Building a Nieuport 11...

[planecrazzzy]

wow, those wheels look great frank.

ditto !

[jdanneel]

good idea to cover the wheels with fabric,
now I know where to save another "millipound" on the W&B

a bit late, but cutting the hole for the valve on the inside ....

summer is in the air

johan

[Frank Giger]

It's a fig leaf to historical accuracy. That's where they put the holes in 1915.

Thanks for the kind words. Big thunderstorms today, and it's all my fault. I have finally figured out how to do the transition piece from the top of the fuselage to the side sheeting and am really eager to get on with it.

Never fails...

[Frank Giger]

No pictures, as my main PC is down for maintenance, but work on the cockpit combing and the transition piece at the side sheeting to fuselage continues. I cut up a vinyl long coat for the material and it's worked out pretty well so far!

[Frank Giger]

Well, let's put up some pics to prove I ain't just telling stories about doing work on the plane.

First up is the cowling stuff. The wife surrendered a long vinyl coat for the cause, and I gleefully cut it up. The part that formed the front of the coat had a lovely seam on it that seemed to me to be perfect for the transition between side sheeting and top of the fuselage.

I measured it up to put a peg every two inches (four inches between them on either top or bottom:



I spent waaayyy too much time trying to figure out how to make a peg with a lip at the top to hold a leather shoe lace. Turns out a little bit of copper tubing, a small pipe cutter, and some time in front of the TV was just what was needed. A small washer on a long 1/8" rivet over them worked well.

The pipe cutter idea is a gift from the EAA. I had brought my test sheet with a bunch of riveted stuff up there and the copper tube part was tilted owing to my poor work with a dremel cut off tool...one of the guys said I should have just used a small pipe cutter. Naturally I laughed as I actually have one and it never dawned on me to actually use it!



The strip is three inches across - one inch above the longeron and two below. I didn't want any holes in my longerons or to rivet the side sheeting to the fuselage!

The problem was the forward most gusset and the one in the rear. I couldn't put the rivet through them, obviously, so I just drilled through the side sheeting, made a mark, and then enlarged the 1/8" hole to where the rivet fits through it. Clearly I was off on my first guesses on placement and had to move the holes to keep from hitting the tubes underneath.



The gusset in the rear had a more difficult fit, as it's two tubes that meet together in an inverted vee shape. To find the right placement I took a couple of small rare earth magnets, one on the inside and one on the outside of the sheeting. Worked really well, as you can see.



All laced up! I'll go back and paint the pegs.



The cowling around the fuselage was simple - coat material over pipe insulation and a boot lace through holes. The back of the cockpit is actually the collar to the coat.



I'll adjust the boot laces to get rid of some of the sausage effect. But it's gooder enough for me.

[Frank Giger]

I've been fussing with the notion of the rudder pedal stops for a long time, and none of my solutions I drew out were worth a flip. Spoke to Robert Baslee about it and he steered me the right direction.

He said to run a bolt of "all thread" back from the firewall to the pedals. Simple enough.

Okay, not so simple. The firewall is just a sheet of aluminum and it moves some when pressure is put on it. Either I could adjust the length of the pedal throw based on the warping of the firewall or find a way to stop it.

The former is wrought with disaster - repeatedly bending a sheet of metal with a rod stuck through it seems like something that is the start of an accident chain in a report. So it's on with the latter!

First is a reinforcing plate of thin steel, painted thickly to keep different metals apart.

It helped a great deal on the warping of the firewall issue and I'd of put it there even if the firewall was rock solid, but there was still some play.



I wracked my brain over how to stabilize the bolt, drawing up complex shapes of aluminum and other crazy stuff when it struck me that all I needed was a nice curved bit of metal with some bends in it to make it beefy.

Shelf supports. They're strong, light, and cost about a buck fifty each in the aircraft section of Lowe's.



It worked.

I also put two long bolts on the end. This makes the length of the stop adjustable. It's much easier to adjust the length of the stop than the rudder cable itself, and the differences between throws if one is different from the other is so small one would never notice it with one's feet.

The wife was coming out of the door as I was coming back into the house to tell her what a smart fellow she married, gone to check the mail. Ha! Gotcha!

She reluctantly squeezed into the tight space behind the tail and I explain that I need to know how far from the up-and-down thingie the swishy tail thingie is when it's from one side to the other. I threw her a ruler to help out, and climbed into cockpit.

Full left rudder, bring the elevator up.

"Now go the other way," she says.

Full right rudder. *whack*

"Ow, you should tell me if you're going to do that. I meant the other thing."

So for fifteen minutes we totally miscommunicate as she measures the distance from the rudder to the elevator, I hop out to make minor adjustments, hop back in, whack her with either the rudder or the elevator, and wind up with about 3/4 an inch on each side clearance. It's a lot of rudder even with that large safety zone of space between the two - without a vertical stab it should be pretty interesting when she gets in the air!

Sherry also confirmed I had measured the cable lengths to the tail wheel correctly - when the rudder is straight, so is the wheel. I had used a brick on each of the pedals to make the rudder center, centered the wheel, and swagged the cables together - not very scientific, but it worked out!

[Frank Giger]

I tend to agonize over little things in projects; it's the finishing touches that make me nuts more than the big things. I once did a free decent down a two hundred foot cliff only to trip over a rock stepping away from it at the bottom to land on my ass, after all.

So it is with putting the markings on my tail. The "Big N" in particular had me vexed.

Now the experten go to print shops, use hole punching wheels along the edges, puts that on the plane, makes little marks on the plane with the hole, and make art with perfect edges.

I went another way.

I looked through various photographs I'd taken at Gardner and Liberty Landing and found that I had taken a pretty decent photo of Dick Lemon's N11 from the side.

Well, decent in that it was flat on to the tail, which is what I needed.

I slapped into MicroSoft PowerPoint, scaled it up to fill most of the page, printed it, and then cut out the N with an exacto knife.

This was laid onto the tail and the hole traced with a pencil. The pencil lines were then used as a guide for painter's tape.




Out to the paint shed, which means I leaned it up against the fence in the back yard after taping paper all around the rest of it to cover the tail.

I shot it first with some white to fill the inevitable little gaps in the paint, giving me a clean edge with the black.



Pulling the tape off with it still wet, naturally I had to let the tape curl, touch the right side of the letter, and pull that paint off.




The bottom left of the letter doesn't match the right side of the curve.

A little work with a sharpie pen in freehand and the white spots are removed and the curve at the bottom of the letter is symmetrical.



Whew.

Note the picture next to the rudder. It's not the example I used. I carried the wrong picture out with me for reference into the back yard, but figured there was no use in going back for the other one - what I made is what I made.

[Hal Bryan]

I don't tell you this nearly enough, Frank, but thank you for continuing to post the updates on your Nieuport. It's one of my very favorite parts of our forums, and is always inspiring. Keep up the great work! I can't wait to see it here in Oshkosh one of these days - it's going to be quite the celebrity airplane!

[Frank Giger]

* Blush *

Thanks for your kind words. I think if I ever flew it to Oshkosh they'd make a new parking section called "Comedy Relief" and hold forums on it with titles like "Poor Craftsmanship - Why?" and "Gooder Enough Usually Isn't."

Leaving off the bottom lettering for the tail for a minute, I decided to tackle two other tasks that need done - the cable exits from the fuselage and the aileron push rod exits.

I decided just to put down some leather(ish) patches where the cables go back to the rudder and the tail wheel. It's a simple thing that doesn't require a lot of muss or fuss.

I had measured what was needed to cover my slits in the fabric and let the cable through and began to muck about marking circles with varying degrees of success, as I broke the needle end of the small plastic compass.

I've been breaking a lot of things lately, it would seem.

I also kicked over my plastic "smokeless" ashtray cup in the garage (I never, ever smoke in the house) and broke it. So I've been borrowing one of the wife's Coke bottles for that duty, throwing them out when they fill with butts.

Frustrated, I decided to grab some coffee and enjoy a cigarette while I contemplate the right combination of profanity that will make this simple task go smoothly. And set the Coke bottle down on what was the sleeve of the wive's long coat.



Um, the bottom of the bottle was just the right size! Eureka! I'll put "not worth a hair in the pimple on a frog's posterior" into reserve for something else.



Pretty scary how well that went.



Now, then, when I put the sheeting on the top of the fuselage forward of the cockpit I made some overly generous and somewhat asymmetrical holes for the aileron push rods to go through. They work great but are ugly as sin.

One may notice some little Sharpie marks around that hole; they're marking about where the rods move. The rods themselves have a little movement as they go up and down, owing to some give to the rod end mounts and not being perfectly over each other (about an eighth an inch). This isn't a problem, of course - just have to give them some play room.



What I want is a nice plate to cover that ugly hole, something done precisely and with only the best materials, preferably designed and checked in 3D in a CAD program.

I opted for some folded up paper instead, though, along with some pencil marks.



I sourced some scrap sheeting and an aileron control rod gusset hole bushing* to complete the work.



* Sold under the odd brand name of "toilet tank gasket."

[planecrazzzy]

Wait.... What ???

The Firewall is ALUMINUM ????

That's no Firewall....

I thought they had to be Galvy or Stainless Steel...

Aluminum MELTS...

Does Aluminum pass for a Firewall...

I know it'll fail with a Fire...
.
Gotta Fly...

PS Mine is Stainless Steel.... Galvy produces Toxic fumes when heated with fire...
.