Tiger Tim
Well-Known Member
So generally speaking, the vast majority of wooden fuselages look the same inside. What you have is a pair of wooden truss sides made up of longerons, uprights and diagonals, gussets in the corners, and tied to each other by cross members. The whole thing is a big bundle of sticks carefully laid up in jigs with a bunch of fitting and fettling to get it all right. Like this:
Now those fuselage sides look awfully familiar, like a pair of gigantic wing ribs. But there's another popular way to make ribs and that's to machine them from a single piece of plywood. Instead of making the part up from a bunch of sticks and carefully shaped gussets, you just remove every part of the plywood that isn't a rib. Here's a couple of ribs to compare the techniques:
My question is, why not do the fuselage the same way? With the advent of CNC routers it seems like it would be really easy to make a big kit that packs down flat for shipping, even if that shipping is just in the back of a pickup truck from the router shop to your garage. It's been done in the RC world for quite some time now, how come we don't see it in full scale?
Now those fuselage sides look awfully familiar, like a pair of gigantic wing ribs. But there's another popular way to make ribs and that's to machine them from a single piece of plywood. Instead of making the part up from a bunch of sticks and carefully shaped gussets, you just remove every part of the plywood that isn't a rib. Here's a couple of ribs to compare the techniques:
My question is, why not do the fuselage the same way? With the advent of CNC routers it seems like it would be really easy to make a big kit that packs down flat for shipping, even if that shipping is just in the back of a pickup truck from the router shop to your garage. It's been done in the RC world for quite some time now, how come we don't see it in full scale?
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