Well, the wing plugs arrived safely at Brad Hill's shop up near Seattle, and Brad is already making great progress in cleaning them up to make molds off of them. Have a look at these pictures:
Here's the right wing plug laid out on the 24-foot table that Brad built just to work on the wing plugs. Note how the root fillet is now bonded on with flox, and he's knocked off the silly popsicle sticks we used to temporarily attach the fillet during the dihedral alignment operation. The nubs along the root face are the ends of wooden dowels that Brad floxed and pounded in at Arnold to back up the popsicle sticks.
Another view of the right root fillet getting floxed up.
And, finally, here's the default 15-meter wingtip getting bonded into place to fill out the span to the full 15000mm. I understand that when you glue something like this on you have to wear a necktie and recite something from Trout Fishing in America. And you're not allowed to use borrowed tools. And, yes, we've designed winglets, and they will be an available option. But you have to specifically order them and their mounting provisions. The default wings will have the wingtip shown here, with a raised line in the gelcoat showing you where to cut them off if you decide to add the winglet internals later.
Another view of the right-side wing root, showing the lift pins at their 3.1 degree dihedral angle. We didn't include mockup spar stubs in the plug wings; we'll be developing the locating features for the spars in a separate operation.
And now for something not-so-completely-different: Here's a rendering of the Glidair motorglider fuselage that Brad has been developing, with the HP-24 wings, winglets, and horizontal stabilizer. I think that this would be a neat little touring motorglider, but I'm a bit worried that its market space might get eclipsed by the RV-11 motorglider that Dick VanGrunsven has been working on. My one consolation is that I'm pretty sure that Van hasn't started developing real wings for the RV-11, so Brad and I are a bit ahead of him there. The RV-11 prototype is being built on HP-18 wings, and I have a pretty strong feeling that Van will probably want something that is simpler to manufacture for a production version. And I do have a pretty good idea how hard it is to machine the HP-18 spar cap sets, and how many sets there are currently available.
page updated 12 May 2005 all text and graphics copyright (c) 2005 HP Aircraft, LLC