The plans - Part 2

I wanted to expand a little on one reason why I think it is important to obtain an original set of plans, besides the legality argument.

Early in my search, I responded to a barnstormer.com ad for a set of Long EZ plans. The price was a little low, but talking to the seller he reassured me that these plans were original.   

Online ad for the set of questionable plans I originally purchased

The plans I received were pretty good, but there were quite a few inconsistencies that screamed "Scam!" as soon as I got a closer look at them.

The most obvious was the paper. You’d imagine 30 year old plans to be a bit yellowish and oxidized, but these were an immaculate white, like they were fresh off the press. 

Comparing a fake to an original

Later, when I noticed the darker markings made by photocopying over the rectangular holes for the binder fingers, the jig was up.

Notice the dark rectangles, they are the photocopy of the holes in the original manual.

To make a long story short, I eventually got my money back, but this is still not the moral of the story.

I decided to compare the scale drawings I had acquired, with a known set of Long EZ plans, and I was surprised by what I found. The very critical wing section profile drawings had been stretched asymmetrically during the copying process, and were at the very least unusable trash, and at worst unsafe. Actually, all the scale drawings exhibited this deformation to varying extents.

Overlaying fake and original scale plans. This is the top left quarter of one page and you can already see a mismatch. 

Bottom left quarter of the same page. The mismatch is enormous.

Bottom right quarter of the page. Obviously the stretching happened only in height, as features still match up horizontally.

Bottom left of the instrument panel

Bottom right of the instrument panel, stretched horizontally and vertically by different amounts.

F22 Bulkhead

So, the moral of the story is: “Buyer beware!” You might spend tens of thousands of dollars building a plane that might kill you, just to save a few hundred bucks up front.

If you did purchase an original unused set, you should have a registration page (top half of plans page 1-4) with the assigned serial number, and at least a note on the back where the rights to this number are signed over to you by the original buyer.

Registration with serial number, Sally Melvill signature, and rights release on the back.

Do the right thing, find and purchase a genuine unused set while there are still a few out there.