Stephen Larew

personal website — updated sporadically

Initial Impressions of the Drawings

Front page of drawings for Chris Heintz's ZODIAC CH 650 B.
Hope­fully that bend in the ZO­DI­AC CH 650 B draw­ings will flat­ten out over time.

I re­ceived the draw­ings yes­ter­day after four days in trans­it via UPS Ground. The ship­ment in­cluded the draw­ings and a CD-ROM con­tain­ing the Photo As­sembly Guides and Con­struc­tion Manu­al.

Be­sides the large dol­lar amounts on my in­voice, I no­ticed the line item “650 NOSE­GEAR SHOCK SUS­PEN­SION.” I be­lieve this is the new shock sus­pen­sion sys­tem men­tioned in the FEB 18 2020 Ser­vice Let­ter and an­nounced on zenith.aero (see also John Aus­tin’s post and Zenith’s mar­ket­ing fly­er). Look­ing at my draw­ings, I see they are not up­dated to re­flect the new shock sus­pen­sion and in­stead refer to a nose gear bun­gee shock chord.

I have a few sug­ges­tions for Zenith Air­craft:

  1. Ship the draw­ings in a box large enough to avoid bend­ing them. My 11x17 inch draw­ings have a bend be­cause they were sent in what ap­pears to be a 12” square (pizza?) box.
  2. Send the Photo As­sembly Guides and Con­struc­tion Manu­al on a USB flash drive or of­fer them for down­load. In the last dec­ade, I have not owned a com­puter with a CD drive.
  3. Of­fer bind­ing meth­ods for the draw­ings such as a three ring bind­er.

Updates

The bend in the draw­ings is slowly flat­ten­ing out. Also, it ap­pears that the CD-ROM con­tents are avail­able on vari­ous Zenith Air­craft web­sites.