Flying, homebuilt airplanes, working with wood, riveted aluminum, welded steel tubing, fabric, dope and common sense. Gunsmithing, amateur radio, astronomy and auto mechanics at the practical level. Roaming the west in an old VW bus. Prospecting, ghost towns and abandoned air fields. Cooking, fishing, camping and raising kids.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
AV - Chugger's Tail
Back in May I mentioned I was using Pete Bower's Fly Baby as the basis for Chugger's tail. At that time (ie, 16 May 2007) I uploaded the drawings for the rudder and vertical stabilizer box-spars, which use 1/8" plywood shear-webs and 3/8" square cap-strips (as opposed to the 1/2" square cap-strips used in the original design). Chugger's tail is smaller in both height and span but I've tried to retain the elegant curves Pete used.
To ensure the four shear-webs would be identical, after rough-cutting them 1/8" door-skins I tacked them together on their center-lines and sanded them to final size as a single 1/2" thick slab. Since door-skins have an inner and outer face, when stacking them I made sure the rough-sawn blanks were oriented with the inner faces against each other.
The horizontal stabilizers use a built-up C-section for both their spars and diagonals whereas the elevators use box spars. As you can see in the drawings the diagonals are of a different size than the spars and are best handled as a matched pair. The six shear-webs for the spars are identical in taper but the elevator shear-webs are shorter. I treated these as matched sets of three, cutting the elevator shear-webs to length after sanding the stack to the proper taper.