All Bearhawk plans are drawn by hand, so no "official" CAD drawings of any sort. Some ten years ago or so, someone drew a wing cross section in CAD, as I recall. But it was just a nice illustration. No other components.
What's on your mind?
Christopher Owens
Bearhawk 4-Place Scratch Built, Plans 991
Bearhawk Patrol Scratch Built, Plans P313
Germantown, Wisconsin, USA
All Bearhawk plans are drawn by hand, so no "official" CAD drawings of any sort. Some ten years ago or so, someone drew a wing cross section in CAD, as I recall. But it was just a nice illustration. No other components.
What's on your mind?
I was just hoping to give my project a shot in the arm, but if none exists, then oh well it was worth a shot
What would you have expected to gain if you found them? Just curious what your expectations were versus working from Bob's drawings. As a guy who has spent spent some time with CAD, I can say that there's nothing I haven't been able to sort out from the plans. But I do think it would be nice to see things in 3-D occasionally. Thankfully there are a lot of build photos out and about that have answered any questions I had.
Christopher Owens
Bearhawk 4-Place Scratch Built, Plans 991
Bearhawk Patrol Scratch Built, Plans P313
Germantown, Wisconsin, USA
I have taken the time to redo several drawings in CAD, Both SolidWorks and AutoCAD. I find it very helpful in figuring out how I am going to make a particular part.
As an example, I feel I saved days laying out the wind spar by simply making a drilling fixture ( 2 actually) for the rivet holes. I have a CNC mill and I was able to make a 18 inch drill template for the longitudinal rivet holes plus a shorter one for the vertical holes.. It turns out that Bob has all the hardware lined up with rivet holes on the spar. But the spacing for the holes he gave was rounded to 2 decimals. On my mill, I did the holes to 4 decimal accuracy. The difference that made amounted to several inches over the length of the spar instead of using the number Bob put on the drawing. Instead doing a layout, I just counted rivet holes.
For a lot of brackets and tabs, I print the CAD drawing full sized and glue the paper templates onto the sheet metal. Again saves time.
CAD can definitely help you visualize different conditions. It's been handy for me, but would be even more so if I had more 3D experience.
Regarding the rivet spacing, mine was a little bit lower tech. The critical distances are between the spacer bars (rib spacing). Get those right, and use a rivet fan between them to get the equal spacing needed. CAD would be perfect if a CNC drill was being used to drill the holes, though. I sure appreciate those with mad CAD skills!
Last thing, Benny. If you'd like to do some doodling in CAD as S Lathrop describes, and you're an EAA member, you're entitled to a free license of SolidWorks as a member benefit. Download it and have fun!
Christopher Owens
Bearhawk 4-Place Scratch Built, Plans 991
Bearhawk Patrol Scratch Built, Plans P313
Germantown, Wisconsin, USA
I'm really surprised no one has converted the drawing to be able to cut out and drill on a CNC.. I have access to a full scale pro CNC router and would go that route on a scratch build IF there were CNC plans... it could speed up everything and close the gap on the time difference between scratch build and kit (not QB of course) I knew I should of stayed in that Computer drafting class in college - not to mention the other 8 majors i took..lol -- yeah for my first post in here
Well, Leftheart, it's never too late to learn... The EAA website has links to some great tutorials. If I could get Solidworks to run on a Mac, I'd be all over it...
(And, yeah - I know I can run it in a Windows virtual machine – even have one of them – but there's a reason I quit using Windows – including the VM... I spend a lot less time fixing OS issues these days!)
Jim Parker
Farmersville, TX (NE of Dallas)
RANS S-6ES (E-LSA) with Rotax 912ULS (100 HP)
Dassault Systems makes an AutoCAD like program called Draftsight that is free for personal use. There are betas for mac & linux. https://www.3ds.com/products-service...free-download/ I use it at home. I've used it to model the 4 place airframe in 3D (wireframe type model). It really helped to picture the interaction between the various parts. When I fix the errors (some dimensions were not correct) I'll use it to estimate quantities.
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