Miles Aerovan

[Tophe]

I think it would need a center engine too.

As requested:

there's NO way I'm building an other one of these heaps of rubbish.

So let us focus on finishing the single one, yes

[Dizzyfugu]

Kit won't like the idea, but I could imagine to chop off the wings and add a rotor (pkus engine housing) on top and on the tail, maybe from a Mi-2, converting it into a heli? Maybe with some Mi-6-style stub wings? 

[PR19_Kit]

Not a bad idea at all Thomas, it would make a neat helicopter for sure.  It'd be a bit reminiscent of the similarly egg shaped Percival P.74.

But the super long spanned HDM 105 would look even better. 

[PR19_Kit]

I'm sorely tempted to take up Thomas' idea and turn this heap of junk into a chopper. That's after I've 'chopped' it! 

While looking over the Aerovan assembly and wondering what to do next, I happened to look at it head on. What the......!



The wings aren't even at right angles to the fuselage! They slant to port about a degree or two, and there's no way they could be assembled any other way or else the upper surfaces would have even  more mis-alignment than they've already got.

I'm not at all sure that this can be fixed, short of sawing off both wing halves and re-gluing them correctly. What I'm actually going to do is give up on the darn thing for a while, for the SECOND time, and come back to it in a month or so.

DON'T watch this pace..........

[Tophe]

The wings aren't even at right angles to the fuselage! They slant to port about a degree or two

Good! This is what-if OOB! No need to transform inventively, it is already different from RW! (meaning: good! for us what-ifers)

[kitnut617]

Not only an odd looking aircraft, it was used for odd purposes ----

Here it was used for aerodynamic tests of the Mamba nacelle that was going to be used on the Marathon.

[PR19_Kit]

At least it had lots off room inside for the test instrumentation. 

[kitnut617]

Yeah, maybe just for the aerodynamics as it didn't have a Mamba installed.

[PR19_Kit]

Good thing too, with TEN times the power of the Cirrus Major on the other side the pilot would have needed a VERY strong right leg! 

[chrisonord]

Kit, I think that you should attack it with a blunt wood saw, then rebuild it into a mini rotordyne/compound helicopter.
Chris

[Pellson]

Looking at that, it seems as if the major problem isn't in the wing assembly but in how the rear body attaches to the rest. Maybe that can be cut away and realigned, then filled with some splinted plastic? I think you will need to cut the rear twice, though.

[PR19_Kit]

The rear door is on crooked, yes, but that's because the upper edge aligns with the underside of the boom etc. and that's crooked compared the main pod. But the wings are still slanted, there's about 1mm difference in the height of the pod underneath each wing.

[Weaver]

Some kits just don't want to be built, do they Kit? 

Kit won't like the idea, but I could imagine to chop off the wings and add a rotor (pkus engine housing) on top and on the tail, maybe from a Mi-2, converting it into a heli? Maybe with some Mi-6-style stub wings? 

I did that with a Skyvan (Kaman-style 'egg-beater' rotors nicked from two Hueys) but never finished it. As a result I had a spare set of wings, and one of the things I was tempted to do was exactly what Kit's suggested a few times: use them to stretch the wings of another Skyvan back to the original Hurel-Dubois proportions. Unfortunately, when I was building my British Antarctic Survey Skyvan, I spilled a bottle of glue over the completed wings (again shades of Kit's travails with this build...), totally trashing them, so I had to use the spares to recover from that debacle.

Other aircraft I think would make good helos are the Dornier Skyservant and the Bristol Freighter.