Building An Airplane From Plans
Summer Months, June – July (More Info & Pictures Coming)
Dan got the all layers together for right hand spar and match drilled them. Quite a bit of work and a little imtimidating to drill that first hole with the $$ spar caps and all the time put into the spar webs. Great job.
We have the assembly cleco-ed together. A couple of the angle parts still need to be added.
(These pictures were taken recently)
Dan drilled the Wing Attach Block, W10-03, to the End Attach Angle.
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Dan and I discussed at length (remember we are engineers) how to mark all the holes on the 141″ long W10-01. We have a 12″ and 36″ steel rules supposably accurate rked to the 1/64 . So one could start at one end and make a make a mark near the end of the rule and move the rule down to that mark and keep going. Trouble with this method is “accumulation of error” or “error stack up”. Say you are off by 1/64 (.015″) on the first rule move, and then the second move is right on, but the third is another 1/64 (.015″), and the fourth is another 1/64 off. (Now before you repremand me to be more accurate, try to mark and then reposition to a 1/64, it’s take time and a good set of eyeballs.) Anyway the holes on your fourth ruler interval are off by the accumulated errors since they are all dependent on the previous set. So those holes are off by 3/64″ (.045″), hmmmmm. Does it matter? I don’t know, but would like to be as accurate as we can.
So when we thought about going 141″ we wanted to try something different. We decided to make a drill template and move the template along the spar (picking up the last hole drilled by the template.) We made the template the distance between the ribs which is 10″. Now the error will depend on the accuarcy of the template, but we have access to a Bridgeport mill at work so we used that for the hole accuracy. So basically the template had the rib holes 10″ apart and all the 1″ holes in between. We put flange on one side so it would mate against the spar top (or bottom) and the holes would be the the right distance. Here is a picture of the template:
We had marked the 10″ intervals with the rule also, but the template would be the guide. Now that we had the top and bottom holes of the ribs, we made another drill template for the rib holes in between. This template was cleco-ed to the top and bottom and provided the middle holes
We went back with the first template and drilled the holes between teh ribs:
Now that is a lot of holes.
We drilled the holes for the wing tip attachment, W10-04. Aligned the top edge and the right length.
We used the first template for the top holes:
Here is the angle, W10-06 on the wing tip attachment W10-07:
August – Finishing the spar andgle parts
Spar Parts In Progress
Marking the holes in W10-01. This took a while, wanted it to be accurate since it is the template for the other webs
Some progress on the spar parts:
Fiinshed up the Spar Parts
Well we started on the spar. Now W10-01 is 7 1/16″ wide by 141″ long and is .032 thick. So how does one make a good cut 141″ long? Well Dan did the work on this one and I think he used the edge of sheet for one side and used the Malco shears for teh other. He gave a little extra on the width so we could file down to it. Dan was careful with the shears to avoid getting a wavy edge, a little is inevitiable but he did a great job.
Picture of cutting web with shears
Dan set up a table for the bandsaw to help with cutting out W10-03 (.125″ thick), W10-05 (.090″ thick) and W10-02 (0.032″ thick).
Band Saw Table
Spar pieces rough cut from the band saw table
We had to clean them up with the vixen file down to the line. Dan stacked some of the similar parts together to get a consistant edge.
Here is Dan working on a part from W-11 getting cleaned up
