GA Airfoils by Riblett

[Mike Switzer]

I have spent the last several days going thru this book (recently purchased from EAA - and this is not meant to be a knock against EAA as they are just selling someone else's product).

I have come to the conclusion that there might be some good information buried in here, but seriously, between his writing style & the terrible printing methods used I spent way more time than I wanted trying to satisfy myself with how he was coming up with his numbers. (And I'm still not sure I have it totally figured out - but I finally figured out the method to lay out his ordinate system he uses in the appendix so I can scale the airfoils & run them thru my software)

Someone (hopefully an aeronautical engineer that understands what Riblett was doing) needs to re-edit this book to make it more useable. I am a fairly well educated Mechanical Engineer & it took me a while to decipher, I am somewhat worried about what will happen if someone makes a mistake interpreting this data.

Just my thoughts after overworking my brain on a long weekend...

[WLIU]

Since I am one, I think that I can say that most engineers are horrible writers. At least modern word processors try to check our spelling and grammar and give us the opportunity to look somewhat literate. That said, if you employ Google, those airfoils and the supporting data get mixed reviews. But if you have the right software, you can try to estimate the performance and compare that to other candidate airfoils. I think that might be part of the "education" component of homebuilding.

If you come up with a conclusion please comment for the rest of us.

Thanks,

Wes
N78PS

[Mike Switzer]

Now that I figured out how he laid things out I have been punching the coordinates in (by hand since my scanner, (good as it is) wont recognize & OCR the type in this book.)

I have only tried a dozen or so, trying to zero in on what I am looking for for my design, but so far, unless I am really missing something, I haven't found a main wing for my project better than the Wortmann FX-60-126/1 (which is a close cousin to the FX-60-126 that Rutan originally used on the Vari Viggen)

And yea, a lot of engineers are horrible writers, as evidenced by every genius professor I had that tried his "new" book out on us students. I had a good Jr High English teacher at my private Lutheran school so I knew how to write better than most of them before I ever got into college...

[Mike Switzer]

I had a couple of genius professors that I learned a lot from. For obvious reasons, I'm not going to name them here, but one was my intro to Aero professor, who was a former test engineer for Boeing. I wish I could figure out what my Mother did with my (preprinted) class notes because that was the basis for his textbook that was never printed. When we got it it was pretty raw, basically mimeographed copies of his overhead projector slides, but a lot of good easy to understand info IF you were in the lecture to write notes in the margins. (every time I smell Captain Black pipe tobacco it reminds me of him - if you ever had him for a class you know who I am talking about). The other one I remember was my materials engineering professor, we were still officially using another text, but he was another genius writing his own book, he had been one of the lead engineers on the Pershing missile system & was also responsible for the basic design of half the ICBM silos in the country. I learned a lot from him, but once again without the lectures & the notes in the margins I don't know what you could learn from the initial lecture notes.