Back doing something, anything.

How long has it been since I worked on Goat?  Almost a year.  Woof.

Last weekend I cleaned out the garage so I had some space to work.  First thing Saturday morning I reassembled on the driveway and assessed that I stopped work on the Jury Struts long ago.  The front one was about 1/4" short and I had a give-up moment upon that realization.  For this weekend, I prepped the end of three 3/8" tubes and started making the new connections.  Left wing first, on Saturday.  Then I left Goat outside overnight and finished off the right wing on Sunday.  It was beautiful weather for it.

I'm not entirely convinced of the upper rear connection, but it's a thing now.

The one major item is the incredible new stiffness feel the structure has to it.  Yes, more triangles, but also boxing in the torsion mode so the twist is held in rather firmly also.  The only place that seems flexible is how the nose can float a little left to right, but I think that'll go away once the wings load up under lifting loads.  Overall, I'm very impressed with the improved stiffness and it's clearly an airplane now.

I will be building a rig and load testing the primary structure to +3.5 G's.  Just lifting up this structure by the outer strut connection (my wife helped me move it out of the garage for Saturday night), it feels like it'll hold some weight.  I'm thinking 1190 lb of water for the 3.5 G's (which, when added to the wing's own weight, should be close to 4 G's).  But that's coming later.  Maybe this winter if I keep actually working on it.

Oh, current structure weight is 97.6 lb as measured on the bathroom scale.  Flaps, ailerons, ribs, and covering remain.