Nose section coming together

I swear I haven't quit! I've just been super busy taking care of other things like school.

Last night I had several hours to work on the nose section some more. I finally put in the forward seat truss, the seat cross-truss, and one of the three forward trusses near the rudder pedal support.

At this point, I can pretty well add some temporary wooden pieces and sit on my seat and play the imagination game!

Major items to do still:
- squish rudder foot support tube and mount
- control stick cross tube
- six more brackets from G4N2 (I have material for four)
- add the doubler to the lower nose tube
- finish all those trusses in the nose...

I'm sure there will be another half month at least completing what you see here and I definitely have started coming up with a few parts I came up short on, so there will be one more small order to finish off the nose. But, by then I should be able to get close to having a seat-back ready to go and can start thinking about what's next.

Thought I'd show a picture of the rear section flipped over. There are two more good trusses that comes to this point and help distribute loads from the pilot sitting there.

The frame isn't quite as rigid yet as I thought it would be, but there are more trusses yet to go in that I'm hoping will really make a difference in stiffness.

Does anyone know where to get plastic end-caps that fit inside a 3/4" OD tube?



Somewhat of an overview of the nose section. You can see that I haven't finished filing the 2nd truss ends yet, but they're mounted and just need that cleanup.

The rudder tube is the cross-piece attached to the main triangle.

The nose section is pretty cool, though I forgot a 1/4-20 nut, so I'm having to temporarily hold that section together with a 10-32 and live with the play during assembly. The bent tube is relatively flexible, so it usually doesn't mind being yoinked on.

This is a closeup of the rear main structure. The big tube is the wing carrythough, so this one is mega important. The rear seat tube is just right of it a couple inches and you can see the method of tube attachment with the bolt going through. I did slightly overtighten this bolt to get two threads out of the nut.

You can start to see how those little u-brackets are used. The cross-brace attaches to the main structural members through two of the bugger brackets. The open one goes to the main wheel supports, not quite yet worked on. I did come on a snafu here thinking all the trusses were spec'd to proper length. Turns out you have to pick one or two to set the location of the attach points, then trim the remaining trusses to fit. This 22" truss had a bit over 3/4" removed to fit nicely.

Moving a step forward, we get to the lower joint. This thing is busy. Two more trusses come in here, one pair from the left and one pair from the right. The washers set the approximate spacing for the tube coming in from the right.

I will say, this was a hard place to pick as a learning curve. Since this area is so busy, I really have spent a bunch of time staring and measuring to see how to fit things here and get the tube end angles right.

Oh I should mention I'm using a hammer to crimp the tube ends together as you see them. Using a pair of heavy pliers was leaving tool-marks, but the hammer flattens smoothly. I'm not sure how I would have done this with a vice.

Moving forward a bit we get to the forward seat tube. It also doubles as a width spacer for the lower frame truss system.

More of those bugger brackets are used to get the correct angle for the lower truss system. This was the first tube I cut to fit in them and I think I trimmed it a 1/4" short. You can see it's a bit squished to get in there. But since this was the first and sets the spacing for everything else, I suppose this is okay because everything else would have been trimmed to match anyway.

Part of the learning process...

Another step forward gets us to the rudder cross tube and the 2nd truss. I set this truss 2nd after the one above so that I could really get the parallel nature of the main triangle and the lower tube correct.

I'm not sure how best to dress the ends of squished tubes. I filed sort of round corners as you can see here, but it still isn't pretty and I'm worried much more corner rounding will result in cracking along the crimp.




Now all the way at the nose, we're at another important and busy junction point. Remember I forgot to get the 1/4-20 nut, so there is an overly-long 10-32 bolt holding the u-brackets onto the nose plates right now. The 10-32 bolt is also a tad long, so I grabbed some other bracket pieces as spacers.

This nose section is otherwise pretty stout. The main triangle pieces are definitely held rigidly by the rectangular plates and the lower tube is farily rigid from the trussing aft below the seat area.

More to come after school project work. Ahh quaternions!