Head in the clouds
Well-Known Member
I've had a couple of requests to get a thread going about my current project so here's a start -
For those who haven't seen it elsewhere - it's my own design two seat side by side, a bit squeezy to keep the brick wall in front of the pusher prop as narrow as possible. The taildragger gear retracts forwards into the leading edge and the wings double fold to fit into a trailer or to be able to use a shipping container as a hangar. It's designed to fit into our homebuilt LSA category.
I modelled all the components of the plane in AutoCAD so was able to have some of the initial primary structure items cut by CNC router and I also got the wing rib blanks and dies cut by laser.
Other than that it's been a case of printing out views of the components from the model, trace them onto the material and lots of bandsawing, snipping and drilling. For those who haven't built yet, a plane consists of half a million holes held together with aly, bolts and rivets.
It's not the prettiest but that's the penalty I've had to pay for some of its other benefits. Here are three views of the model.
The first metal was cut on August 4th 2011, it was the spar caps made from 2"X1/4" 6061T6 angle which was cut to length and then tapered. While I was doing that the CNC shop was routering some of the same angle to make the main elements of the engine mounting frame and the undercarriage carriers, all of which tie the centre sections of the spars together.
When I got the routered stuff back the edges were very rough and took many hours to clean up and deburr but at least they were accurate in terms of the drilling so that was a great benefit in terms of the centre section being self-jigging.
The pictures below show the routered parts, my crude setup for drilling the spar caps ready for rivetting and the first assembly of the primary structure.
The next thrilling episode will be after I finish installing the brake lines - I'm a fair bit further down the track than these pics show...
For those who haven't seen it elsewhere - it's my own design two seat side by side, a bit squeezy to keep the brick wall in front of the pusher prop as narrow as possible. The taildragger gear retracts forwards into the leading edge and the wings double fold to fit into a trailer or to be able to use a shipping container as a hangar. It's designed to fit into our homebuilt LSA category.
I modelled all the components of the plane in AutoCAD so was able to have some of the initial primary structure items cut by CNC router and I also got the wing rib blanks and dies cut by laser.
Other than that it's been a case of printing out views of the components from the model, trace them onto the material and lots of bandsawing, snipping and drilling. For those who haven't built yet, a plane consists of half a million holes held together with aly, bolts and rivets.
It's not the prettiest but that's the penalty I've had to pay for some of its other benefits. Here are three views of the model.
The first metal was cut on August 4th 2011, it was the spar caps made from 2"X1/4" 6061T6 angle which was cut to length and then tapered. While I was doing that the CNC shop was routering some of the same angle to make the main elements of the engine mounting frame and the undercarriage carriers, all of which tie the centre sections of the spars together.
When I got the routered stuff back the edges were very rough and took many hours to clean up and deburr but at least they were accurate in terms of the drilling so that was a great benefit in terms of the centre section being self-jigging.
The pictures below show the routered parts, my crude setup for drilling the spar caps ready for rivetting and the first assembly of the primary structure.
The next thrilling episode will be after I finish installing the brake lines - I'm a fair bit further down the track than these pics show...
