A new order for the nose!

Yay, I got an order in today for nose parts! It's a collection of a lot of AN3 aircraft hardware, a handful of rivets, a 1/4" drill bit, and a couple AN42B eyebolts. Aluminum wise, there are a two pieces of u-channel, a few 5-foot pieces, and a piece of 2"x1/8"x24" flat stock. It's pretty neat to have a small army of bolts waiting for homes to go. The progress thus far has used bolts fairly sparingly for the amount of hours I have spent, so I think it's a bit of shock seeing the bag of 22 AN3-12 bolts. This order (when you include the 60' of tubing showing up from California on the 10th) really should keep my evenings fun through Christmas Break.

I really think it would be fun to figure out how many pieces are actually in the nose section as I build it. When you include the sleeves that go inside some tubes, all the washers, the castle nuts and their cotter pins... I'm sure it adds up quickly!



I couldn't resist last night not starting a few parts from the new material. I changed out my hacksaw blade to a new one that I bought on the first order and it cut SO much faster! These three parts I knocked out in about 20min each. I haven't taken two of them to the drill press on campus yet.

The two u-channel pieces are for the nose tube and the lower pod keel. The rectangular piece is the most forward piece on the plane, being sandwiched by the two u-channel pieces and itself sandwiching the two forward tubes in the nose pod triangle. This rectangular piece will also be the part that transmits the loads from the aero-tow attachment to the rest of the airplane ... a bit of an important part!

I also drilled 8 holes and riveted the horizontal stab rounded tips into the horizontal stab trailing edge as piece View C on G4T3.

On another note, a friend of mine who knows who he is has been thinking about building an ultralight too. You should definitely start! So far, it hasn't been all that hard and it is definitely rewarding!