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Home < > Slopers < > Manawatu Slope Soarers < > Build Room < > Squirrel

Squirrel

Squirrel pair

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.

cutting-trmplatesThe 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-foam 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. 

blocked-wing-panels

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.

 

holding-pins

 

Templates installed and the hot wire is located on the TE point ready to go. When installing the templates you can rotate the tip template to cut in wash out. The cut is carried out by elevating the foam block so that the bow lies on the bench and the wire is sitting up on the templates. Move the battery wires in close to the wing, this allows you to press and pull the wire through (the wire outside the battery wires stays cold) Also position the foam with the exit edge parallel to the bench this helps with the exit. Now switch the wire on and looking from above enter the foam parallel and smoothly press/pull the wire through. Ensure that you enter and exit at the same time. Once you have cut the top surface, flip the foam over and cut the bottom surface, Then you can cut the next wing panel Be careful to set the templates in the middle of the foam and the correct way round.
ready-to-cut-1ready-to-cut
Cores are now cut and ready to be joined and skined.
cut-cores
finished-cores
If you have setup the cores in the middle of the blocks you can sand an angle on the cetre root section for the diahedral, then setup up the cores and glue the foam cores (inners/outers) together.

bottom-of-cores-with-diahea

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

 

glued-and-weighted
More to follow as it happens.

 

Last Updated on Monday, 19 March 2007 04:04  
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