Just an idea, but it would be cool to have airplane plans as whatever code is needed to run various CNC machines. A metal plane might work well. We could get matched holes, and potentially maximize the number of parts from a sheet of metal. Buy the plans, buy the raw materials, take it all to a properly equipped machine shop, and leave with a kit to assemble.
Your thoughts?
That's largely what Vans does, in quantity. They own some of their own CNC equipment and subcontract out some of the work too.Originally Posted by Cap'n Jack
A group of Canadian guys started a project called MakerPlane (Wikipedia link) to do just that, but it seems to have morphed into DIY avionics and a few 3D printed parts. Their website once had info about the aircraft design effort, but that seems to have disappeared. Their forum might contain posts explaining the history...
Eric Page
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How many places do you think would have a shop equipped (and willing) to handle large sheets of alclad and run precision cutting and punching operations as a one-off? I suspect that number to be very, very small indeed.
Measure twice, cut once...
scratch head, shrug, shim to fit.
Flying an RV-12. I am building a Fisher Celebrity, slowly.
To be economical, the shop would have to have both a CNC laser and a CNC punch. At this point you are talking about a shop with a couple of million bucks tied up in tools and a minimum shop rate of well past 100$ an hour. Initial setup and proofing is going require considerable amounts of time and resources. Simply the process of correctly nesting the parts to minimize material wastage and efficiently cycle the materials thru the tools will eat up more time. For the cost of setting this up, one could probably buy a full set of standard kits for everything that Van's has available, and still have money left over for engines and props for a couple of them.
Yes, that is the sort of shop I was thinking about. Nesting the parts would be part of the plans that are submitted. Using standard sheets, that will be difficult the first time while developing the programs for the machines, and easy thereafter. The cycling through the tools is probably something that can be done, too, as part of the plans a person gets, as I'm assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that there are similarities between the machines used in different shops.
There seems to be some, locally. We prototype sheet metal for instruments regularly, but I don't know the process we go through.
Last edited by Cap'n Jack; 08-04-2021 at 04:01 PM.
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