What's new? Well, let's see. I got a few things done at the shop but forgot to bring the camera, then I went on vacation (a trip to Seattle with the family) and delivered the right flaperon plugs to Brad. Then I got some more stuff done at the shop and got photos but had lost the cable for downloading the camera. Then I finally found the cable, and also got some new photos from Brad of the Glidair.
Here's some photos:
Your intrepid sailplane developer at the seashore.
Your intrepid sailplane developer's daughters at the seashore.
A lighthouse on the Oregon coast, I forget which one.
A bridge near the lighthouse. Infrastructure like this has always fascinated me. It seems to me that bridges are more interesting in Oregon; by and large they seem more elegant and better suited to their environment that what I see down here in California.
The daughters at the Seattle aquarium. They really liked the tank with the SCUBA diver in it. The diver has a microphone, but the sound is somewhat garbled so there's an interpreter to decipher what the diver is saying.
On the way back from Seattle, all of us at Castle Crags near Dunsmuir. There's some good looking rock, I want to go back and do some climbing there some day soon.
Fast forward to 18 August, back at the shop and working on the elevator plug. It's starting to approach moldworthiness.
Another thing I did that day was to add this angle stop to my sheetmetal pan brake. It's just a chunk of threaded rod drawn through an eye by the motion of the hinged portion of the brake. The threaded rod has a jamnut pair that stops the motion when they meet the back of the eye. Setting it requires a bit of trial-and-error, but once you find the right setting it makes for good repeatability. I'd never seen an angle stop like this until I visited Dick Schreder's shop.
I also started kitting out parts for a set of horizontal stabilizer skins. This will be a somewhat experimental layup, using an unconventional core foam. I'm mainly doing these parts so that I have stab skins of about the right thickness so I can get started on squishes to make rib and shear web molds from.
The black strips are the pultruded carbon spar caps for the stabilizer that will be molded right into the skins.
Fast forward to 24 August, Brad has the right flaperon plugs spliced back together (I'd had to saw them in half to fit into the rental car we took out on our road trip to seattle, filled, primed, and approaching moldworthiness.
Brad also had a friend over to help with some construction at his place, here they are working on a shop table that they'll use to mold the flaperon plugs.
And of course trying the Glidair fuselage and canopy on for size.
Forward to 25 August, Doug has just liberated the portion of the left wing plug that will yield the left outboard flaperon plug. The inboard portion followed soon after.
And here's the four-high wing molds that we stacked up to liberate as much floor space as practical.
On 26 August, here's an old, cracked HP canopy transparency I'm cutting up for a friend. I think that the middle 48" might yield a usible LS1 aft canopy transparency.
Waxing up the horizontal stab molds.
Doug shapes the sandwich foam sheets.
Doug with our temporary laminate cutting table. Here we're cutting out the sandwich closeout ply, which you can see has +/-45 fiber orientation.
Doug buffs, Raen supervises. "Work smarter, not harder!"
Homebuilt aviation is not for folks who don't try things at home.
page updated 27 August 2007 all text and graphics copyright (c) 2007 HP Aircraft,
LLC