As you will see he does things a little different to the manual.
He builds the planes stronger than the manual says to. His planes do get maximum abuse as they are flown to the extreme of their envelope pretty much every day. Each of his Twisters does 350 hours a year, and a good bit of that 350 hours is aerobatics.
Onto the photos - and as you will see from the wing rib photo that his is in an even worse place than mine. He took so much rib off to fit the bell crank pushrod that a reinforcement behind the rib was needed. Sadly I did not take a photo of this but it consisted of 4 layers of glass, plus flock in the voids left in the honeycomb.
Quite a fiddle to get in behind the rib to do this job - arm through the flap counterweight hole - and you are effectively working blind.
You will also see that he does his fuel drain a different (better!) way - only drilling the holes that are needed right though the bottom wing skin and tank - unlike my method of making another smaller hole. Although this is what the manual tells you to do.
The other job I watched him do was fit a fuel level sender. This sender goes to a mechanical gauge and with the fuel flow meter on his Dynon that gives him two independent fuel readings.
My resin arrived yesterday so I will get cracking again this week.
 |
| And I thought my rib was in a bad place! |
 |
| Fuel drain with holes drilled only for overflow and drain |
 |
| Fuel sender |
 |
| Support rib for rear wing pin - my next job |
 |
| Nylon washers to space the controls into the right place |
Hi Andy, its interesting that Peter is building another one. Is this to replace one of his display ones or is he starting a twister squadron? ;-)
ReplyDeleteCheers Krishna
Hi Krish,
ReplyDeleteIt's a spare. In case one of his other two goes tech at short notice and they have a display coming up.
Kind of makes sense as they do a full season of displays with sometimes several airshows in one weekend - so if one plane went tech at the start of such a weekend then they would not be able to perform.
Did you get my message about Facebook?
Bye for now
Andy
Your right Andy, it does make sense to have a back up but I thought I had read that they had three aircraft some time ago....must have been wrong. It is very handy to have Peter building one at the same time. How does he build it stronger?
ReplyDeleteSorry didn't see your message about FB. No not a fan of Dassault systems.....try Krishna Parikh, Geelong, Victoria. (I've got a profile picture of me and my boy on a blue motorbike.)