Mmmmm, Ribs

I stole some time from my take-home final and worked on Goat over the last week (?). I can't really remember when I did this work, but I have a few pictures.

To the left is how I'm making ribs now. I cut a several foot long piece of 1"x1" pink foam, made a slit for the carbon cap, and glued each long cap in at once. The picture to the left shows the first of two caps getting bonded in the slot, this time with West Systems resin. The board and PC power supply are simply to keep the part straight as it cures. To the right is one of the completed ribs, installed near the tip of the horizontal stabilizer. I bonded the unfinished rib to the leading and trailing edges and added a wrap (with 3M Super 77) of fiberglass cloth. I have yet to put resin on this cloth (like I showed for the rudder ribs) instead waiting to have all eight horizontal stab ribs ready for that stage at once. Now I simply need to make six more foam ribs...

I had some leftover curing epoxy from another project, so I started gluing in the tail anti-crush foam blocks. These go between the 1/4" x 0.035" truss tubes on the vertical tail. This is the aft-most lower corner block bonded in place.

These foam pieces see virtually no loading that I can think of. Maybe they see some shearing from torsional twisting of the whole vertical tail ... but the fabric will probably take most of that load. I think they're mostly to keep the covering from dimpling the thin truss pieces in. So, I didn't work too hard on getting a super-uber-bond.

I did remember to take a finished shot of the lower horizontal stabilizer control rod guide bushing support structure. I mentioned I believe last post I added an additional wrap from what I had a picture of.

You can see the PVC bushing (white) held firmly between the two 1/4" x 0.035" truss members and with two layers of 1" fiberglass tape wrapped around the trailing edge tube, all of this supported by a foam stand-off. I'm quite a happy camper with this arrangement.