Mantua, New Jersey
Original Site:
September 2004
E-mail: usav8or@yahoo.com
More... The Radical Radial Fuselage.
February 24, 2008 Tacking left... tacking right And no, we ain't sailing a boat
Over the past few days... work has been progressing on the building of the first fuselage side.
Sixteen point three hours into it and it's coming along pretty nice. Other than that one glitch I had with two station 5.o to 0.o tubes, er, I mean, made practice cuts on two pieces of tubing before cutting the one I would be using on the fuselage side.
Finished measuring, cutting, notching and fitting up the tubing without much hassel. Same as what I had been doing the few nights before. (by the way... make sure you wear a pair of gloves while you're working with tubing... keeps wash-up afterwards to a minimum)
OK, now I'm ready to tack this puppy up. Oh, yeah... need
to drill the oil access holes before we do that. Would have
probably forgotten, except I have it written all over my tables.
As the Skybolt Manual (find it on the biplaneforum.com) states,
you can make these 3/16" or 1/8" holes by either using your
torch and burning them in or drilling them. My thoughts...
you're heating up the tubing enough by tacking it and then
welding it... why heat it up even more by doing something
you can do with a drill. Maybe it won't look some much like
a pretzel. Don't quote me on that one though.
I wasn't about to do my stair climbing routine again tonight so I marked the tubing with my silver marking pen,
un-jigged the tubes then very carefully drilled the holes by hand. You'll want to take it slow 'cause the drill bit will want to wander. Don't forget your cutting fluid. And take it slow. Did I say.. take it slow ? Take it slow.
You'll feel the bit start to go through the inside wall. If you're zipping along, thinking about something else, that bit will either rip the tube out of your hands or be pulled through to the other side and nicking the inside of the tubing and or breaking the bit. None are good final results. So... take it nice and slow.
You're going to find that you need to un-screw a lot of your jig blocks while fitting the tubing and taking them out to drill the oil access holes. Keep track of where what goes. No sense in adding more hours to your build because you now forgot what block went where. No, I didn't do this, but just something to keep in mind.
OK, now I'm ready to tack together the fuselage. Again, refering to the Skybolt Manual, Back when you were deciding on how you were going to make your jigging for the fuselage, you could have either made blocks that would hold the tubing up at the right height, or did like I did and
just made blocks to hole the tubing in the right place. Man, that other way would have been time consuming, and you know I'm not into building jigs, I'm into building this biplane.
It's simple enough to "block" the tubing to the correct height after it's been cut and placed in the jig. I figured that I needed .0625 and .125 "blocks." Simple enough, no need to even cut wood ones. Take some of that scrap metal you've been making when cutting out your fittings. They're good as anything. As a matter of fact, they're better than wood. They won't burn away when tacking up the frame.
Before I did the actual tacking up of the fuselage I made sure all the weld joints were a little loose. If you have them so tight that they don't move you're going to end up with all kinds of bending and stresses that you don't even want to deal with. So take a few minutes now to take a looksee and if need be grind some of those tubes down to fit snug, but loose.
Feels great ! The first side measured, cut, notched and now tacked up.
This week I'll be doing more measuring, cutting, and notching. Next weekend I hope to be tacking up the second side. Should go along a lot smoother. Not that the first side was a problem, but...
February 25, 2006 Do it now...
Do it later...
it's all hours
Spend a few hours setting up your shop the right way...
Right way meaning. Build a simple tube holder so that it's easily accessable with all the tubes clearly marked. Do the same with your wood.
It'll help prevent some of what I'm going through. Frustration in trying to find tubing that you know is here, because
you've double-checked your triple-checks, but ya just can't seem to place your finger on it at the moment. (I think I'm beginning to
sound like a broken record, but never fixing what's broke)
Spent the better part of an hour tonight looking for a 7/8" X .O49 tube that was at least 60" long. Knew I had it because
of all my checking before hand, but just couldn't lay my hands on it. Ended up finding it in an eight foot shipping tube
and even with all my shaking to get what was in there to the open end within the first five minutes of looking... an hour later I ended up shining a light down into the
tube to see something close to that size still sitting pretty at the bottom of it. 'nuff said
Tools all in their place. A luxury for most of us. You can find me any night of the week searching for one tool or
another, holesaw, drill bit, rubber mallet... You get the picture.
Ideally, I'd love to have a 40' x 40' shop; nice large cleared area for building the plane and setting up it's rigging, a
place for all the shop tools, each with it's own outlet, a wall or two with pegboard where each and every tool has it's
own place. At the end of the night I'd just match the tool to the "shadow" on the pegboard and be done with it. Ideally
and realistic are two different things for me right now. Ideally, the world should be at peace, realistically, that ain't
gonna happen any time sooner than me having the ideal worshop.
Enough of the saying what ya ought to do and getting back to building this bird.
Feels good building the second side to the Skybolt. Other than the search for the tubing, oh yeah... and some notes that
I jotted down the first time that I still didn't find tonight of which I finally just gave up on, the second fuselage side is going together real smooth.
Cut three pieces of tubing. The forward most pieces of the upper and lower longerons and the vertical piece at Station 0.o .
Made the 45's and the 30 degree cuts (make that 60 degree cut, not 30 degree - looking at the book, it's a 30 degrees angle if you measure the angle above the tube, but if you're cutting that said tube, it's a 60 degree cut - minor annoyances - glad that I put six rossette welds in each of the joints instead of just two.) On Wednesday I'll cut the additional tube for the upper longeron and the two
additional pieces for the lower longeron, cut the holes for the rossette welds, weld them closed, weld the scarf joint and
then I'll be ready to heat bend the lower longeron at station 49.o6 .
Getting back to spending a few hours setting up your shop. When I go to do it again. And yes, they'll be at least another
plane coming outta me. If I have the room, I'll set it up all nice and pretty. Things in their place. An outlet for every
cord. A hanger for every tool. A central vacuum system. An eighty-gallon air tank for my compressor. Yeah, I could spend
all my money on that, or put my money towards the plane and just fight through some of the hassles of not having the perfect
set-up. Me, like my jigs, I'd rather be building the biplane rather than setting up the perfect shop or making a beautiful
jig.
Guess the "Do it now... Do it later.. it's all hours" lead-in to this entry was misleading. I should have started it off with. Stuck in traffic... or driving a few extra miles to avoid it... at least I feel I'm doing something while I'm moving "forward." Neither senario is perfect. For the one, you know where your things are but you've spent hours getting it in that shape. On the other hand, if you haven't spent all that time getting it into shape you'll be spending a lot of time
looking for that "perfect" place that you left the tool the last time.
Things tend to change every once in a while. And, if there is good enough reason to change, I'll make it. Damn well better be a good reason.
Who knows... that Flitzer, DW-1 Chilton, Tailwind, M-1 Mustang... just might have the luxury of being built in a large 40' x 40' nicely equipped workshop with all the bells and whistles.
Maybe it wasn't misleading afterall. Do what works for you. All I can do is write what's working for me. Or, what's not working...
OK, now I'm ready to tack this puppy up. Oh, yeah... need
to drill the oil access holes before we do that. Would have
probably forgotten, except I have it written all over my tables.
As the Skybolt Manual (find it on the biplaneforum.com) states,
you can make these 3/16" or 1/8" holes by either using your
torch and burning them in or drilling them. My thoughts...
you're heating up the tubing enough by tacking it and then
welding it... why heat it up even more by doing something
you can do with a drill. Maybe it won't look some much like
a pretzel. Don't quote me on that one though.
I wasn't about to do my stair climbing routine again tonight so I marked the tubing with my silver marking pen,
un-jigged the tubes then very carefully drilled the holes by hand. You'll want to take it slow 'cause the drill bit will want to wander. Don't forget your cutting fluid. And take it slow. Did I say.. take it slow ? Take it slow.
You'll feel the bit start to go through the inside wall. If you're zipping along, thinking about something else, that bit will either rip the tube out of your hands or be pulled through to the other side and nicking the inside of the tubing and or breaking the bit. None are good final results. So... take it nice and slow.
You're going to find that you need to un-screw a lot of your jig blocks while fitting the tubing and taking them out to drill the oil access holes. Keep track of where what goes. No sense in adding more hours to your build because you now forgot what block went where. No, I didn't do this, but just something to keep in mind.
It's simple enough to "block" the tubing to the correct height after it's been cut and placed in the jig. I figured that I needed .0625 and .125 "blocks." Simple enough, no need to even cut wood ones. Take some of that scrap metal you've been making when cutting out your fittings. They're good as anything. As a matter of fact, they're better than wood. They won't burn away when tacking up the frame.
Spend a few hours setting up your shop the right way...
Right way meaning. Build a simple tube holder so that it's easily accessable with all the tubes clearly marked. Do the same with your wood.
It'll help prevent some of what I'm going through. Frustration in trying to find tubing that you know is here, because
you've double-checked your triple-checks, but ya just can't seem to place your finger on it at the moment. (I think I'm beginning to
sound like a broken record, but never fixing what's broke)