HP-24 Project

Over the Christmas holiday I spent a few days at the shop measuring the internal depth of the left wing and adjusting the spiders to support the internals commensurately so as to obtain nice even bond lines. I also spent a lot of time in head-to-head shredfests dueling it out with my daughters on Guitar Hero, but fortunately there are no photos of that.

On 26 December 08, trimming the edges of Brad's lower wing skins so they fit well with the uppers. The easiest way to do this was to climb up on the mold stack and walk around on the inner skin. A wing skin that won't support this kind of almost-abuse is probably too flimsy for everyday ground handling loads.

It's been snowing a bunch in Arnold lately. Here's a peek out the door.

Here's the basic plan: At every intersection on the spider, I position a pylon of polystyrene and poke a nail into the top.

Here's the box of 1" square pylons I made from the EPS lining of a fruit crate.

On 27 December, here's the upper wing skin with all the pylons hot-glued in place.

Next, we lowered the mold onto its carriage on the floor, rolled it over to the mold stack, and did a rollover-and-drop of the lower wing mold and skin onto the upper. Here's the pair getting rolled back into the main shop.

Then we lifted the lower skin mold (the one on the top of this short stack), put the nails in the pylons, and closed them up again and then clamped them together at each spider mount station.

On 28 December, here's a peek into the root opening, showing the nail-to-skin contact.

Then we lifted the molds and evaluated the heights at the nails.

Here I do a rough adjustment pass on the spider feet.

Here I do the final adjustment pass, using an inspection mirror to evaluate the gap between the spider and the nail as I dial them together.

Next weekend we're converting an 18-foot travel trailer into a bunch of Craigslist fodder plus a flatbed airplane recovery trailer.

Homebuilt aviation is not for folks who don't try things at home.

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