YES. Please, help! Let's keep the canard community going and preserve an awesome aircraft. Please message me, and we can talk about next steps. It's very boring work that is a lot for one person but would go super fast with 5 dedicated people. Please see the TODO page to see how things are going and what's next.
Rutan released it into the public domain. It makes sense to start here.
I was watching it and was sad to see it fizzle out. Starting from scratch is very hard. I figured it would be better to start with a project which would require making CAD drawings from pre-completed drafts.
I take absolutely no responsibility. There is no sole individual or organization controlling this project. This is for educational purposes only. No aircraft of any sort was nor will ever be intended to be built from these documents.
Markdown provides a fast and easy way to digitally write up a document. Word has syncing and licensing issues. It's much easier to just use a text editor. Markup also works very well with Git. I use LaTeX regularly, so it would have been a great choice too, but it has a steeper learning curve than Markdown and requires more setup. Plus, those Open-EZ plans were stored in one big, fat PDF. Digital text and a few pictures is a MUCH lighter format.
Reading forum posts regarding the Open-EZ led me to believe that many tried to digitize the plans with typed text and even CAD, but nobody was effectively working together. Git allows everyone to see the progress, and divide tasks to help prevent everyone from drawing the same part at once.
NO! My job is to digitize the plans as they were originally published. After that, the next phase will be to update the plans according to the mandates in the Canard Pusher newsletter. There are several deviations which are very practical, but the purpose of this is *cough* historical preservation.
The Vans RVs are successful because everything gets updated. Everything is trackable. Vans understands organization. If the canard community worked in the same way, we'd have a much higher completion rate. This also sets a precedence for the idea of open-sourcing aviation. Sure, it's nice to benefit from the final result, but there's a lot to be learned from how the project was done.
mogrify -format png -strip *.*
rm *.tiff