Aviation Coming Eventually

This is just a small update to say I've been working on an airplane. I've been doing a lot of reading on home-building aircraft lately and one of the "hints" I've run across over and over again is, "work on it every day;" most articles say to work an hour a day, and I've laughed at them. After a 10 hour work day, some time to decompress, then make and eat dinner, I have precious little time to spend in the garage before 9PM rolls around and I stop making noise in order to keep peace with the neighbors who also share our triplex apartment. However, recently I read an article suggesting half hour stints and another that just said, "Do something every day, no matter how small. A light bulb went on in my head. There was that A-HA moment when I realized I didn't have to stick to a schedule.  Please bear with me as I explain. When I started I took the process of building my airplane and broke it down into some fairly large chunks, lis...

Now that my spars were ready to recieve ribs, I had a little more work to do the ribs. Ribs 5 and 9 get 1/8" deep cutouts to make room for drag-wire brackets that go between the rib and the spar. These brackets hold the end of threaded rods called drag wires and anti-drag wires which form an x-brace pattern within the wing and take any loads that would rack the wing out-of-square.   I started trying to cut these slots with an x-acto saw but it took way too long, so I tried whittling it away with an x-acto knife. This took even longer. I finally realized that I had a scroll saw in the garage and made short work of the rest of the slots.  And then, just as I finished up the last slot I realized I'd accidentally grabbed rib 13 instead of 9. So, another mistake needed to be corrected. Rib 9 got the appropriate slot cut and was ready to go. Rib 13 had to have the mis-cut member replaces. This entailed removing the gussets in a similar process to removing the spar plates fro...

It took a while, but I'm finally at a place where I was able to pull those beautiful Sitka Spruce boards down from the wall and make some sawdust. I had two wide 13' boards, three narrower boards at 13', and a few 6' boards for the ailerons.  The two widest 13' boards became forward spars. The two nicest of the narrower boards became the rear spars. The last of them was ripped into two 3/4" square sticks to make the leading edge.  Both front and rear spars were then ripped down on the table saw just a little wider than final width with the required bevel on the top edge. The spars were then hand-planed to final size. A chop-saw squared up the root-end of the spar stock to have a square edge for laying out holes for hardware and the taper at the wingtip. Spar marked and ready for drilling. Hole for Wingtip bow already cut. All holes were drilled with my little bench top drill press. The spars laid across my new sawhorses which were adjusted to keep the s...

After the burst of activity that was sourcing drag wire stock I let the project lag again. I don't know why. Excuses range from "busy working", to "I didn't feel like it", to "the garage is a disaster." Any way, I'm back at it again for a little while. Some ancillary projects were completed, flashback arrestors on the welding torch and cleaning a sticky regulator, cleaning the garage, and building adjustable sawhorses for wing assembly. Adjustable sawhorse. Leveling feet. I got a coat of zinc-phosphate primer on my finished wing fittings to stave off rust.  Last night I finished preparing the new aileron control horns. I bent the old ones wrong and they cracked slightly, unairworthy but useful for practice. The new ones are bent correctly and only need some welding completed before they can get primed too. On that vein, I'm practicing my welding and am finally getting some welds I feel goo...

Progress on the airplane has been very limited as of late. It has, however, been made. After a long episode of researching and calculating I have found drag wires.   Not the drag wires the plans call for, but still. The plans want 1050 alloy steel wire to be threaded with a #6-40 thread and retained with what are essentially spoke-nipples from motorcycles wheels. The aircraft rated nipples are about $7 each and I need 24 of them. Spoke nipples are 20 to 50 cents each. We'll, I wasn't going to spend $170 on bolts, but $12 seemed reasonable, so I ordered a bunch of spoke nipples. I had intended to match the thread of the nipples with my drag wire stock, but they are just irregular enough that I couldn't find a thread that matched and it seemed like sending wires out to have the correct thread rolled on wouldn't be worth the effort. So, despite having bought my spoke nipples, I abandoned the idea of using them. Enter the Baby Great Lakes. I researched drag wires and alt...

  Progress has been slow, as it often is, but progress has been made nonetheless. I finally put another order in with Aircraft Spruce to get materials to finish making my spar fittings and remake the aileron control horns.   I cut, drilled, and finished the edges on all eight rear spar fittings. Four will be to attach the spar the the cabane structure of the fuselage and the other four will accept the upper end of the rear lift strut. I then chopped up two 6' lengths of .035 thickness steel, forming the blanks which will become the drag wire end clevises.  I've been having difficulty finding the correct material to make the drag wires, and will need to source them before I can finish the wing assembly. If anyone knows where to find 9/64" diameter, 1050 steel rod/solid wire please let me know.    I then laid out and cut my aileron control horns out of the 24" square sheet of .090 thickness steel I bought. This sheet should be enough material to also make th...

  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...