Carlson Skunk Works

2/1/2007:
The rib jig has been completed! The first set of rib parts other than the gussets have been cut, so if I cut some gussets I could assemble one rib at this point. However, I am going to use this rib as the pattern and duplicate each piece so that I have enough to assemble all of the ribs before doing any of them.

I have attempted to include some pictures with this post. We will see how they turn out.

The first image shows the completed rib jig with the rib parts on it. This is from the front end with the jig laying flat on the table. When I work on the ribs I keep the jig flat on the table. The spruce for the ribs is in the cardboard box on the back of the table. The pieces that I bent are fairly easily seen. The bent ends are to the left center of the picture.

This also shows the tools that I am using at this time. Rib building is a very nice winter indoor sport 😉 The ribs require only hand tools. I am using a manual staple gun, but some of my friends have purchased pneumatic guns for their projects. My biggest problem with the manual staple gun right now is accuracy, but that will probably improve with practice.

At the far end of the table is my pull saw. In the picture it sort of looks like a butcher’s knife. This is an interesting device. The blade has very fine teeth and is very flexible. A single good pull on the saw will cut through a 6 mm x 6 mm piece of spruce. There is very little kerf, so the waste is minimal. The only issue is that it has difficulty distinguishing between wood, paper and skin.

This is a view from across the room. I was trying to get a better shot of the whole jig, but it doesn’t show up very well due to the angle. It does give an idea of my work area.

Here I set the jig up on its edge so that you could see the whole rib better. One of the spruce stips cracked while I was trying to bend it on Friday last week. I replaced it with another piece and boiled that one a bit longer. However, you can see that I managed to salvage that piece by using it for the bottom stringer for this rib. The broken end is to the left.

This picture has the added coffee can. I have been saving coffee cans, from work and home, primarily to store my rib parts. I have a combination of large three pound coffee cans and smaller one pound cans. The term cans is not exactly accurate, since these are the plastic coffee containers rather than the traditional metal cans.

My approach to this is to label each of the pieces needed to build the rib. In this case the labels went from A to P. Then I labeled the coffee cans from A to P. As I cut the pieces I put them in the appropriately labeled coffee can and when it is time to assemble the ribs I will take the pieces from the coffee cans and place them in the jig at the proper location. The coffee can in the picture contains the nose blocks. I have another one that contains the tail blocks.

After I took these pictures I proceeded to start cutting pieces for the ribs. My approach is to cut the longest pieces first and work my way down to the shortest pieces. This keeps the waste to a minimum. So far I have 16 of the “J” pieces which are the longest diagonals in the rib.

Well, I am going to wrap this up for today and see what the page looks like once I publish it.