Building a Nieuport 11...

[Frank Giger]

So the turnbuckles arrived and I jumped right into finishing the rigging. Left landing wire in place, and time to figure out how to make the lift tangs for that infamous fifth wire that goes from the front of the fuselage to the interwing strut mount.

Let's gather our supplies - steel for making the tangs, check. Wire? Check. Swag tool (known by other names, all unprintable)? Check. Swages? Uh, wait a second. I've got three in my little bag where I keep them. Start tearing through everything looking for that fourth one; darned things tend to get away. Maybe one is in the shed where I store all the aluminum parts for the aircraft.

The wife actually came into the backyard to bring me some water, and innocently asked "what's that for?" as a large diameter bit of tube that's two feet long rolls out from behind some plywood. She said it was scary to see me just stop, stare at it, and then go pale.

S21 is the label on the part. It goes into the main spar at the compression strut where the interwing struts go for reinforcement. If I've failed to install one of them, the whole wing - ribs, drag/anti-drag wires, compression struts, everything - will have to be taken apart. I had put on the build table each of them in a check list and made a mark as they went in to ensure I didn't forget them.

It's a slow march out to the aircraft, where I look down the spars.

One each in both spars for the left wing. Breathe, I tell myself, as I walk around the aircraft to the right wing, and peek with one eye down each spar.

One each in both spars - all four are in.

That darned Robert Baslee stuck an extra one into the kit materials; normally I sing his praises for putting in extra stuff in the materials kit, but that was just cruel. I called him about another question and mentioned that he was trying to kill me with good gestures, and we chuckled about it.

Anyhow, until I either poll my EAA Chapter members for a swage, find one hidden about, or knuckle down and order some, the wire thing is put on hold. Again.

Might as well cover the "real" rudder, the one I'm actually going to use on the aircraft. Breaking the seal on the bag that holds 32 yards of Ceconite was another building rite of passage. I decided to use the wrap method, since A) that way I can use the full with of the fabric with just one cut to the roll, and B) why not, the shape is amiable to it!

Pics either tomorrow or Monday, but I was very pleased with the first side's efforts. I made the tight ninety degree bend without so much as a pucker, though there is a tiny glue ridge underneath that won't show when the other fabric goes over it along with a tape. I even managed to make the cut in the fabric for the control horn in the right place! I won't say covering is fun, but it certainly is rewarding - instant visible results to one's work.

With the 1915cc VW engine and prop a couple months from delivery, I'm going to put covering as part of the build process, splitting the time in half.

[planecrazzzy]

I don't know if you plan on putting the swirling "Engine Turning" in the Firewall or out side Cowl...

I have some examples ... I tried to explain how I did it...

(It's a PDF hidden at the bottom picture...)
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Gotta Fly...

Another example on my First Plane.
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http://www.wingsforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=4466

[Frank Giger]

Hey, that's sweet - I always wondered how that was done.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the cowl. It's got big spin marks, so polishing it down would be a long process; I like the burnished cowls I've seen, that's for sure.

[Frank Giger]

While I wait for the custom made lift tangs for the infamous fifth wire to dry from their paint, might as well show off the rudder.


Apologies for the blue tint of the pics - the tent tarps make everything blue, and it was too light to make the flash go.


Laying out the rudder on the fabric - it was just right for folding over the rudder in one go, so I only needed to cut the end off.


Wrapping around the angled bottom and keeping the warp of the fabric horizontal and vertical to the top presented less of a challenge than I thought.





Here's that 90 degree turn without a wrinkle or pucker. I would later ruin this with the nightmare of edging tapes, but not too bad.





Some reinforcement where the rudder horn cuts through the fabric. Oddly enough, I cut the slit for the horn on the numbers, which I was sure I'd get wrong. The trick is to allow for the tenting of the fabric over the end of the top of the horn; in other words, TLAR method and don't think about it too much.





I bought some of those covering rivets, which are much flatter on the top, and they worked better than the standard domed rivets. But I still got some tenting over them in the covering tape. I'd be super frustrated, but it seemed that most planes at Gardner had the same effect.





This is the end of a long saga involving the fickle nature of painting tapes.


The sealing of the fabric with primer went really well, smooth as a baby's bottom. I painted the white center first, and when I pulled the tape up it made a really clean line.


Waiting overnight, I taped the sides of the white and painted the red and blue at the same time. Of course they both bled under the tape, particularly the red.


So I got some Frog tape and then re-edged it in white; it seemed to work better with me than the other colors - I think I got the mixture of floteral and windshield fluid more right with it than either the blue or red.





I couldn't resist sticking it on the aircraft to see how it looked.





On to that fifth wire on each wing later this afternoon.

[Dave S]

Read through the whole thread! I am building my plane (Thatcher CX4) in a dirt-floored shed. Us shoestring fellers have it goin on!

[Matt Gonitzke]

Rudder looks great! If you don't want to have to worry about paint bleeding under masking tape, use 3M Fine Line Vinyl tape. Expensive but it works. You get what you pay for with masking tape, as you may be noticing...

[Frank Giger]

*Blush*

Thanks, y'all - it sure is nice to see a part taken to final, that's for sure. Makes me feel like I'm in the home stretch of the build. Loads to do yet, of course.

On to those infamous "fifth wires."


The problem is that when I put in the bolts that hold the interplane struts, I went pretty far down in the mount, where they're actually below the rib line. It's a good place to put them, if one doesn't know there's supposed to be a wire leading from the forward bolt on the wing to a tang where the gear are pinned into the longeron as an additional anti-drag wire on the lower wing.


A few options:


A) Run the wire down from the upper engine mount bolt. Tempting, but the point is that the wire is an anti-drag wire to the lower wing, holding it forward. Having it run up and forward from interplane struts changes the force line to where it's pulling the wing up as much as forward.


B) Put in another bolt higher up on the interplane strut mount and run the wire from there. It won't hurt anything and will just be another thing holding the strut in place.
So I went with option B. I had a couple extra AN4 bolts with one end as an eye and the slightly smaller turnbuckles I bought at B&B fit them like a dream.





For the fuselage end, I just made a lift tang out of some steel stock I made for the lift tangs on the wire, bent them to the right angle after putting holes in them, painted them for rust and dissimilar metal phobia prevention, and mounted them.





I was sort of concerned about pulling those bolts out, as the plane is resting on the gear. But they came out and went back in without a grumble....especially when I had a rubber mallet and a bit of wood to threaten some persuasion with.

Dave, it's both humbling and a point of pride when I visit other builds and see these immaculate workshops and hangars with all sorts of tools and machines without any rust or dirt on them. Humbling in that I think they can work faster than I can with all the room and organization space; a point of pride in that I'm managing with what I got.

[Blue Chips]

That painted tail installed really begins to bring it all together, and looks great.

[Frank Giger]

I've got to adjust the elevator control rod one more time, bringing the pivot point back by about six inches and lowering the rear of the seat by about three inches - it's canted forward a little and in flying position is uncomfortable - and then I can remove the horizontal stab and elevator for covering.

So there really is a point to climbing in the aircraft and making engine noises. Well, climbing in it, anyway.

The lower wings need leading edges and the left one the pitot & static probes mounted, as well as some bracing of the inner ribs to keep them from bending inwards during covering, and the upper wings need a lot of refinement.

At the rear of the ribs at the ailerons I made some angles out of sheet aluminum, and did a poor job of it. They're not only ugly, they're too flimsy to hold up to the tension of the fabric (something I learned on the rudder), especially if I ratchet up the heat on them.* So I'll take a cue from what I saw in Kansas and get some aluminum angle stock and replace the nightmare I made. I'm also going to extend the end bows on the upper wings as well as the ailerons. The transition from main spar to end bow is far too abrupt; not only is it ugly, it's actually blocking the ends of the aileron.

The options are to either cut back the spars to give them a taper to the end bow or to extend the end bows by about four or five inches and make a transition funnel like piece. Making any cut in the main spars, even at the end, seems like a bad idea to me, and I'm going to avoid it.

* The rudder fabric was taken up to 325 degrees instead of the full 350, as it's one big loop of quarter inch tubing - there's a lot of ultralight type covering practices used on this bird.

[Chick]

I believe airplane noises are an integral and important part of any build!