We felt that we didn't have enough control over our Europa at certain speeds during the start as well as during the roll out, particularly on concrete runways.
As you can see from the pictures we brought the tailwheel axle closer to the vertical castoring axle as opposed to the original Europa tailwheel.
Although there are many ready made tailwheels on the market doing the same trick, we decided to machine something ourselves so that we could experiment a bit.Surprisingly this first design instantly gave us the result we were looking for.
The airplane steers very light now and recovers with a touch of a toe from any heading deviation at any speed.
We used two ball-bearings in a steel housing.
The vertical axle makes a 20 dgs angle to the ground to prevent tailwheel shimmy.
The original Europa wheel is used.
For the final version we will use aluminium in stead of steel, this should make it as light as the original Europa tailwheel.
Or maybe we will buy some of those beautiful and very light carbonfibre tailwheels on the market today. We don't know yet.Note:
We received quite a few reactions to our tailwheel.
Our tailwheel mod is a one-off, made for our Europa only.
If you want a tailwheel like this then visit your local metal worker and show him the pictures.
Or browse the website of your favorite aircraft parts supplier for something similar.
We pomise to make a drawing of our design on one of those dark and rainy winter evenings.
If the drawing isn't here, we don't have it.
Good luck.
Bart & Henk.
