Squirrel
The Squirrel is a 1992 design of mine that was feature in the OZ airbourne mag.
I am going to construct it from carbon with a few mods to bring it up to date.
I will feature everything from foam cutting to the layup to finish.
Well its now underway, lets look a foam cutting. The templates have been printed, I use tracfoil and another program from Steve in Aus to plot the sections. The paper templates are attached to sheet alloy with super 77 and the alloy is cut and filed. The templates are made with leads (tips) on the LE.
The cores are cut right to the trailing edge for carbon layup, later the ailerons will be cut out.
First of all lets look a foam cutter. Mine is very simple, the power supply is 2 off 12v batteries backed up by a 4amp/hr charger. It is setup with one charger lead to one battery and one to the other battery, then the batteries are hooked together with a wire from the + on one to the - on the other, and the same for the other terminal. The leads to the bow are taken off the + on one battery and the - on the other battery, not the terminals with the charge conected.
My bow is made from timber as shown below. The sides pivot and it has a two strings across the top to tension the wire. The hot wire is 0.030" stainless. The length of wire is about 900mm, this seems to work best.
Blocking out!
Pictured right is a 50mm foam block that is being blocked of wings,to do this sit the wire on the location required and let the bow hang underneath, switch on the bow and let gravity to the work.
Left is the blocking out of wings completed.
Once the panels are blocked, you have to mark the centre and install the cutting templates. I hold the templates on with double sided tape and pins to ensure that they don't move. (pins shown below). The pins are pop rivets with the rivets reversed, also grind the pins to a sharp point.

Then make up the wing skins and super 77 them on the cores and weight down.
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