Narfi's Life after EU: Chapter Five - CH750-SD 3 Place Aircraft

That is an alignment tool for securing or 'jigging' the part to the table?

 

I like it!

 

~4.5hrs
Cut the strips, debuted the edges and bent the spars and doublers for the horizontal and elevator last night.
It's an old brake at a neighbors I am using and it used the full 10ft of it, bending sharper at one end and bowing a little in the middle creaking and groaning the whole time on the .040. I got the angles closeish and will finish them with the hand seamer like I did with the rudder spar. It's close and the bends are straight and where I want them so shouldn't be to hard to finish them off.

Once I have them bent to my satisfaction I will tweak the rib dimensions Roger gave me to match perfectly to the spars and build the new formers and cutting blocks for them.




Total time spent building: 102 hours
Total Cost: $8803
Airplane + consumables + project specific costs: $5867
Tools, etc.. I will keep for future projects: $2936

 

One of my heroes was an aircraft designer/builder who somewhat pioneered a period of the homebuilt aircraft scene with plans he sold. He went on and did design and build his own space ships before retiring. His success drove the current era towards what they are doing and striving towards now. In retirement, he designs and builds his own planes again.....
If you have some time, it is well worth going down the rabbit hole on all that Burt Rutan had a hand in during his carrier.

I am not on that Scale(extra points if you can understand the pun), but even as a private guy, it is fun to have good roll models to try to learn different things from.

 

~9hrs

Spent an hour Friday working the angles on the spars and doublers.
About 8 hours Sunday afternoon building forming and cutting blocks for the horizontal ribs, cutting them out and forming them.
The first time around when I thought I was building the 750stol ribs I built 3 form blocks, one for the leading edge, one for the middle and one for the full ribs, this time I just made the one full sized former and used my hand seamer to bend the hidden flange on the nose and middle ribs. I still made 3 sets of cutting templates to run the router around for cutting the aluminum.
Of course after forming the ribs I had to dummy them up to the spars to get a peak at how they will look :)





Roger is gone to Sun n Fun, so I won't be able to get dimensions on the center hinge assembly parts or rib spacing or attach brackets until he is back next week. Spacing seems most critical on the center two ribs as the forward attach brackets match up with them and from what I can tell need to be spaced appropriately to match the fuselage width and fuselage side of the attach brackets for bolting on. (and I obviously haven't built the fuselage yet....)

I have seen some people build increase the size of the outer hinge bracket to form a strake on the outer ribs of the horizontal. Any thoughts on if I should do that here? I am strongly leaning towards yes. I like the looks of it. It probably does help some. I intend to build floats for it at some time, and although I have not read anything yet about float characteristics for it, nearly all certified aircraft I have put floats on require more stability back at the tail. For example Cessna has a larger rudder and a dorsal fin bolted on under the tail and beavers have a plate bolted on the outer edge of the horizontal stabilizers looking almost exactly like larger versions of what I have seen done on zeniths. What do you guys think?

Also ordered the elevator trim system from Aircraft Spruce, It includes the Servo, clevis/pushrod kit, as well as switches and indicators. $372

Total time spent building: 111 hours
Total Cost: $9175
Airplane + consumables + project specific costs: $6239
Tools, etc.. I will keep for future projects: $2936

 

Should be back to working on the plane soonish..... We fell down a rabbit hole and almost to the end of it :)

Having never sailed, or even been close to sailboats to see them in operation, we decided to turn the canoe we built a few years ago into a sailing trimaran. The project goal was that the canoe could bolt on and off completely independent of the sailing rig. We designed the outriggers, beams, mast, boom, etc... ourselves without plans and purchased a used 420 class dinghy sail off of eBay for it. That took us most of the summer but its done now and we have had it sailing 3 times so far, and it has been lots of fun!

Still small tweaks to do on the rudder system, but everything else is working great and it goes upwind very well. We are very happy with it. (esp for not knowing what we were doing :) )

 

A few interesting pictures from the build,

 

Beautiful picture, it looks so realistic!

 

Sailed, modified, broke, and repaired the sailboat a while. Evenings are getting cooler so Wednesday night I sanded all the epoxy drips off the work table and dug out some zenith parts.


Last night laid out some steel tube for straight support jigs. (Table is on dirt and uneven after a few freeze thaw melt mud cycles) good practice to have some straight steel tubes or beams to clamp to anyways.

Clamp the horizontal stabilizer spars and ribs in place and started going through all my old emails with Roger for dimensions. Drilled pilot holes for the center three ribs and clecoed in place. Need to find or make the angle tab for the outer ones and get them clecoed in place.

Thinking about the skin. .020 with a 1 1/4" radius leading edge. The pipe I had used for vacume forming the rudder isn't long enough for this 10ft long skin. Will need to find a longer pipe which may start getting too flexible or figure out a different method.

 

Squirrel!!!!!

What do you see?