Thursday 17 November 2011

Rolling along on some brass wheels

Today I started at the shop a bit later than I thought. I had to do a dump run to get rid of all the wood from doing all the windows at home. I started designing the landing gear supports when I arrived at noon.
 This was something I had left until near the end as I couldn't wrap my head around every little geometric condition. On this build, I worked from my 3d computer model, laying all the parts out in Corel and Aspire as 2d vectors. But now that the main fuselage is built, I can physically see and measure the places I need to affix the landing gear frame.
 I was able to pick up 4 bicycle wheels last week for this, and got them sprayed up in a brass colour today. I chose bike wheels because I loved the idea of spoked wheels. And bicycle wheels are fairly dainty, which adds to the look that some parts of this flying machine might be slightly under-engineered. As the director wanted it lower in the front to show the wings, I put on 20" wheels in the front, and 26" wheels on the back.

I removed the rubber for painting, and will fire that back on tomorrow first thing, then stain it all up. I still have to glue up the MDF for the propeller. I should get to that tomorrow as well. Saturday I will machine the propeller, which has been designed in Hexagon, and toolpathed already with Cut3d.
All things considered, we are doing well despite the 5 day window interruption to our schedule!
8)
JO

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