HP-24 Project

More pictures of the Douglas Flat Akaflieg work party:

Another detail shot off the dihedral alignment operation. Here you can see the two root incidence templates I'm using to make sure the two wing plugs are at the same angle.

A detail shot of the half-finished fin spar plug. What you see is a fiberglass layup done on tooling wax laid into the fuselage mold (to simulate the skin thickness), and the wedges of red PVC foam, and then the fiberboard plug armature. What's left to do is to do the rollover/mate oepration on the fuselage molds, and then bond the opposite layup to the armature with another course of foam wedges.

This one shows the mated fuselage molds with the two gear well box plugs held in place by the alignment fixture. The fixture is clamped to a steel tube suspended between the alignment holes for the forward lift carrythough tube.

Here I've finished gluing the gear well box plugs to the mold surfaces usng PVC foam chocks and hot-melt glue. That's daughter Raen in the background.

Here I study the fin spar plug. The right-side skin is now in place.

I'm creating a fillet between the gear well box and its flange. Around the perimeter of the box you can see the yellow tooling wax we used to simulate the thickness of the fuselage skin and also the bonding flange of the finished gear well box. The dark area on the top platform of the box is a temporary closeout for the access hole. This hole allowed access to the inside of the box so I could glue it to the mold. In the finished parts, it allows access to parts of the landing gear retraction system. The bluish tint is TR104 release wax, with which the plug and tooling wax are liberally treated.

The gear box plug positioned, flanged, filleted, waxed, and ready to mold.

Here I apply the TC-1610 epoxy tooling coat to the surface of the plug.

And here's we've applied a zillion or so ply of fiberglass scraps to make the mold.

This is a turtledeck part that Brad made for his HP-24...

And here it is under vacuum. Properly done, vacuum bagged composites really suck.

The canopy frame that Brad made for his ship, with chunks of peel ply tape in place.

Doug holds up Brad's turtledeck, demolded and looking pretty!

Doug holds up the as-removed gear well plug and mold. You can see the PVC foam chocks I used to glue the plug to the mold surface, and other interior features of the plug. Note the T-nuts inserted into the interior stiffeners; these were for the bolts that attached the plug to the alignment fixture.

The two gear well box molds. Ugly, and requiring some cleanup and rework, but they'll make usable parts.

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