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Dear Proppastie...

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plncraze

Well-Known Member
Supporting Member
Joined
May 11, 2006
Messages
2,439
I am very sorry to hear about the results of your load test. Please do not stay away a long time because moments like this are a great time to have the resources of this group.

When reading about the load test I was wondering if the issue might have been a local crippling of a flange rather than a complete failure of your analysis. The original Dragon was wood which has different buckling characteristics than very thin aluminum and this would make stability of attachment points more critical. On the LAA website http://www.lightaircraftassociation.co.uk/ there are a couple of technical sections and if memory serves some of them discuss buckling failure where all the strengths were met but a local instability caused something that looked like an absolute failure. Chris Heintz talked about some of this in his book http://www.flyingonyourownwings.com/. We will pause for here for 601 wing comments. The best description of local crippling failure I have heard is the one about standing on an empty pop can and tapping the sides. The can is just fine till the sides are not parallel then it collapses.

You built what you had very quickly and if you could figure out what caused the failure you could be back to where you were even sooner.
 
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