Joe Horton's KR2S

Joe Horton's Corvair Powered KR2S

Cowling is a tweaked Revmaster.

Although these wing tips look similar to Diehl skin tips, they were hand made.

The photos below were taken when Joe first started flying, when we met at Beckley West Virginia (which is halfway between his house and my house). We were looking for an excuse to do a long cross-country flight, and this gave us the opportunity to check out each other's airplanes for the first time. I rode with Joe, then he rode with me, then be flew side by side before heading back home.

LED wing tip lights are a do-it-yourself kit sold by an RV builder.

There are two wing tanks and a header tank, for a total of 34 gallons.

You know he's brave if he'll fly with me!

Corvair cam gear problem, July 2008.

Joe Horton wrote: I almost made it to OSH by myself. The short of it is that I had just climbed to 6500' under new blue sky just south west of Chicago directly over Aurora IL. The numbers from the engine were all perfect and I had settled in for the last hour of flying before reaching STE. The engine just went quiet like I turned the switch off. I declared a emergency and landed at ARR and coasted off the taxi way. I worked on it for a couple hours and Mark Langford flew back from OSH to help for a couple more hours. In the end he took me to OSH, and days later we returned to STE andtried all the things that the brain storming came up with. In the end, it was clear that the engine had no compression.

The next step was to get a U haul and load it up. Mark left for home after dropping me off at the truck rental and I got on the road at about 8 pm. 800 miles later I was unloading in my own hangar. Yesterday I took the next step and started taking the engine apart.

The cam gear appears to have lost a tooth and the piece jammed in the case and the gear and split the gear in half.

I appreciate the silence from the people that knew I had trouble to find out what the problem really is. I will continue to tear down and fully expect to be at the gathering WITH N357CJ.

More of the story to come with full disclosure of the cause and effect of what I hope the FAA calls an incidence. Thanks to all the helped me through the few days at OSH. I really did have fun in spite of it all.

Joe got some help from the local airport folks to put his plane on a trailer.

Obviously the cam gear failed.

This is a "Failsafe" cam gear from Clarks, FYI. Despite the cam gear trauma, the connection to the camshaft is still good. It turns out that the p-factor exerted by the prop was causing the crank to bend, bearing down on the cam gear at four different points around the cam gear, overstressing and eventually breaking the cam gear. Dan Weseman's front bearing will eliminate that problem in the future. [As of 2021, it has over a thousand hours on it].