Acrosport with a Marine Outboard Motor

September 2016

I met Ted Kiebke very briefly at AirVenture Oshkosh this year, and he shared these photographs with me. Although we had communicated on his project of building and installing a Mercury outboard engine in an aircraft, I had never met him. It was a delight to meet him in person, even though it was a very brief encounter in the middle of a fairly hectic social gathering. I have written the following based on what he told me at the show, so I have attributed the article to him. – Ed.

The installation and taxi testing have gone well, and the next phase will be flight testing. We created and installed a water-cooling system for this engine, and a series of articles were published in Bits and Pieces. The last article was sent out in November 2014. You can also see a video of our first taxi tests here. We mounted the wings and basically have the aircraft ready for flight testing, which we hope to begin shortly. As we mentioned in our last article, the total cost of the engine, prop, and redrive was under $7,000. One recent change was that I installed a different exhaust system.

 

New exhaust system

The cowling also had to be modified.

 

Modified cowling

I installed a steerable tail wheel, and all ground controlling problems are gone. It steers like a Cub.

New steerable tail wheel

Acrosport Tailwheel Video Clip >>

I decided to increase water flow in the engine, so I installed a larger water pump. Waiting on parts now, so flight tests will begin soon.

Here is a photo of how it looks today, ready for the flight-testing phase.

The next article will be about the test-flight phase, and as soon as the planets are aligned we'll get on with it.