Douglas DC-3

[Ian Warren]

We all know this wicked Douglas DC3 by Manfred Jahn and his team , good news is the photo real VC is under way again
Mike Cyul of Flight Replicas has decide to jump in , funny only talking about this yesterday. From Jan Visser 'Great News'


Well, you can't fly a DC-3 with a pair of old leather seats and some padding, can you..

Just coincidently, and you have to really believe that, i havegood news to tell: a well known and well respected developer by us all here has stepped forward and very kindly offered his help with the gauge coding and anims for the VVC : Mike Cyul !


Mike already contacted me just about after i had to tell you all about the sad affair of Hansi gone missing but i wanted to wait atleast another month for Hansi to reply to my emails before finally having to come to the conclusion that Hansi seems to have really thrown in the towel as far as developing for FS is concerned, virtual aviation and computers all together. He did that before, due to family matters, but now it seems deffinately final. I still can't believe it and probabely never will but there comes a time one has to take the inevitable for granted and move on. Nothing would please me more to atleast know that he's alright and i keeping hoping that day will come sooner or later.


Personally i have had a lotta problems with my computer this year, starting with "Display driver stopped responding and has recovered" and, eventually, ending up with a new computer of which the power supply gave up the ghost after working for 4 hours.... Well, you know, someone once said that bad tidings never travel alone and do i know the truth about that !


Anyway, gents, my new monster machine is running fine now, as are freshly installed FSX and P3D and a while ago i got the VVC back in a freshly installed 3dsMax too ( thank Heaven for external drives ! ) and just recently started working on the gauges which will now be coded by Mike.


So, i'm 110% sure i'm speaking on behalf of all of you here : Welcome aboard, Mike !!


How about that for a spot of good news, éh ?


Mind you, boys, a lot for us to do now but atleast you know work on the VVC is set in motion again. I want to thank you all for your patience and understanding and i'll be back here about the new gauges once i've got something worthwhile to show you.


Until later,
Jan

[lowglow]

Its funny you should post this I was reading about this the other day and was thinking about contacting you to find out what was up. I will be down in Chch again for a week in the next few weeks so we will have a catch up

[Ian Warren]

Pleased to see a move on this little project , course Mike has a great reputation with his Boomerang and P-40 models so with Jan and Mike its going a super goodie

More than welcome always Chris

[Ian Warren]

While photoing the insides I noticed the cowl flap controls missing, it stumped us both, so 'Barf' at RNZAF Wigram Museum dug up this information.

The outside fix

“All of the DC3s that I flew (P&W R-1830s) had fixed cowls, it was explained to me as a young sprog that -

(1) The variable cowl flap system was unreliable, erratic, and required a lot of maintainance, and
(2) Unnecessary in the Temperate / Tropical conditions in which we operated, with the fixed 'optimised' setting.

The latter was true, we rarely had any CHT problems. Only once did I ever see the use of 'Auto Rich' necessary during cruise, and 6 or 7 times had to resort to 'Emergency Rich' during prolonged climb at high power to 16,000 feet or so to avoid the New Guinea hills. In both cases, use of the Mixture control worked well, and kept the CHTs within limits.

We were obsessive in the use of 'balanced power' (not much less than Holding Power) during descent, and never had any problems with low CHT.

The only twitchy part of the engine controls was the Carby Heat, with only a small tweak of the control resulting in large variations in intake temperature.â€￾

and this one


It is a modification, incidentally never approved by Douglas or P&W. It works well thoughhttp://www.pprune.org/images/smilies/thumbs.gif.

The fixed gill modifications are only approved in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. I have done these conversions to fixed gills and from, ad nauseum. It's quite simple to unbolt the gill assembly and then manufacture 3 fixed sections, fixed at 11 degrees and then rivet them on. There is a cut out on the outboard side to fit around the bulge on the heater inlet cowling and either another cut out at the top to allow the top cowling to fit around the carb air scoops (only when using the ram/non-ram "saddle" airscoops), or a slight extension for the short carb airscoops, so cowl can fit snugly. Some fixed gill conversions have the heater cowling cut out on both sides, so that the cowlings can be interchangeable between left and right engines, and some have little holes in the gills, so that the accessory bay cowlings can be got at without too much stress.

The hydraulic lines are simply blanked with pressure blanks at the firewall and ditto for the selectors in the cockpit. Sometimes, we leave the selectors in the cockpit for show, some owners like this. In practice with the fixed gills in South Africa, we normally get a perfect cruise CHT of 200 deg. In cold conditions, this obviously drops, and in winter conditions cruise CHT can go as low as 160 deg, although this rare and the tendency is pretty much there with the normal gills too. As Old Smokey said, judicious use of "emergency rich" usually brings any high temp issues back into the green, but I've only ever experienced this once. This is bearing in mind that Take-Off CHT is permitted to go as high as 262 deg and cruise is permitted go as high as 232 deg.

It is true that the adjustments on the normal gills can be tedious and they can be a real pig to get aligned as the Maintena nce Manual says, but once ok they work alright, just need looking at every check.

I had a look at the photo archive and found pics of 3551 with the cowl flaps in 1953 but gone by 1959. It appears that all RNZAF Daks were similarly changed