AMF-14H Maranda SN:1026 Construction Log October 23, 2009
It has gotten to be a long time since my last post! Fortunately, there has been a fair amount of progress made on the airplane as well.
At this point the spars are basically done. I haven’t gotten any metal for the various fittings, so I have been doing as much as I can without the fittings. Therefore, I still need to finish the root end of the front spars and they all need a final sanding.
So to get everyone up to date, here are the rest of the pictures that I have taken of building the spars. Here is a picture of how I clamped the plywood after it was glued up. I figured that it would save time to glue up both of the rear spar webs at the same time.
Now it is on to the tail feathers!
This picture shows the fin spar in the foreground and the rudder spar toward the back. The fin ribs are laying across the two spars, ready to be glued to the fin spar. The top three ribs needed to be glued at right angles to the spar.
Here is a picture of some of the parts for the rudder ribs. They are not glued up in this picture, but they have now been glued in the first step toward making the rudder ribs.
I got so excited about actually assembling the fin that I forgot to take any pictures until I got this far.
At this point my wife said that the fact that we are really building an airplane sunk in. The parts are now starting to look like airplane parts to her.
The length of the fin spar is not quite 60 inches. This is about the position that the fin will be in when the plane is actually flying. Just imagine it with it’s fabric covering, the rudder trailing it and the rest of the plane ahead of it.
Last week I was in San Francisco at Oracle OpenWorld. It was a good time and I learned a lot, but nothing got done on the plane while I was gone.
Today I was able to get back to my lunch routine of doing at least a little bit on it. I don’t have any pictures yet, but I scared and glued up the plywood for the skins and gussets for the fin. I am hoping to be done with the fin next week and ready to move on to the rudder.
