In the new year I've been recovering from the fuselage layup, and forging ahead on several small sub-projects. The biggest problem right now is that I seemed to have developed an allergy to the epoxy system that I selected. So I'm working on testing some other systems to see if they have the same effect. The MGS 285 and Jeffco 1307 systems look like good candidates so I'll start with them.
Also, on 15 January I delivered the horizontal stabilizer plug down to Harald at Precomtec R+D so he can quote on polishing it up and molding it. That was a one-day trip from Murphys down to Tehachapi and then back again; starting at about 6:30 AM and getting home at about 6:00 PM.
On 16 January, and again on 22 January I was back in the shop tooling up to make a big batch of ball-bearing push-pull tube guides. They're similar to the ones you can get from Aircraft Spruce for about $11 each, and if I only needed one or two I'd just get them from ACS. But since each aircraft will probably use about 20 of these things, I can't bring myself to pay so much for a couple inches of aluminum tubing and a few tiny pieces of plastic.
In other news, I've finally handed the winglet design that Steve Smith did for me off to Brad Hill for modeling. Here's a rendering of it:
Steve Smith worked out the planform based on a compromise between the Lemke "Wolf Ears" and Gerhard Waibel's Schleicher winglets. Through a couple of exchanges we negotiated some aesthetic tweaking of Steve's original planform, and then Steve went back and worked out the airfoil and incidence angles. Then I handed that data off to Brad Hill, and he took the planform data, airfoil data, and incidences and fleshed it out into a full 3D model. Going forward from here, we'll probably make a plug using a combination of CNC hotwired foam and hand-carved slices, skin it in fiberglass, and them have molds made.
page updated 25 January 2005 all text and graphics copyright (c) 2005 HP Aircraft, LLC