HP-24 Project

Here are the latest pictures from Harald, showing how he's making molding flanges for the full-fuselage molds.

Note that he's making new molding flanges out of Masonite instead of salvaging the ones from the short molds as we'd thought we might do. That's good news, since it means we're keeping the short mold shells so that we can do future projects with them, such as the low-cost 13m ship that I keep re-sketching to meet the challenge offered by Stan Hall so many years ago.

If you want a nice forward fuselage with matching canopy frame and transparency for your glider or small airplane project, give me a call. If I had the time, I'd make a new fuselage for my HP-18 using the short-molded HP-24 pod, and have an HP-18 like the Patton, Rumpf, and Hollestelle ships - one that you can actually sit up in and see down out of. I'd place the bulkheads and interstitials at the same stations as in the HP-18, and use the HP-18 landing gear and wing carrythroughs. I designed the original HP-24 fuselage to join to a shortened HP-18 aft fuselage, so I could just cut the tail off of my 96S Patton-built fuselage (which I bought for the old HP-18k project) and frankenglider it.

Last weekend I didn't get anything done at the shop. The family and I went on a camping trip in Yosemite, and on Sunday did a bit of rock climbing in Tuolumne Meadows. I did my first trad climb on the bottom pitch of Golfer's Route. It got pretty runout above my second piece, and I went a long way before I could set another cam.

This last week I've been going back through the Updates, looking for good photos to put in the PowerPoint show for my talk at the 2005 SSA convention in Ontario (CA for California). My lord, what a long strange trip it's been. And still is...

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