Matt Anderson - Group of (3) Spread Eagle Builders | home
Building the wings and finishing the Spread Eagles...
Project status 11/21/2004
 Fletcher Burns flying the prototype UltraVair Spread Eagle
|
Delta Honcho wing core for reverse engineering
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Subj: Re: Parts building...
Date: 11/30/2004 2:56:37 PM Pacific Standard Time
From: roseauace@wiktel.com
To: SKiblinger@cs.com
Steve,
All the aluminum was ordered yesterday. I should have some of the rolled stock tomorrow by UPS. I was actually went out to the guys place that is going to be making some of our parts on his computerized CNC. He had all the boxes for the spars already programmed into AutoCAD and layed out in the computer, looked really neat how those all get packed into a 4' x 4' sheet of aluminum. We will still have to manually 90 degree break them, but a lot of time saved. I also flattened out one of the compression braces ( the long piece with all the oval holes in them) and brought that out to him today so he could program that piece into AutoCAD. He knows the material is going to be here tomorrow, the ball is kinda in his court when he wants to do them now.
600' of 1 1/4" x .035 tubing and some other stuff was coming by truck and should be here by Friday. I have to work this weekend at the store here so we are still technically not in full wing production yet. I'm trying to get a few of the parts that we need a lot of taken care of, hopefully tomorrow evening or 1 evening this week the CNC guy will call and say lets get those parts done tonight. He is going to make 120 of the front boxes, 120 of the rear and 36 of the compression braces. I think we are going to manually do the rest, since it we don't need as much of the other stuff and it isn't that complicated.
Rivets, what was used was mostly steel in the original, almost all are very rusty. Few aluminum 3/32 in the aileron box and other places. We are going to use SS instead of steel and we will use the same 3/32 aluminum. All pop rivets.
Assembly jigs, I have already purchased the lumber to build 2 - 4' x 16' tables. The lumber is sitting out where the wings are going to be assembled, although I haven't built the tables yet. It will take me about hour to build both of those tables with my air-nailers 1 evening next week. I don't think there going to get used so much like a jig like the fuse or tails? On the honcho wings the compression braces have the angle and holes predrilled from the factory to line up with the spar boxes. Very ingenious design and for the most part idiot proofed it from the factory. Since we are having the spar boxes and braces CNC'd with all those holes pre-drilled, it should be a line up and rivet for us, not so much jigging. I'm sure we will still use the tables a lot and have them blocked and strapped in, just to make sure they stay straight.
From one of your emails I am hoping the 042 is going to work well. I know you said Fletchers Corvair was producing approx. 28 HP at Osh. And that is what you estimate we are making. At least that's what I'm hoping? I would prefer to use the 042, it would be a great, cheap engine if it could be made to work.
Friday, Dec. 10th is technically the next (5th) weekend that we are ramping up production. I think we are going to head up to Duane's Friday night and start shearing and bending aluminum, probably sometime into Saturday. We have another friend/contact with a pretty impressive machine shop that we will head up to Saturday evening or Sunday morning. There we are going do some of the final bending, breaking, lathing and other misc. functions we have to do to make all the parts for the wing. Actual wing assembly will start taking place on Dec. 17th once we have ALL the wing parts fabricated. I'm sure we will have a few odd parts we will have to fab on site, but we will have the shear and break handy so it shouldn't be a problem. I think once we have all the parts made and actually start riveting a wing together, we anticipate about a day to make each wing. So, it could might be after x-mas before all the wings are done, since we won't be working the weekend of x-mas. We just don't know how fast the wings are going to go yet?
At least that's the plan, we'll see.....
Matt
We are still waiting on the turbo, hopefully tomorrow. I guess none of us are completely sold on the turbo yet, even the guy doing it. If we are producing 28 HP now and that will fly it adequately, we might just stop there? Or at least try to tweak a little more HP out of the 042 without the turbo.
----- Original Message -----
From: SKiblinger@cs.com
To: roseauace@wiktel.com
Sent: Tuesday, November 30, 2004 4:32 PM
Subject: Parts building..
Matt:
How is the wing parts building effort proceeding?... Have the full take-off done?... Are there a variety of solid rivets used?... Assembly jig (s)?...
After the initial flying season with the 2A042 engines you will know if they have adequate power... If not the UltraVair can be made cheap if you have a machinist in the team...
Be sure to put an oil temp gauge on the turbo engine...
The J C Whitney (Keyword JCW) manifold pressure / boost gauge I'm using is: 81SB0097Y...
Steve
|
December 3, 2004 - Results at the CNC shop
Mike
Johnson
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Drilled Holes
 |
Subj: CNC
Date: 12/03/2004 2:51:54 PM Pacific Standard Time
From: roseauace@wiktel.com
To: SKiblinger@cs.com
Steve,
My buddy called this afternoon and said, "Lets get the vacuum board done today, that way you can drill all the holes this weekend". So, I left work here this afternoon and spent about 3 hours out there. The vacuum jig is the biggest and most time consuming piece to make. We drilled the holes in 1 corner so we could test run the program and make 1 part, you should be able to see in the pics. I think it turned out pretty good? If you lay them on top of each other they are dead one.
I'm going to drill out all the holes for the jig this weekend at work, probably take about an hour or so. He figures sometime next week in the evening we will do the parts. He anticipates about 2 to 3 hours to do all those parts. 240 spar boxes and 40 compression braces. Approx. 8,500 1/8" (#30) holes will be drilled when these are done. Can you imagine doing that by hand?
All the aluminum came in today except the tubing, that is coming by truck and should be here Monday or Tuesday. We should be able to fab parts all next weekend.
Matt
|
December 9, 2004Spar box and Compression rib production run at B & B Diversified, Roseau, MN. Mike Johnson - CNC programmer ...
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
December 10, 2004
The group of 3 is deburring 8,000 odd holes in the parts produced above... The metal shear / brake work and
low volume wing parts are being fabricated this week end...
(5) Fifth session 2 days on 12/10/2004 - 12/11/2004 completed thru picture WFab09...
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 Wx=Ice Storm |
Subj: weekend build pics
Date: 12/12/2004 5:46:04 PM Pacific Standard Time
From: roseauace@wiktel.com
To: SKiblinger@cs.com
File: MVC-001F.zip (1177695 bytes) DL Time (TCP/IP): < 1 minute
Hi Steve,
I didn't get a ton of pics of the actually shearing and cutting of aluminum you see in the pics. This job this weekend really wasn't all that fun, and took a long time. What you see in the pics for the aluminum parts was done Friday night and all day Saturday by 3 guys. It was a painfully slow process.
We had a little set back on Saturday which pretty much ruined Sunday. We had a SEVERE ice / rain storm on Saturday night and the roads pretty much turned into a skating rink. I'm not kidding when I say I think there was at least 1" of pure ice on the road, if you got out of your truck you could barely stand up. Needless to say no one wanted to drive the 60+ miles to the machine shop on Sunday morning because of the road conditions, I don't blame them. The pic I sent you driving was taken the middle of Sunday afternoon, you can kinda get a feel for the weather and roads. So we really didn't get our full weekend in.
We pretty much wrapped up the aluminum shearing and cutting. What is left to do is bend all those parts now. I know we planned on starting wing assembly next weekend, but I think we may still have another weekend of bending and machining to do? We'll see how the week goes here, but I have a hunch I know what were going to be doing next weekend and it might not be wing assembly.
I did however go out to the new location where the fuse's are and wing assembly / airplane rigging is going to take place and build my wing tables. Took about what I figured, just a little over an hour. I think you can see the larger 4 x 16' tables in the pics. We started playing with that turbo also, since we had some down time. Got the intake manifold all done and most of the exhaust. Might be running it one night this week?
We'll I wish I had more pics and more progress to send you. It doesn't look like much in the pics, but it was a lot of work.
Matt
|
December 17, 2004Wing parts fabrication continued...
(6) Sixth session 1.5 days with 2 builders on 12/18/2004 - 12/19/2004 completed thru picture WFab18...
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Subj: Weekend build
Date: 12/19/2004 6:11:27 PM Pacific Standard Time
From: roseauace@wiktel.com
To: SKiblinger@cs.com
Received from Internet: click here for more information
Hi Steve,
Sent you a few pics from this weekend. It doesn't look like much, and it isn't, but some of these parts are really kicking are ass. I can pretty much see why Delta Technologies went out of business. They made one hell of a wing, but holy parts Bat Man!! Not a ton of money in materials, but very time consuming and hard to make some of these parts, I imagine the tooling for this wing when it was made in the factory must have been quite extensive and expensive.
We were a man and day short this weekend. I think you could honestly take last weekend and this weekend and count them as 1 full weekend, I think that would be a fair assessment? One of our builders went out west on a snowmobile trip so he was gone. I had something come up Friday night, so we were unable to work on it then. We worked Saturday but, Duane one of the other builders, had a x-mas engagement he had to attend Saturday afternoon, so we only got about 4 or 5 hours on Saturday morning. Sunday was a solid day, not the 12 or 14 hour days were used to, but a good day. Christmas is a great time of year, but not very good for airplane building, that's ok though we all need a break once and a while.
This weekend we decided to make the strut attachment brackets that wrap around one of the spar tubes on each spar and wing, 4 per plane, 12 total. On the original Delta Honcho wing this bracket was made out of .080 aluminum, 1 piece. We had a tough time locating .080 and also thought that we may have a small problem bending it to the degree of accuracy that the factory had done. We were also uncertain as to what degree of heat treated aluminum the factory used. We decided to make a design change, that we feel is stronger and probably safer since there are certain aspects of this part that we can't do and are also uncertain of. We decided to use .063 aluminum in 2024 - O, basically untreated aluminum. Very soft stuff in the untreated form and easy to bend. We prebent the bottom of the strut bracket at 2 70 degree angles after determining the amount of material required to go around the 1 1/4 tube. We wrapped the aluminum around first and completed that bend. We then used .032 4130 Chrome Moly sheet and wrapped that around also. After making tooling that involved a bench vice and several other pieces of metal, we clamped everything together and drilled the required holes through the part. After the holes were drilled we cut the excess material off the bottom and cleaned it up. We are still going to heat treat the aluminum to a T3 rating, which should make this part very strong. We are getting the aluminum bracket like the original, but we are also getting the benefit of a secondary bracket made out of steel wrapped around the first. But since we did not know what the part was originally we felt that this was probably a safer design. Kinda a back up so to speak? Neither of us are structural engineers, but we both agreed, that if something failed, it was now going to have to be the spar, not the strut bracket. Needless to say this was a very time consuming process just to make these 12 pieces, but it had to be done.
The other pics are of the CNC'd boxes all bent up, a total of 480 bends.....FUN!!!!
We'll with the Holidays now upon us we will probably not have another weekend end for us to work on it until Jan. 7th, 2005. I think me / we will probably mess around with a few misc. parts between now and then, but I don't know if any major progress will be made. The weekend of Jan. 7th should / will / hopefully be at the shop were wing assembly takes place. We still have to heat treat our strut brackets and finish making our spar doublers, which should be 1 day for 1 guy. Hoping that we can squeak that in between now and then. With that done, we should be able to start assembling wings on Jan. 7th, 2005 (if not sooner). It would be fun to see those start coming together.
If anything happens between now and then, I will send the pics and let you know ASAP.
Hope you have a good Christmas and a Happy New Year!!!!!!!!
Matt
|
