Aviation Coming Eventually

  Not much has happened on the Ace this year. The winter was long and spring has been very cold, so I spent a long time waiting for the garage to warm up. Now that there's a little heat down there I've been making some headway on the next step of my wing build: fittings. I copied the parts off the plans into CAD and then printed them onto cardstock to use as patterns when laying fittings out on the steel stock.    First I tackled the brackets that will hold the pulleys for the aileron cables. I have a lot of extra material in case I had to remake these. The next step was to bend up my fittings. There is one fitting that mounts to the forward side of the strut which gets bent to a 90° angle. The fitting which mounts to the aft side of the spar gets bent at about an 85° angle. I forget the exact number, but don't feel like looking it up at the moment. Next I cut out the aileron control horns. My Harbor Freight porta-band chucked into my vice works well for cutting th...

Just a quick update. All 26 wing ribs and 4 aileron ends are assembled and the gussets have been routed flush to the capstrips. I just need to trim the bevel on the trailing edge of 30 different pieces.  My spar material has arrived as has my 4130 steel stock. So, ribs are essentially done. I'm waiting for the garage to warm up and then progress will resume. The wings won't be able to be able to be assembled until my car sells and I get some space back.

This is a summary of the rib building procedure as I had posted it to the EAA builders' forums. How I build a rib: Nose block, and preformed upper and lower capstrips are placed in the jig. Both capstrips are left long at the trailing edge, the lower sits atop the upper for now. Intercostals are added, forcing the capstrips into final shape. The upper capstrip is marked where it abuts the lower. It's then removed from the jig, trimmed with a razor saw and sanded to final fit. Then all the joints are hit with a sanding bar to bring the pieces down to the same thicknesses, there is some slight variation between them. A vacuum with a brush attachment pulls up all the sanding dust before gluing begins. Here are all the parts in the jig post sanding. Cardstock spacers are used either side of the spar blocks to allow easier installation of the finished rib on the spars. Next, the nose gusset is laid in place with an aircraft nail partly driven into the upper and low...

Warning: I have almost no pictures to supplement this installment. I laid out a diagram in CAD of all the gussets that had to be cut and how to best fit them on my two 4'x4' sheets of 1/16" plywood. From here it was just a simple matter of ripping the sheet down into strips, then cross-cutting those strips on my crosscut sled. There are a few triangle shaped gussets for the trailing edge that were made by cutting a rectangular gusset on the diagonal with my band saw. The leading edge of the rib has a custom gusset that covers the nose block made last time and butts against the forward spar opening. These were made much the same as the nose blocks, but were able to be cut 4 at a time. There are 50 nose gussets (part# 1), 50 Trailing edge gussets (part# 22), 50 long gussets (part#19), and 602 standard gussets (part# 18). All these gussets are 1/16" birch plywood. Birch plywood needs to be sanded to roughen the surface before gluing. I forgot this fact until after I ha...

Yes, I hate myself for it, but that pun was too easy to pass up.   The first step of construction isn't the cutting of materials, but the construction of the rib jig. This jig will be the template on which the 6 long ribs, 6 short ribs, aileron ribs, and butt rib of each wing panel are constructed. In total there are 26 ribs plus 4 end caps for the ailerons.   The pieces of each rib will be laid into the jig, gussets glued and nailed to one face, rib removed and flipped, and gussets glued and nailed to the other face. Repeat ad-nausea.  I'll be gluing with T-88 epoxy and so it's important that if I have squeeze-out I can still remove the rib from the jig. To aid in this I'm laying the jig out on a melamine shelf and coating the jig blocks in liquid floor wax.   The first step in all this is drawing out the rib full size on the melamine base. My copied set of plans are slightly undersized, so I had to use the originals. In an attempt to save them from any damage ...

So, where does one start when building an airplane?   The answer changes from person to person. The kernel of inspiration to build an airplane was there, as I mentioned in the last post, from the time and effort it took to build the Spirit. But what plane? I looked at the trusty Pietenpol, but the size of the cockpits and the useful load left me wanting for something more. I looked at the Double Eagle and the Airbike, but my girlfriend didn't like how open they were. Finally, I made a list of what I thought I wanted in an airplane, reproduced here.  -High wing monoplane (biplanes mean building 4 wings)  -Taildragger w/tailwheel  -Fabric wings and stab.  -Aluminum tube or wood construction, maybe steel  -Inexpensive to build  -Inexpensive to operate  -Single carb engine.  -Aircooled?  -Two seats  -Mostly enclosed cockpit (not a breezy)  -minimal systems  -AOA/reserve lift guage  -Amphibious a plus ...

 I believe one of the first questions that comes to everyone's mind when you tell them you're building and airplane is, Why? I figure I should answer that question first.  Last October I moved out of my parent's house where I had been living since returning from the Bahamas in 2014. As a sort of christening for my new apartment/ build space I decided to build a 1/6 scale flying model of the Spirit of St. Louis for Flite Fest 2017. Over the intervening 9 months I spent nearly 300 hours constructing this culmination of my aviation and modeling skills to date. 1/6 scale Spirit of St. Louis at Flite Fest At some point after Flite Fest I realized I had spent 1/6 the time required to build a real airplane in building a 1/6 scale airplane, so rather than building a new model every year, why couldn't/shouldn't I just build a real airplane. To keep a long, meandering story somewhat concise, I'll just say that I decided the Junior ACE was the airplane for me. I ...