After a bit of dressing up the previous layup, we flipped the canard today. Things are looking good.
There is one fly in the ointment, how to strengthen the canard? There are several issues I am addressing, but the bottom line is the canard isn't quite strong enough for the landing loads I seem to put on it. I'm not going to hash it all out here, but I will show you what I came up with.
Here, I have lots of lumber bondoed to the canard. This will hold it in place.
We have broken it loose from the templates and set it on the floor. If you click on the photo, you can see all the foam and micro that dripped out.
After a couple of hours of sanding, it is starting to look pretty good. Maybe I can get the lay-up done next weekend.
I have been trying to decide what to do about the wheel pants.
Several years ago I re-vamped them, starting with a simple core then building them up for the desired aerodynamic shape I was looking for. I am leaning toward doing the same thing. I imagine I would cut off everything but the core, stick them on the new canard, just like last time, then build it all up again. This would save me from having to do all the fitting associated with the wheel and brake installation.
1 comment:
Interesting posts. I worked at Boeing for a lot of years, nothing directly related to airplanes but I did see the films of the wings breaking in the test stands on most of the planes after the 757. They all failed in compression of the top chord, that is the top skin buckled just like in your photos.The skin separated from the stringers with a bang.
The top skin is thicker and there are more stringers on the upper wing box because of the buckling failure mode. So the fix should be more upper plys on the spar and a thicker upper skin.
The only plane that they didn't test to failure was the 787 because, being more flexible, they ran out of room in the test stand. The wings normally fail a few percent over 1.5 times Ultimate.
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