A fairly good day in the workshop today.
Managed to get the gear legs aligned to 0.25 degrees toe-out. I had to take off 10mm on the Port, and add 8mm to the Starboard gear plywood brackets to get them both the same alignment.
With the plywood brackets removed I was able to finish the spar tunnel to safety cell reinforcing with carbon.
Next thing to do is put the plywood brackets back in place - I will just tack them in place with flock to start with. Then check the gear legs again (getting paranoid here) before fully flocking and glassing the plywood brackets in permanently.
On Friday I went to Farnborough. They now no longer have the trade halls open on the Public days (Sat and Sun), but release some special tickets for the Friday which I was able to get - so I had a good look at all the new tech on offer. Pretty interesting to see the Skylon stand with there prototype Sabre engine - the future of space travel? More about Skylon here: http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/space_skylon.html
Some pics that I took on this link: http://www.flickr.com//photos/andymac53/sets/72157630571936142/show/
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| Final bit of spar tunnel to safety cell reinforcing |
Hey Andy,
ReplyDeleteI'm over here in the US and I'm interested in building one of these, but looking at your build blog I'm wondering if I'm up to the task. Did you have much fiberglass experience before you started this?
Thanks,
BTW: Is the new tail wheel setup steerable ? Looks fixed in the photo
Jim
Hi Jim,
ReplyDeleteI had no experience before I started. Once you understand the basics then it's pretty straightforward. The manual does not spoon feed you all the answers - you have to do quite a bit of thinking and figuring out how to do things yourself.
Regarding the tailwheel - it is steerable, but through a small range. The external tailwheel is steerable, then outside of it's range is fully castoring. I think the integrated tailwheel will be more stable and make the aircraft less likely to groundloop because of it's limited range.
Regards
Andy