HP-24 Project

First off, thanks to everyone who's been asking about the HP-24 project. Yes, things are still poking along, but, no, there's been no particularly photogenic progress since the last update.

We have gotten a few things done, like separating out the joggle flange for the left leading edge. But for the most part we've been doing family things like camping and rock climbing. And last weekend it was just too bloody hot to get anything done in the shop. So mostly I sat around and did detail design for control surfaces and control system parts.

However, the 4 July holiday weekend (more like most of a week) promises to see a ton of progress on at least one front: We're convening another Akaflieg at Brad Hill's place outside Seattle to make the fuselage molds for the Glidair motorglider.

Brad's ordered in a ton of the composite materials and a bunch of steel tubing, and has spent the last couple of weeks adding parting flange features to the fuselage plug. Brigitta is already enroute with the kids and the welding machine and a bunch of materials, and I'm hopping a cattle flight up there on Friday morning. We'll get together and lay up at least one fuselage mold half, and my part of it will probably be to weld up the steel support truss for both mold halves.

That's the plan, at least.

In other news, we've finished off the drum of epoxy we bought about a year and a half (I'd never have believed we'd go through 55 gallons of epoxy so quick), and I'm shopping around for the next drum full. I might switch systems at this time, but I'll most likely stick with common Epon and Epicure products.

I'd like to go with one of the MGS(R) products, but nobody in the Western US seems interested in supplying it in quantities greater than gallon jugs. I've no intention of paying what that would cost - it's about $87/gallon versus about $22/gallon for the Epon stuff. I've emailed the Scheufler guys a couple times, but not heard word one back from them. But I just now noticed that Scheufler is now a Bakelite company, and when I click the Bakelite.de link on the MGS Web site it redirects me to Hexion, which is were I buy drum-quantity Epon epoxy. So maybe my usual supplier can set me up. I'll ask about that.

Return to HP-24 page