Latest Work Completed Mantua, New Jersey
Original Site:
September 2004
E-mail: usav8or@yahoo.com
August 18, 2008 Planning a weeks worth of work...
or am I ?
SNAFU one and two
I didn't make it to OSHKOSH so I'm spending some of that vacation time working on the biplane. What better way to pump up the project hours.
I've had it planned for some time now. I figured I'd hear back from Steen by now about the placement of the bungee truss. But just in case I didn't, plan "B" would be to work on the metal ribs for the tail section. Figured it take some time to cut out all those ribs
and a little bit of time to bend them. OK... so I'm pretty much set for a weeks worth of work.
SNAFU number one... haven't heard back from Steen. OK... I'll put plan "B" into action. Last Saturday, before going to Van Sant to get checked out in their J3, I drive down to Harbor Freight to pick up a bending brake.
SNAFU two... the good thing is they had a $270.00 bending brake on sale for $169.00 (the one I was going to get cost $149.00) The bad thing... they didn't have either of the two bending brakes... the $149 or the $179 models. DAMN !
Can you say "rain check" ? They said it could come in on Thursday. Thursday came and went. Maybe this Thursday ? (wishful thinking.)
Looks like I'll be hoping and wishing a few things fall into place on Monday or Tuesday.
Spent close to eight hours today working on the project. Finished putting the final yellow coat of paint on the throttle levers. I'll let those dry over night before putting them back together. The rest of the day I spent cutting and grinding down the metal ribs.
Finished both the painting and the metal ribs in about five and a half hours. The rest of the eight hours were spent with the DeltaCAD program.
I'm pretty much stuck in the water at that moment and I have until next Tuesday to work on this... uh... that's seven days with two SNAFUS. Not good. Denise is taking a trip down to Florida to
give her daughter a bridal shower that her friends can attend. She'll be leaving on Wednesday and won't return until Monday. That's five nights that need to be filled with biplane building.
OK... um... let's see. Guess I better pull plan "C" outta my butt.
That thread on the biplane forum, about moving the bungee truss, I remember Pelican (Dennis, a Boeing Engineer) saying that he spoke to a well known builder and they decided to move the truss to the same location as the Standard Skybolt. I emailed him earlier today and he said he would
try to get a few photos and to note the location tonight. Which hopefully means he'll have something for me tomorrow. I'd love to wait it out and hear back from Steen but it's been close to a month and a half already.
I feel pretty good about moving it to station 13.o . If Dennis and that guy agreed that it was good to move it to that location, and a few of the A and P/AI's on the forum thought that it would be OK... sometimes ya just gotta make that corporate decsion.
Update: August 23, 2008 Decided what I am going to do about that bungee truss.DON'T move it to station 13.o. About a month after my decision I read a post from Pelican about the trouble he is having by moving it to station 13.o. Glad I didn't follow their lead.
Looks like I'm back in business. I just might be able to pull off that fifty or sixty hours.
Oh yeah... got an email from Ed Neumann, one of the guys I know from EAA Chapter 216. We use to keep our planes tied down next to each other. He had a Tri Pacer... me a T-craft.
Anywho... he had asked if I had gotten hold of Joel, the RV guy, to talk about riveting. I said that we hadn't hooked up yet.
He then asks if I had a Tech Conselor look at my project yet... and if not, to have Whitey Lance take a look at it. Great ! idea. I had thought of it several times before but never got around to it. Took a quick look and found his number in one of the past Chapter Newsletters and gave him a call. Looks like he'll be coming out here some time this week.
I've got plenty of questions to ask him.
December 29, 2008 Taking a break...
on the metal ribs...
or is that to the metal ribs ??
I was lucky enough to speak to Steve, the guy that lives across the street from me. Lucky enough... that is... to find out that he knew someone with a large bending break. Said that the guy, Dick, used it for bending aluminum. I'm thinking that it wasn't strong enough to bend the 4130 that I had but what the heck... I'd give it a try.
Several weeks ago... December 13th, to be exact... we met up on a Saturday morning. After going out to breakfast we drove over to Pitman, NJ, to the place where his friend, Dick, had the brake. Dick opened up the shop where the brake was stored and man-O-man was that thing ever BIG !
It had a decent lip on it so that I could do practically all the bends. I found that it was just a little tough getting to the bends where the ribs went from 7/8ths to 3/8ths. But, with a little work we managed to get all the bends completed. What I thought would take 1/2 hour ended up taking the two of us close to two hours; Steve would work the
handle for clamping the metal while I positioned the piece in the brake and then worked the handle that made the bend. I can guarrantee that you'll have a difficult time in making those bends without a bending brake this big. This brake actually had a HUGE weight on the one end of the bending handle that helped (tremendously) in bending the metal ribs.
Hint hint... if you don't have a nice large bending brake you may just want to save some sweat and a lot of good metal by purchasing the ribs from Steen Aero. I'm not an advocate for buying parts and putting them together but in this case... it would be a good idea.
January 11, 2009
Here's a photo of those metal ribs. (took me long enough to post this)
January 12, 2009 A hammer and a piece of wood.
And you didn't
think an English Wheel...
could get even lower tech.
The multitude of things you need to do after you thought
you were just about ready to do it. And the time that it take
to complete the task at hand is squared by the desire to get
'er done.
It's not that I didn't realize that I had these tasks to do
before I started on putting together the pieces for the tail
feathers... it's the fact that there are sooooooooooo many
tasks. I believe that bending the metal ribs for the servo
trim tabs are the last task before moving on to the "big"
project, the actual making of the tail feathers.
Thought real hard all last week of just calling up Steen Aero
to see if they'd sell me just the four metal ribs for these
servo trim tabs. Decided that since I had the ribs already
cut and partially bent I'd give it a try. More than give it
a try... I was going to make them.
OK... it's Monday night, played with the pup, did my workout,
grabbed a bite to eat... time to go down and bend those four
ribs into shape.
Set my
table saw up to cut the shape of the metal rib with angles
of 90 degrees and 30 degrees. No hardwood sitting around so
I picked up a piece of partical board. (Pretty damn hard
compared to a pine 2x4.) Turn the saw on and made sure
my fingers weren't in the way of the blade as I cut the thin
strip of wood that was going to be my template/bending block.
I used
the vinyl flooring as my table as I began to bang away on
the metal rib with a dead blow hammer. I was suprised at how
fast this was taking shape. A little tweak here and a little
tweak there and I'll be done in no time. And I thought that
this was going to be a long night with not a lot accomplished.
After
about ten minutes of sculpting this masterpiece I was "close"
to being finished. Laid it up on the table to see what a nice
job I had done and was surprised at what was once a flat metal
rib now turned bowl shape. Actually, I wasn't surprise...
nothing surprises me. I thought about it and banging the heck
out of it like I did was no different than taking this thing
to an English Wheel. I had always thought that that piece
of tooling look primal... something out of the Medieval Times.
What I was doing was taking this concept back to the Stone
Ages. (I only wished I had started doing this stuff, er continued
doing this stuff back when I was younger. I'd be pretty good
with the English Wheel by now. I digress....)
The trick
now was to finess it back into being straight. I set about
to bang it some more... bend it a lot... finess it a little...
I wasn't getting there as fast as I wanted or as fast as I
thought that I should. Thought about making the call to Steen
Aero tomorrow to place that order for these four ribs. Thought
about it a few times. Then thought.. the hell if I'm going
to give in when the learning is getting a little tough...
the hell if I'm going to lay down and give up. So I continued
doing what I was doing and learning a little of the art that
I was to learn.
And
learn, I did. Twenty mintues of banging two metal ribs close
to the shape they needed to be... another two hours and twenty
mintues of learning; of banging and squeezing to put the finishing
touches on them.
I like the outcome of the last three hours. Another three
and I'll be ready to make those tailfeather... that is...
January 15, 2009 Finally !...
these pieces are looking more...
  and more...
like tail feathers.
I've been working on the elevators/stabilzers/rudder for quite awhile now. A lot of little pieces and a lot of big pieces to make before making it. (made a few other things in between too) The last of the metal ribs were cut out and bent up tonight (actually for the third time) and it was time to start putting this piece of the puzzle together.
I still need to notch the ribs, drill a few holes and then tack this together... hope to have these done in the next week or two!
YIKES ! it's actually starting to look like a biplane !
January 25, 2009 Yep...
still working on the tail feathers
Before jigging all the pieces together for the elevator and the horizontal stabilizer I needed to drill the hole for the trim servo tab shaft. In speaking with Jim, from the biplane forum, he strongly recommended that I use a unibit (a stpped drill) to save myself a lot of grief. I had thought about buying one, the night before at the Home Dept, but thought that I would tear all that hard work I put into making those metal ribs.
Took Jim's suggestion, and drilled those holes in short order. As you can see... that unibit does a nice job of drilling holes. No need to even debur after using it.
OK... so NOW everything is completed so that I can jig it all together. Took longer that I thought that it would... but what doesn't. Here's a photo of the pieces all tucked in and ready for the torch.
January 26, 2009 There was another fight tonight
between me and...
  my work space.
Finally got all those little bits and pieces of the puzzle together and was able to tack weld the one elevator/horizontal stabilizer together tonight.
Oh... it wasn't easy at first... no not the tacking... having to heft the 5' x 4' MDF jig, with the tubing and metal ribs in place, up the steps and into the garage workshop. Knew I should have put it all together out in the garage
workshop but it's been dipping into the teens at night and I, at the time, thought I would rather haul this up the flight of steps than to spend a few hours out in the cold temps to
put it all together.
At the time I thought it right... knowing that when I would go to move the jig... I would have thought otherwise. It was fun... oh yeah. Enjoyed tring to navigate the narrow steps, missing the door jam as I step into the garage work shop, slithering past the tail end of the fuselage to, of all places,
rest it on the fuselage; using it as my work bench. There just wasn't any room to sit it anywhere else.
Sure it took longer than the guy who walked over to the work bench and had at tacking the tubes and metal ribs together. He would have been done all of the tacking tonight and after an hour decide to go in and grab a cold one. Me, two and a half hours later deciding that enough was enough after I tacked the one
side... finding out I wasn't too happy with where the hinges ended up, cutting the tacks, re-tacking again...
The only cold thing I grab tonight was the torch handle.
The one side is tacked now and it's on to the other one. I'll have that finished by Thursday. And then I'll weld this up. Should be easy... yeah... this should be easy.