starting fuselage

[dedgemon]

Finished up the wings yesterday and rolled them into the garage. I sure was getting tired of those things.

Spent today digging the tables out and getting them straight and flat.

Looking forward to working on the fuse for a while.

[Chewie]

Congrats! Do you have a build log online?

[dedgemon]

Nope. after 4 airplanes, I'm pretty much just taking pictures and keeping a written log of the time.

Looking forward to the fuse, the wings had gotten pretty monotonous.

[Bcone1381]

Dave, would you take some pictures for us and keep us updated as you build your fuselage? I don't see a lot of information floating around here about building the fuselage. You are a few years ahead of quite a few of us on this build and light years ahead on experience. I personally would love to see and understand how these future steps will take place.

Brooks
Scratchbuilding Patrol #303

[dedgemon]

Got the top of the fuselage completely tacked. Its ready to set aside and wait on the fuse bottom to be assembled. Camping this weekend so it'll have to wait a while . This is way more fun than the wings. (so far!)

[dedgemon]

Had the day off and was able to spend it laying out the fuselage floor. This a lttle harder to fit up since its not flat. The longerons bends are already made. I decided to fit up and tack the aft portion of the floor since that piece IS flat. Then I could handle it as one piece. Shot a few photos at the end of the day.

[DRLPatrol]

Thanks for the pics. Keep them coming.

[dedgemon]

Started to layout the lower firewall frame this morining and discovered that I had not rotated the longerons enough. Since the angles are already in the tubing they have to be in just the right position to fit. 10 minutes to cut the tacks and rotate the longerons, and now the front pieces fit. Just retacked and kept going. Good reason to keep the tacks small. One of the guys building the LSA recommended not tacking the bottom until later. I understand his reasoning but the tacks sure do help in keeping it from swirming around. Oh well, we'll see how the uprights work out.

[Jflyer]

Dave, I can see from the nice clean and tight joint-work, this ain't your first rodeo.
What are you coating on the non-weld areas?
The top looks grey-white with the bottom yellow.

Thanks for the input

[Mark Goldberg]

We color coat the tubing with cheap paint coded as to wall thickness of the tubing. This lessens the chance a worker will use the wrong wall thickness of a certain OD tubing. The wrong OD tube will not fit in the tooling (or be loose). So the main risk is to use the correct wall thickness. This is one of the ways they double check that every tube used is the correct one. On our kits this paint is sand blasted off, but it stays on the tubing packages and other parts that are not painted. Mark

[dedgemon]

John, As much as I would like too take credit for the joinery, I cant. This is one of Avipro's pre cut tubng kits. They fit really well and are saving a ton of work. Apparently they paint the tubing in order to color code them. It makes grabbing the right sizes easier. It just looks like rattle can to me. I'm sure Mark can tell us more. I've built several planes but this is my first tube frame. Its fun.

[Jflyer]

Awesome. Kind of makes it like a paint by numbers deal.
:-)

Mark Golberg, nice work.

[dedgemon]

Sort of. The problem is that since all of the tubes are cut, that you have to assemble them to fit. Basically you're building a jig to fit the tubing. Now that I'm starting to add uprights and diagonals I'm thinking a lot more about fit and tolerance buildup. Todays pics.

[dedgemon]

Got to work n the fuse today. The diagonals and uprights are going well, just a little slower than the floor and ceiling. Almost ready to make airplane noises in.

[dedgemon]

[dedgemon]

working on the forward left side of the fuse today. I was expecting this to be hard to set up since ther are several complex clusters in this area. In actuallity it went together pretty well. Once I set the uprights on both sides to the correct vertical dimension (there is a slip joint that lets you adjust this) and got them tacked down the other tubes went in pretty well. Had to adjust a couple a smig but nothing dramatic. I really expected the tolerance build up to rear its ugly head in this area but fortunately it did not.