The Mission:

I am building an airplane. I really can't tell you how weird it sounds to me to hear those words in my head as I type. I am keeping this blog as an adjunct to my written log, which is required to comply with FAA requirements for Experimental Aircraft construction. My son Doug is my partner in this project. There are two goals: to build the best, safest, and yes, COOLEST, airplane we can, and to allow Doug to acquire some truly awesome experiences, not to mention building skills. Thanks for viewing.



How to use this blog

The most current post is displayed on this opening page. To access the older posts, click on the "Blog Archive" on the right hand side. The drop down menu is arranged by the month and lists the posts, by title and by date posted, in reverse chronological order.

I will arrange the hypertext links to other websites I find interesting better some day, but they are at the bottom.

If you navigate to my first post, there is a link to my luthiery pages. I miss working with wood. Aluminum is nice, but it's boring. Give me a highly figured maple any day!

Thursday, May 19, 2011

The wings are on!

Doug and I, assisted by Ryan and Tom, were able to get the wings on today.  It was equal parts precision and aluminum rodeo, but they are on and look good.  Afterwards, we briefly measured a few of the pertinent things, including sweep (there was none; the wings are in essentially perfect alignment); symmetry between both wings in terms of being orthogonal to the fuse (we were within 1/8th of an inch, measuring from wingtip to the most aft centerline point on the fuselage; ie darned good!), and a quick measure of incidence (also looks good. We are easily going to have appropriate margins when we drill in to the rear spar flange).  So, at this point, all is well.  We (that is to say, I) decided to wait until this weekend to drill the rear spar bolt.


Note shim under the wheel of our cradle on the right side of this photo.  We made sure we were level side to side. 
We hung four pyramid shaped fishing weights down from the leading edge (note blue tape). All were co-linear on the chalk line
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