Lately I've been working on tooling stuff for the wingtips and also for a revised design for the landing gear well boxes.
The gear well boxes boxes transfer the landing gear loads into the fuselage shell, and also stiffen the fuselage shell in the area where the lift and landing loads transfer from the wings into the fuselage. The orignal design called for a fairly complicated weldment for the lift carrythrough tube that bolted to the well boxes, but it became clear from the first article that it would hard to maintain tolerances for the bolt locations, and that the bolting arrangement made for a pretty high bending moment near the ends of the carrythrough tube. The revised design transfers lift and landing loads out of the carrythrough tube through reinforced areas where the tube goes through the shell in the side-of-body area. Assymmetrical drag/thrust loads (that is, loads that try to force the tube through the fuselage) are transferred into the fuselage by bonding the tube to the tops of the landing gear well boxes using shear tapes.
The molds for the horizontal stabilizer are also in progress, and I am scheduled to go down to Tehachapi on Saturday 19 March 2005 to pick them up. The following pictures show the steel frames for the two mold halves and also the stabilizer plug in preparation for molding. Note the 16 March 05 date stamp. Harald says they'll be done on the 19th, and I trust that they will.
page updated 17 March 2005 all text and graphics copyright (c) 2005 HP Aircraft, LLC