This might go better in the General Forum, but I posted here due to discussion that might ensue. I did a SSWF search and found lots of great stuff, but no answer for this question. Anyway, I'll post here too.

I don't remember how much I "adjusted" the tail-wheel strut of my late P-Force to get ground handling to my liking on our grass circles, but I know that I did increase the stationary AoA some from what I built from the plans. Do any of you have a preference of angle of attack to build into it's replacement's landing gear for flight over grass. I won't be building adjustable height into the tail wheel, but plan to just fly it everywhere - predominantly over grass - with whatever I build in. The new plane is also flapless, with the same wing (only slightly modified). Thanks!

SK

This might go better in the General Forum, but I posted here due to discussion that might ensue. I did a SSWF search and found lots of great stuff, but no answer for this question. Anyway, I'll post here too.

I don't remember how much I "adjusted" the tail-wheel strut of my late P-Force to get ground handling to my liking on our grass circles, but I know that I did increase the stationary AoA some from what I built from the plans. Do any of you have a preference of angle of attack to build into it's replacement's landing gear for flight over grass. I won't be building adjustable height into the tail wheel, but plan to just fly it everywhere - predominantly over grass - with whatever I build in. The new plane is also flapless, with the same wing (only slightly modified). Thanks!

   I don't know, we fly off of grass all the time, and use the same landing gear for pavement and grass. One thing I do know, is not to go overboard jacking the airplane up in the air, all that does is make it flip over faster, particularly on landing.

    The technique is more important than the gear. Unlike pavement, you want to always have a fair fraction of the wind on the nose of the airplane for both takeoff and landing. I usually try to take off around 45 degrees to the wind with it coming from the left front quadrant, with it even further into the wind on particularly bad grass. I land so that I touch down just a hair past downwind and let the airplane skim until it is around 45 degrees again. If you try to land directly downwind or slightly before like on pavement, you don't have much control over it to keep from flipping. There's nothing wrong with landing dead into the wind on grass IF you watch out for the airplane floating back up as you come around.

      Brett

Here is a place like many for personal preference but it sounds like you are trying for an at rest ground angle right at the takeoff angle of attack.  In fact this will vary a bunch due to weather and weight factors,  position to relative wind and on grass,  bouncing wildly on the turf.  Usually the ship gets sort of bounced into the air off a tuff of grass.  My only point is that not giving more free room for rotation for the tailwheel may cause the bounce and prop strike I mentioned above.  I'd allow quite a bit more.  On some of my planes I have felt the need to bend the tail wire back to pull the wheel in some.  As long as you can do that then you can fiddle with it at the field.

Dave

Thanks, guys! I got out my Walter Diehl (what a great tech author!) and Teichmann texts this morning and computed some sample angles of attack for take-off. I guessed that I might want to lift off grass at about half the straight-and-level terminal speed and came up with about 3.3 degrees for infinite AR, converted to about 4 1/2 degrees for my P-Force wing (AR = 5.1) ant RN = 295,000.

In ground effect or free air?