John wadman
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- May 27, 2019
- Messages
- 206
Well, this is my third wood and fabric aircraft. . . kind of. My first was a Light Miniature Aircraft LM something or other. . . it was a two seat Taylorcraft replica which I thought was 87% scale but when I wikipedia it I think it claims it was a 75% replica. Whatever. It was cool, had a Revmaster 65 hp 4 stroke and weighed in at just under 500 lbs. I started building a new plane. . . something inexpensive that will get me back into the air and having fun once again. Being that I am a woodworker by trade and have all of the shop equipment, I stuck with wood and fabric. I chose the Ragwing RW6 sport parasol. I'm a 6 foot 160 lb pilot with long legs so I chose the stretch version and added a wing bay to each wing and an extra bay to the fuselage length. That plane is sitting in the garage waiting to do firewall forward. She has been assembled and rigged, wings removed, covered and painted and I have the 45 hp 1/2 VW on order from Scott Casler. Had no idea he had such a backlog or I would have ordered the motor a year ago. The plane was pretty much ready for firewall forward when I made the call 5 months ago. Hopefully by the end of next month Scott will have my motor ready.
My oldest son came to me and told be he's been watching STOL competitions and STOL flying Vlogs and sent me a link to a video. He said he wanted to build a STOL so I started researching them. I ran across a really short youtube of a homebuilt RW19 by Roger Mann from 1997 or something like that. That plane got off the ground in literally 30 feet. . . I was immediately interested. I bought the plans for $25. . . yep, that's right, just $25. Here's the deal, Ragwing plans are . . . mmmmmmincomplete. They aren't what I would recommend for the first time builder. But, you can build a plane from them. . . if you practice common sense homebuilt technique and know people who have built aircraft such as LMAs, Fishers, Teams, etc. Building the Ragwinds is doable. Everybody says, "Get the videos from Ragwing too!" I'm ordering the videos.
I'm not much for procrastinating so since we can't finish the parasol for at least a couple of months and can't even really work on it right now, we started on the wing ribs for the Stork. Here's day two of partime work. Started by picking out three bards of sweet looking clear vertical grained Bald Cypress. Check the specs out on Bald Cypress and compare them to Sitka Spruce and Douglas Fir, both proven aircraft woods. We ripped the boards on the table saw into 5/16" x 3/4" strips and then, using a feathering bard to hold the strips tightly to the fence, we ripped those strips into two 5/16" strips for making the stick built ribs. We then cut enough pieces of each stick in the rib to fabricate 30 complete ribs using the chopsaw and a stop block clamped to the fence at the various lengths.
Next I found a scrap piece of 3/4" shop ply to use as a mold for the ribs. I set it up for building two ribs at a a time. (see photo) I recommend you make two patterns in a mirror image of each other so you can have right wing and left wing ribs. (I didn't do this because my scrap piece of ply was too small) Remember, the ribs at each end of ailerons and flaps require a hinge strap so they have to be built right side and left side. By laying out the double rib pattern in a butterfly or mirror image it's easier.
Next I transferred the paper patterns for rib trailing edge filler blocks and gussets, leading edge ribs and slot leading edge ribs onto some scrap 3/4" melamine board and then cut them out with a jig saw and sanded them smooth on the disc sander. These now can be pinned with a pin nailer to pieces of the appropriate thicknesses of aircraft ply. I then used a trim router and a flush trim bit with a ball bearing guide to cut the ply pieces out. By using this method every single piece comes out exactly the same. I'll show some of the parts that I cut in the next installment.
