It’s been a while since my last post and this time lapse deserves some explanations. Recently I have been really busy doing some home renovation work. I’ve been mainly acting as plumber, electrician and carpenter, cleaning lady and everything else it may come to your mind for such situations.
It shouldn’t be an excuse for neglecting my work on the plane, as obviously the home renovation tasks haven’t taken all my spare time (although most of my energy, YES!). Moreover, the always present menace of a computer crash had materialized in between. I do now and then back-up copies of my most critical files, but you guess what? the last back-up was three months old, so I have lost plenty of files relevant to my Storch project. Be as it may, the new Lenovo computer is now up and running at full power . I hope to achieve soon a good cruising speed with the construction of the wings.
I finally got all my wing ribs finished. The reinforced ones were given a final trim with the router and to my great surprise they all ended up quite decent. Right now, my garage seems a spare parts warehouse with plenty of airplane parts and none of them assembled so far.
Here you are the wall storage I have devised in order to save my scarce working space (ceiling may be next when storage for the complete wings will be required ;-)
Picture of the progress done with the ribs with reinforced trailing edge, the ones where the brackets for ailerons and flaps will attach:
In addition to the regular complete ribs, there are two «trailing-edge-only» ribs which you can see on top of the complete ones. Those fractional trailing edges are intended to allow some space for the bolts of the hinge bracket. According to the construction drawings, they solely attach butt end to the rear spar, but bearing in mind that they are supposed to take the lion share of the torque involved when lowering the flaps, I thought it would be wise to apply the same design used for the regular ribs, say enveloping the spar and adding a pair of gussets. It may well be over engineering but I needed some peace of mind if I have somewhen to fly that airplane.
And last but not least, I have started to manufacture the nose ribs using a template and a copying router bit. Not an easy task though! Almost every time I use the router, I damage some parts and the nose ribs obviously were no exception... Be as it may, at the end it seems I have succeeded in creating my first four pieces (top corner slight damage included), which will soon be glued to the blue foam.
