Darryl,

Your empty weight for a normally powered IV-P should be 2200-2400 pounds. Some have been built lighter (good), and a few much heavier, but 3600# empty weight is way too heavy. I hope this was an error; that you meant 3600 gross weight, fully loaded? That’s a bit above Lancair’s recommendation, but what I set as my MGW. My airplane flies fine at that weight, but the structural load limits are reduced, and I have to be careful in turbulence. Also, no horsing it around at high gross weights—which I don’t do anyway.

Just as a starting point, my empty weights on the gear are:

Nose Wheel-     613#--27%

Left Main-           842#

Right Main-         842#

There are a lot of considerations when you get into weight and balance, and some are critical. I’ve attached an FAA pub on this that’s pretty good. It may not be the most current version, but the principles won’t have changed. It’s well worth the time and effort to understand, and follow, what they tell.

Note that my nose wheel is 1” forward of the Lancair standard configuration. I have a home-made air conditioner in the back that tends to make the airplane tail heavy…the reason for moving the engine forward. This will affect the percentage load on the nose wheel a bit. As others have advised, the IV-P tends to be tail heavy. Keep/move everything forward as you can. If you overdo it a bit, easy to correct with a very small weight addition back in the tail, but unlikely to do so

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