NEW HYDRAULIC PUMP & CONTROLS
Throughout the years when I was working through the difficulties with my Seahawk, the hydraulic pump supplied with the original kit just kept causing me grief. The way that pump was made, the check valves were very undependable and it was also a major job to adjust the pressure output and even then there was no way to adjust the pressure precisely. We always had to accept something other than what we really wanted. Even then, then check valves wouldn’t hold 99% of the time and I was constantly hitting the pump switch to bump the gear back up on long flights. The pressures could only be adjusted by disassembling the pump entirely and putting in or removing very tiny little spacer washers under a spring. Then the pump was reassembled and tested to see what the resulting pressure was! After 6 or 8 times of that, you just gave up and accepted whatever combination gave you the best range you could get.

The new pump we are supplying with the new Glass Goose kits is a whole different matter. It is precisely externally adjustable by turning screws, and the check valves are dependable. You do have to remove the fluid reservoir to do the adjusting, but you do not have to disassemble the pump and the reservoir can be removed without all the mess associated with working on the other pump. I think a part of the problem with the old pump was that when builders inexperienced with the pump (including myself) disassembled it to attempt to adjust the pressures, they fouled up the check valves. Since the new pump doesn’t have to be disassembled, the likelihood of this happening to these pumps is almost nil. 

The pump we now supply is sized correctly for the

I have designed the hydraulic system on the Glass Goose to be as simple and problem free as I feel it can possibly be. I went through years and years of trying everything from the ridiculous Radio Shack solenoid switching circuit shown in the old Seahawk plans, to pressure switches, to just plain switches. When I started that painful process, I was like a lot of people. I wanted my plane to be technologically braggable! Well, let me tell you, technologically braggable can translate into a big pain in the Pitootie. If you don’t know what a pitootie is, bend over, back up to a mirror, and look behind you. THAT’s a Pitootie!!!

The desirability of bragging rights fades amazingly fast when you are hugely embarrassed and inconvenienced by some fancy system on your plane that doesn’t work right. Where are the bragging rights when your plane is sitting on it’s belly in the middle of the runway on a controlled airport? The pilots that are diverted to other airports won’t think you have anything to brag about. The controllers and others that watched the belly landing won’t think so either. And neither will the FAA inspector that comes out to take the incident report which will go on your record. I said incident because I would hope that it would not rate an accident report. It is almost as embarrassing to be sitting on the side of a lake with your gear hanging down in the water and it won’t go up because of some fancy control circuit gone belly up. Not as bad, but really frustrating because now you have to figure out some way to make the gear go up so you