Carlson Skunk Works

It is seven months until Christmas! Do you have your shopping done? I don’t. However, progress has been made on Sawdust and I am getting excited.

The days have been cool and rainy, so I have been taking the glue into the house at night so it will be at room temperature when I am ready to glue. This has worked quited nicely and now both sides have been completed. The current project is getting the pieces and the jig for the windshield frame ready for our my brother in law to weld.

So, on to the pictures and commentary:

Here I am sitting in the cockpit of Sawdust making airplane noises. This is the left side of the fuselage. The right side is complete now, too. Both of the sides are now haning on the south wall of the garage.

Here is another view of the left side with the pilot installed. At this point things are still pretty much virtual, but progress is being made. The exciting part about the sides is that they are identical when hung side by side. Except for the left/right differences, that is.

There are a couple of things that still need to be done on the sides before the fuselage can be assembled. The side window openings need to be cut, the leading edge of the airfoil shape needs to be trimmed, and the edges need to be sanded. I intentionally waited until now to cut the window openings because I wanted to be sure that they were cut exactly the same. I will clamp the sides together and cut both openings at the same time. The leading edge mainly needs to be sanded to shape, so I will do both sides at the same time by clamping them together and marking the outline that I will need to follow.

The other thing on the sides is that I need to drill the hole for the top pipe of the windshield frame to go through on each side.

The windshield frame is the next component to build. This assembly is made from 4130 steele and connects the leading wing spars to the engine mount. I built a jig to keep the parts positioned while they are tack welded. Most of the parts are made from steele tubing, but there are a few that are made from sheet steele.

The sheet steele parts needed to have some holes drilled in them. The larger holes are 1 3/8″ diameter and the smaller ones are 13/64″ (#11). I started by making tagboard templates of the parts, then I taped them to the steele and center punched the hole locations and traced around the template so I will know where to cut the steele. Then I drilled pilot holes at each hole location, then I drilled all the #11 holes. I purchased a bimetal hole saw to “drill” the large holes. Before drilling the large holes I fastened the steele sheet to a 2×6 with a few screws.