I'm pretty new to the forum but a few friends of mine and I recently completed a Legal Eagle project. We started working on it during sophomore year of high school. I went off to the Army and my friends worked on it when they could while attending college and working. I got out of the Army in February and worked with them to finally finish it in September. If any of you wandered your way into the Tech tent at Airventure 2014 and saw a Legal Eagle in various pieces being worked on, that was our airplane.
We've kept it very simple, using a betterhalf vw engine with distributor ignition, small tires from another ultralight without brakes, a hall wind meter, and simple gauges from the autoparts store. The engine ran great, and the airplane functioned quite well, though climb performance was a bit low and our Vmax was about 50 MPH. I already have the airplane back in the shop for the winter. I'm installing streamlined struts, brakes, a curved windscreen, shipping the crankcase to Casler to have it cut, cutting the camshaft, installing a mag, adding a belite altimeter to the panel, replacing the heavy automotive tach with a tiny tach, modifying the engine mount to move the CG forward/ match our cut-case engine, covering some of the fuselage, and a few other odds and ends.
Attached is a picture of the plane before we changed to the smaller diameter tires.
