Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
Building a Biplane: Some Updates
I've been making good progress on the Charger build lately, and wanted to share some news.
The first thing is that I've made a dashboard showing my build progress. It was amusing to put together, and it's interesting to see in charts and graphs how I've been working on the plane. Having to take 2019 off due to lack of shop space made a pretty healthy dent in my progress.
The other thing is that I made a video about a tiny part of the build process, which may or may not interest you.
This shows one of the many many little steps that go into making the aileron pivots, which are deceptively simple-looking on the plans. It's just these three arms, how bad could it be? As I mention in the video, it's going to take something like 40 hours to go from looking at the plans to having 12 functional pivots in my hand, and that's not even counting getting them sandblasted and painting them, which is a completely separate adventure.
As someone commented about the build when I was describing it to them, "Oh man, even the details have details." Yep, the top-level step of "make 12 aileron pivots" touches on all sorts of questions: how to buy steel that hasn't been made for decades; what's the best compromise among the available sizes of steel; where to find that size; justifying paying $18 a foot (not including shipping or tax) for a weirdo size of steel that is also going to make the plane unnecessarily heavy; where is the steel after the seller put the wrong zip code on the box; how to cut steel; how to cut steel so it's square; how to cut steel so it's got the correct angle to the cut; how to figure out the correct angle to the cut (CAD to the rescue); how to locate two holes in a part so that they have the exact same placement on every piece; how to assemble the pieces once they're cut; how to build a welding jig for assembling the pieces once they're cut; how to make a welding jig that will lock everything into place, and then let it go once it's welded together; how to weld these two pins so they actually match the piece they're supposed to locate... It never ends.
To be clear, this is a big part of the fun: taking a job and breaking it down into its component parts, and then doing all those little jobs as efficiently and well as possible. In the end, you have a finished product that reflects all the hours and effort. It's slow going, but it is rewarding, eventually.
Posted at 23:44 permanent link category: /charger
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater