I went to the Sonex website and downloaded a copy. Some of you might want to do the same.
As an IT professional (who’s downloaded a lot of these over the years during my Sonex built), I am working on a complete archive of docs from the Sonex website. Out of respect to Mark, I will not post them publicly until we know the fate of the website & company - but I have them stored across both cloud storage & multiple local devices. Should the Sonex website go away, I’ll provide a new online home for the drawings & bulletins that are currently publicly accessible.
Thanks Noel, as a fellow IT manager, I was getting ready to do the same. I just hadn’t got around to it yet. Hopefully someone will take over, but if not, it’s important that the information be available to the owners and builders.
Ha! I did the same thing, but I just have it local. I did it because I want to be sure I have all drawing revisions, service bulletins, manuals, and instruction sheets. The most interesting thing I found - a zip file of sonerai newsletters from 1973-1979. Looking through that stuff, it is incredible how far he and Betty, and eventually Jeremy, and Mark took the company. At the same time I can’t help but also be reminded of and saddened by the tragedy intertwined in their story.
I have 8.5GB of data downloaded from the website. However, since the Store was a database-driven ecommerce portal, it wasn’t scraped (and I suspect it won’t have been captured by anyone, as you’d have to do some searches and filters to bring up parts lists on that interface).
However, I did capture several manuals, upgrade instructions, and all SBs & drawing revisions. If we had to, the community could probably reverse-engineer parts lists from those documents over time.
I’m crossing my fingers that we won’t have to, though!
On the sonex pilots FB group, someone posted that they have been a supplier of machined parts to Sonex from day one. They said that they would be able to continue to be a supplier to the community if needed. I also specifically asked about the oops fittings and he said he was not the supplier of those, but could ramp up easily if necessary.
Oh no, John was using PM alternators on the ORIGINAL AeroVee “Econo-Vee” conversions for Sonerai Back In The Day. Riding lawnmowers were starting to trend towards electric start, and John figured out a way to mount one of their alternators to the “X-Casting” he had already developed to drive a Slick 4216 from the flywheel end of the engine. I think this would have been about 1972, when the Sonerai II mid-wing first flew. I think he cut a deal with a mid-western supplier of the alternators to Briggs/Kohler/Tecumseh/Robin. The early alternators were just strong enough to run a com radio and lights - electric start Sonerai were very, very rare; Dan Diehl did make an accessory case that could snake a starter past the tubing cluster just aft of the firewall.
1.5GB+
