Latest Work Completed Mantua, New Jersey
Original Site:
September 2004
E-mail: usav8or@yahoo.com
YES... more of... The Radical Radial Fuselage.
April 17, 2008 Flames ... and fish supplies....
Yup... out to the garage workshop to tack this puppy together. Although... I was thinking about this last night and decided that a hot flame and rubber tubes used for fish tanks don't play together nicely. So.... without a second thought I decided I needed to cut that tubing off. Not because it was going to melt and make a mess and in melting would loosen the x-bracing. I took the time to cut it off and re-square the fuselage because it was the right thing to do.
My brilliant idea to cover the wire so that it wouldn't scratch the tubing wasn't so brilliant after all. Go figure. What was I thinking, or better, what was I thinking ? Now that it's off, the wire doesn't seem to be scratching the tubing afterall. Go figure, again.
Now that I have all that rubber cut off, and the frame square again, I can tack (fingers crossed) the front portion of the fuselage together. Not tonight, but tomorrow, or this weekend...
I'll need to put in some additional x-bracing further back on the fuselage and you can be sure I won't take the time to wrap it in air line tubing. No more thinking outside the box on this part of the build.
I still need to go out and purchase a router table. I'd like to get started on those throttle quads. It's times like these that you need another piece of the project to work on so that you can just separate yourself from the brilliance.
April 21, 2008 Indecision
...
I'm having problems with the finality of a decision... the decision to say that I'm
happy with the squareness of the fuselage. The answer hangs heavy on how my Skybolt will track through the sky. Out of square and we'll be slipping (not a good thing here) through the air, slipping as in slipping in on final, you know, kicking the rudder, using the side of the fuselage as a brake.
A little tweak
here a little tweak there. I could tweak from here until
eternity and still be tweaking. I need to move forward with the project.
After three or four days of this I finally said enough ! and started tacking the three lower and three upper cross-tubes to the longerons (not before tweaking it a little bit more.)
The size of the garage workshop reared it's ugly head when I went to tack some of the tubes. There just isn't any room on the one side of the table. I can barely squeeze in between the wall and the table, let alone manage a 5000 degree torch and a welding rod. At one point I was half standing on the fuselage table in order to throw a few tacks onto one of the cross-tubes. (whatever it takes)
Next on the to do list is squaring up the bungee truss, then tacking that, followed by a little help from Denise when I heat the upper and lower longerons at stations 51.o and 49.o6. I'll heat while she slooooowly bends the sides in. After bending the sides in I'll be able to contine measuring, cutting and notching the tubes for the fuselage. I'll throw a little fuel tank mock-up building in there to change it up a little.
Per the Skybolt Manual, the one on the biplane forum, I either need the actual fuel tank or a mock-up to fit some of the forward diagonal tubes in the front section of the frame. If I don't do this I have a good chance of not being able to slide the tank in after the frame has been all welded up.
I'll test fit the entire time I'm measuring, cutting and notching the tubes for that location and do a few test insertions after the tubes are tacked in place.
Once I have the mock-up made of the fuel tank, it shouldn't be too much more effort to make the actual tank using the mock-up as a pattern. so he says at this point I'll need to get someone good with TIG welding to welded the aluminum up for me.
Oh yeah... figured out why that router bit was climbing on me when routing the patterns for the throttle quads. I can get started on that too.