Aviation Coming Eventually

 As some of you may know, I've been toying with the idea of widening the Junior Ace from the original 33-1/8" to something more comfortable. To help explore this idea and decide exactly how big "more comfortable" is, I built a mockup of the fuselage structure from pvc pipe. The sides are mirror images of one another and follow the bends of the stock fuselage exactly. The cross-tubes are just zip-tied on so that the sides can be moved to any width. The seat was knocked together quickly from some scrap and duplicates the shape and size of the stock seat. PVC cockpit mockup I set the mockup to the stock width and Cheyenne and I both sat in it. It was very tight and left little room for manipulating a control stick. My knees just clear the cross tube at the top of the fuselage when my feet are where the rudder pedals will be. I then set the width to 36,38, and I think 40 inches consecutively. 36 was much more comfortable but still felt a little tight; getting in and out ...

 Once the tubing arrived, I had the jig table built, and we finally cleared off the garage sale remnants, it was time to lay out the tail surfaces. Horizontal stabilizer leading edge The dimensions on the plans were marked out on the table and centerlines were drawn in. Then I could offset that centerline to mark out where edges of the tubing should land. Jig blocks can then be screwed down touching that edge line. I'll skip a lot of the specifics because it's hard to visualize without pictures and I took very few pictures. Each tail surface is made up of a tubing perimeter and C-shaped sheet metal ribs. The ribs were bent up out of sheet steel with a borrowed bending brake. Bending tool The trickiest part of these surfaces was bending the leading edges around the 5-1/2" curves called out on the plans. The radius is tight enough that I could not bend the tubing without kinking, even when packed tightly with sand. I decided to try building a sort-of mandrel bender. The devi...