Week 76 - 5 May 2004
I brought the wing home from the Sponsoring Hobby Shop (NRC Hobbies) last night, so we were ready to go tonight. First thing we did was bolt the wing on and visually checked all the alignments. They looked great, everything lines up perfect! With the wing on, we decided to mount the belly pan to the wing. The belly pan was cut out of the fuse so it was already sheeted and had a rough wing opening cut. We decided to cut away the rough wing opening. We accomplished this by marking the sheeting 2" each side of the crutch, which is center line. Now cut the sheeting on the marks and break off the remaining sheeting. Cool, this is working great! We can now see the belly pan formers, which helps mark and sand the formers till we get the belly pan fitted like we wanted. Once proper fit was achieved, we glued the belly pan to the wing using CA glue.
This whole process took us about 1 hour to complete. We all needed to call it an early night because of various commitments. So we took it outside to get some pictures all put together. We have had several requests for some new all-together pictures. They say hind sight is 20/20, and I guess that is true, as I wish we had taken a picture of the bottom side as well. Remember the bottom on all the wing sections is un-sheeted.
If NRC Hobbies has room the fuse will go to the shop for a while, till lots of wing details get worked out and completed. As you can see in one of the pictures we had the scales out tonight also. Current weight with wing as shown is 20-1/4 pounds.
-- Gary Himes
Week 77 - 13 May 2004
Well this report is a day late. We did not work this week. I am behind a big Dead Line at work and have been working long hours this week. When I checked with Rick & Greg, their lives were also plenty busy this week. This is only a short delay and we should be back on the project next week.
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Gary Himes
Week 78 - 19 May 2004
In the pictures tonight are 2 of a full scale B17G, Aluminum Overcast taken last year at Lee's Summit Airport. For those of you who do not know, Aluminum Overcast folded her main landing gear on landing this past week. The incident was somewhere on the west coast. Sure hope EAA can make Aluminum Overcast fly again! See www.b17.org for additional details.
If you jumped ahead and checked out the pictures you already know tonight's building was the wing flaps. Here, once again we deviated greatly from the plans. As you can see from the full scale pictures, the trailing edge of the flaps are flush with the top of the wing. According to plans, it was opposite with the trailing edge of the wing hiding the flaps.
To achieve this, we started with the 3/32 bottom balsa sheeting as shown on plans. Square 3/8 balsa was used for front edge of the flap glued on top of the sheeting. To achieve the full scale look and gain strength, we used .125 X .215 solid carbon fiber rod glued on top of the sheeting, for the trailing edge of the flap. Next the cut off ribs from the wing were glued between the leading and trailing edge pieces. Some of these were not long enough for our new plan and had to be made from scratch.
The remaining picture shows a hinge/control that we are strongly considering to drive the flaps and possibly the ailerons. This part was acquired from Hobby Lobby at the start of this project. We will get our supporting local hobby shop (NRC HOBBIES) to order us some more of these and our landing gear.
--
Gary Himes
