RV-14 Cargo Door

Has anyone approached Vans to design a cargo door for the -14 like the -10?
From experience that door was very handy.

Good thought, do you think that you could take the parts off the 10 and use them on the 14?

I have not even seen the 10, but just thinking out loud.

I would think that the aerobatic nature of the -14 would make this more problematic than the -10

I discussed adding a baggage door with Rian Johnson (Chief engineer at Vans) a few months ago and he advised against it...cutting a hole in the side of the fuselage will weaken it considerably, and while I'm sure it would be possible to add reinforcement to carry the aerobatic loads, it would add weight and you would not really know it was adequate without repeating all the load testing & flight testing that Vans did on the original. There are a combination of bending loads and torsional loads and it gets pretty complex with all the permutations of control inputs (wings are putting a twisting load on the fuselage when you deflect the ailerons...elevators impart vertical bending loads...rudder gives you both bending and torsional loads...etc). Even if the fuselage can withstand the static bending and torsional loads (assuming you knew what those loads were), it can be hard to predict what effect the change in torsional rigidity may have on empennage flutter modes/frequencies...so you'd be the test pilot for that too. Barnaby Wainfan had an article in his Wind Tunnel column in Kitplanes some years ago cautioning that an airframe might be strong enough to handle static load testing but could still fail catastrophically if it is too elastic (not rigid enough).

There are some structural modifications you can make where it's fairly easy to calculate the reinforcements needed to provide comparable strength to the original design (using published structural data for aluminum materials & rivets), but this is not one of those areas IMHO.

I really wish there was a baggage door on the -14, but doubt Vans will ever add this feature, especially now that the 14 design is done and they're focused on the RV-15...maybe it will have one?