Carlson Skunk Works

May 22nd, 2013

AMF 14H MARANDA SN:1026 Making Sawdust May 22, 2013

Posted by Roger in AMF 14H Maranda SN1026, news

Well, it has been a couple of weeks so I thought I would show a little bit of progress.

The big news is that a hanger has opened up out at the local airport, so Sawdust will be moving to a new home about the first of June. It would be really nice to get a bunch of the little things finished up before the move. To that end the elevator and horizontal stabilizer have been connected via the hinges and things lined up very nicely.

I wanted to be sure that everything will clear properly, so I took the stabilizer/elevator assembly out to the garage and set it on the fuselage. Then I put the vertical fin in place to see how it looks.

Not too bad! However, I will need to do some work to provide a secure mounting both front and back. I need to move the horizontal assembly just a bit farther forward than what I had expected. This will require a bit of engineering. I think I will follow the idea of what Randy has done with his stabilizer mount shown on his web page: http://www.mywoodenairplane.com/Fuselage/20110424.aspx

Everything fit other than the final mounting points and it looks like the clearances are good, too.

Marsha came out to the garage to let me know that supper was ready and was reasonably impressed with things and insisted that I take a few more pictures of how it all looks. So, here are a few additional pictures.

As you can see things are getting pretty tight in the garage and I can’t leave anything assembled overnight. After each work session I have to take everything apart again so the car can come back inside. I am REALLY looking forward to moving things to the airport!

May 6th, 2013

AMF 14H MARANDA SN:1026 Making Sawdust May 6, 2013

Posted by Roger in AMF 14H Maranda SN1026, news

Well, I have continued to make progress on Sawdust. Tuesday evening I took the elevator out to the garage and proceeded to shape the trailing edge and sand things. Now I need to order more plywood and glue and I should be able to really complete the elevator. In the mean time I need to focus on making and installing the trim tab, the hinges and the metal parts like the elevator and trim tab horns.

Yesterday I took a bit of a diversion and worked on the link between the stick and the elevator bell-crank. Chris calls for a couple of “bearings” to be installed at each end of this link. The bearings have a threaded end, i.e. they are a swivel on the end of a bolt, sort of. There is a length of 4130 steel tube between the ends. The bolt ends of the bearings are 1/4 x 28 threaded rod. Therefore, the steel tube needs to have a threaded hole that will accept these bearing ends.

What the plans call for is an tube with plugs at each end. The plugs have been drilled and threaded and are secured to the tube by rivets. Well, I sort of followed this idea, but I used four inch long chunks of steel rod for the plugs and drilled and threaded my own holes. The plugs will be welded into the tube, but will have to wait with this until I get the stick end and the bell-crank finished to accept the bearings.

Here you can see the tube and the two plugs. The plug on the right shows the threaded hole and the one on the left has one of the bearings installed.

The plugs are four inch lengths of 5/8″ steel rod. This rod just fits inside of the tube, so it should be fairly easy to weld things up.

I will leave about an inch of plug sticking out of the end of the tube. The bearing has about an inch of threads on it, so the threads will remain outside of the tube. I will probably cut fish-mouths into the end of the tube and drill holes to accommodate securely welding things together. This is probably overkill, but I don’t want it to fall apart on me in the air.