Dec 01, 2019     Progress - (2.5 hours)       Category: Wings

Rebuilt the rib that I'd cut up yesterday. Touched up some of the existing glue joints.
Did some shaping to the wingtip bow with the hand plane. There's something extremely satisfying about using a nice hand plane to make wood shavings. Next step will be to sand the tip down.

I also spent some time thinking about the overall layout of the wing and the best way to skin it. The wings will likely be sheeted entirely in 3/32" aircraft grade ply with the grain running parallel to the spar. The approximate outside dimension of each wing is 13' with a 6' root rib and a 4' tip rib. I'll have to see if there are different sizes of plywood available beyond the standard 4' x 8'. Standard 4' x 8' sheets will require quite a bit of trimming and waste if I want to layer the scarf joints onto structure underneath. That would be ideal. The last plane that I'd built was a DR-107. One of the simple, but brilliant things that Dan Rihn considered when he designed the DR-107 was the use of the plywood on its wings. A single sheet of 4' x 8' ply was used to cover each surface of each wing. That is, four sheets of ply for all the wing surface. The wing on the DR-107 has a root chord close to 6' and the wing tapers towards the tip. What was cut off at the tip due to the taper was then scarfed onto the root section to provide the width for the full chord. Only about a 1/4" was removed from the length of the plywood and it all fit on the wing. Of course, the DR-107 is a single seat plane and is quite a bit smaller, but I love those sorts of details in designs. Well done Dan!

For the Dalotel, my initial calculations suggest 11 sheets of 4 x 8 ply for this project, and approx 76 square feet of it becomes wasted. But that is if I sheet the entire wing. The drawings suggest that the area between the ailerons and main spar were left open, or unsheeted. I found some of Ray's notes that he made when he first acquired this project about 10 years ago. It also sounds like the wing was originally skinned with different types of ply in 4' x 4' sections. This resulted in a lot of joints and they used a lot of filler to try to smooth the wing. I think we can do better than that for the rebuild.