Building a Nieuport 11...

[Frank Giger]

Just for fun, let's start out with how NOT to make a leading edge for an aileron!

Measure around with some paper to find out where the center is:



Anneal the aluminum and rivet it to one side.



Roll it over, pressing with one's hands will give it that hail damage effect that few can deny is rarely achieved!



Hmmm, that didn't work out so well. Perhaps if I just rolled it around some PVC pipe before putting it on the aileron...



Muffin topped leading edge! Woohoo!



Do over!

[Frank Giger]

Clearly I needed to completely rethink the process. I polled the guys at the EAA and even posted on the Airdrome builder's group for advice.

Naturally I came up with something goofy!

Behold the Giger-matic aileron leading edge bending machine!



That's 1.25" PVC pipe on the right (inside) and 1.5" on the outside held together with some wood I planed to fit using my table saw with a couple of bolts. Genius! It only took me two weeks to work that out.



So the leading edge is wedged under a board screwed to the work table and the GMALEBM is inserted over the piece:



Bending upwards, the curve is started until the whole thing can be moved to the floor and rolled with one's knees on the center of the PVC pipe.

Many, many times.



The trailing edges were then marked at about a quarter inch and bent down around 20 degrees to stiffen it up and the whole thing gets riveted to the aileron:



Woohoo for real!

I also taped the aileron ribs where they meet the leading edge before putting it on.

Now all I have to do is put the other piece on for the center and then on the other side of the aileron holder piece thingie, which should be fun.

And then do it all over again for the other side.

[snj5]

As Wile E. Coyote would say, "Suuuuuper Geeeeenius!!!!"

[Frank Giger]

Hey, whatcha doing over here? Back to theaerodrome.com with you!

And a big plug for http://www.theaerodrome.com where they've really helped me out tremendously on this build. All things WWI and loads of experts. As I wrote in the first post of this saga, this thread is really just a mirror of the one there where they gently lead me in the right direction.

[Frank Giger]

Realizing that I had forgotten a personal rule in building - when frustrated or stymied by one task, do another! - I left the stupid aileron alone so it can sit and think about the trouble it's caused and tackled the brake drums.

Since the last time I welded anything the President was Reagan and I was wishing I could afford parachute pants to go with my full head of hair, I enlisted the aid of my father-in-law - farmer, builder, and fabricator of well deserved renown all through DeKalb County.

The problem, of course, is that the hole for the drum is larger than the hub of the wheel and something had to be put between them.

Scrounging around barns we found a nice piece of pipe that fit the bill. Unfortunately, the band saw had only wood blades, so it had to be cut by hand. I wielded the SawsAll with an expert eyes and in what I will unashamedly brag on cut two pieces an inch long perfectly square with two cuts and off a sixteenth of an inch off on the other two. A grinder brought them into tolerance in minutes.

Only to find the pipe was an eight of an inch too thin around in the outer diameter to the drum once all the rust and gunk was removed from it. The drum and pipe are both too thin to risk a fill weld - plus it's got to be perfectly centered to the axel.

A local machine shop said they had some stuff that would fit the bill in scrap and they'd be more than happy to just give us some. Only it was machined stuff that had a thickness of an inch and weighed a friggin' ton.

We were pretty low - both of us have made a lot of mileage out of figuring out how to use one thing for another, when I randomly kicked a round bit of scrap something that was under the well cluttered garage/workshop work bench. It rolled across the floor and rested against the welding machine.

We both looked at each other with the same model of light bulb clearly visible above our heads (okay, mine's running at just 20 watts) as he got to it first and scooped it up. It was an old bearing race that had given its all in a tractor or some other farm machine. The inside fit around the bearing hub of the wheel like a glove, and the other end fit over the hole of the drum nicely. Son of a....

I scraped grease off of the hub and ground down a bit where the bearing had departed to make one side flat while my father-in-law accessed his super-duper spacial memory to figure out where he had tossed another when replacing them. He found it under a rag under a pile of other cast-off, broken parts.

The arc welder he has is a fine piece of machinery, six feet tall and a state of the art contemporary to the Saturn V rocket. The gauges had long since given up the ghost and I noted that he flipped the switch and rotated the huge crank on the front in a posture that nearly perfectly matches one takes when hand propping. At a certain level of hum he judged it was 'bout right and we did some test beads on some random angle stock.

My skills were immediately deemed good enough if one wanted some ugly cuts through rebar but not much else, and he took the rod from me.

The amperage had been dialed down to the minimums to do the job ("that wheel is awful thin") and after I had centered the bearing race on it he put down the first tack weld. We spun it on the axel mount I brought and we locked it down with several more.

At which point we discovered his welding rods were well past their prime. Zzzzzzzztttt....darned it....pull stuck rod....zzzzzttttt. I glanced at the box - they had the name of a farm store that went out of business when I was in Desert Storm. Oh well.

I centered the drum on the race using the Mark One Eyeball and we did a single tack. On went the axel for a spin with a tape measure running from the center to the edge of the drum.

Hand me that ball peen, I said casually, and one tiny whack later it was dead on. Tacked around using the zzzzztttt-damn-zzzztttt technique. And we found every hole in the drum for extra fun.

We put out the rag on the floor that caught fire from some slag and grinned at each other. I was holding the tire of the wheel to keep it in place on the anvil we rested it on. While wearing a t-shirt. Fortunately the rag was right next to my foot, so it was easy to stomp out.

"It ain't gonna happen," I winked at the unspoken question and he shrugged. Third degree burns from jumping slag just wasn't on the menu; I only ever got burned by it when wearing the appropriate gear back in Agricultural class.

We did the same for the other wheel, except it didn't even need a tap to center the drum. It might be off center, but someone will need a micrometer laser to put a number on it.

Tap tap with a small hammer to get the slag off and done.

It ain't the prettiest welding ever done, but once I take a wire brush to it and some paint nobody will ever see it - and now my plane can have some brakes!

[Frank Giger]

Been doing a lot of little things - got the aileron done and thought I'd tackle some other stuff before beginning the other upper wing, like assembling the fake gun and working out how I'm going to do the seat.

Anyhow, some pics of how the wheel brakes went.

This is the problem:



as one can see, the hub and the brake drum don't exactly mesh.

The solution:





My poor paint line down the drum gives the false impression that it's katywhompus, but in fact it's true!

The welds ain't the prettiest, but the drums are on solid as can be!

[Frank Giger]

I figured I'd update the thread, since I've gotten quite a bit done after my hiatus from building. This summer proved just too hot to do a lot of work in a tent in the back yard safely. Highest temp recorded back there was 140 degrees....which came down to 110 after fans were turned on. There's tough and then there's stupid....no way I was going to risk heat stroke for an aircraft.

Did the other upper wing (all four wings, hurray) and cut and fitted the other aileron ribs.

Learned an important lesson: when bending two identical bows from aluminum tubing ALWAYS BEND BOTH AT THE SAME TIME. One can't replicate the bends exactly after a delay of a couple of weeks (or even a couple of days). The jigs (all my jigs are temporary) and one's technique will change.

With the weather finally cooperating, I took a couple days off to get some stuff done:

First things first: must bring order to chaos!



Better:



Here's the PVC oversleeves that keep the aileron from shifting left and right.



They're sanded very fine to give a smooth edge and I made a wax ring on top of each.



Eventually this ring will wear down, allowing a little shift left and right. That's okay, as it will allow the spar to flex a bit and not be totally bound by the aileron spar (more on this later).

For all the craziness I went through with leading edges, making a new one took just a minute or so using the jig and a board to do the final pressing around the pipe.

The little dimple part way down was what I was wasting time and materials on - I kept trying for perfect, which is stupid.

The rubber mallet that one will see in most pictures is for whacking the table with when either frustrated or elated. Nothing helps the building process quite like a good whack with a rubber mallet onto a non-essential object.



It fit like a glove!

[Frank Giger]

Once I had both the leading edges on the aileron* just for fun I grabbed some landscaping material I had laying arournd and did a quick cover check. The little dimple is invisible.



*Why two pieces of leading edge? Functional fixedness. Since Robert Baslee provided leading edge pieces of a certain length I simply copied them when I got my own sheet rather than do the logical thing of making it one longer piece.



End of the aileron cut with a measure check to see if the horn would clear the bow when the rear cabane was in place. Zip strips kept the aileron spar in rough position. No way that aileron mount (just the other side of the zip ties) would fit on the inside of the compression strut.

It's here that I smacked myself for not putting on the bow on the end of the upper wing spars.

What you're not seeing is the end of the wing spar bow curved inward to where it's not flush so that it can't be riveted to secure it (the rear was a-okay).



I could have drilled out the intial rivets on the ends, pulled it out and monkeyed with it until I either broke the bow or got it to where it wasn't even close to matching the other one, but I went another direction.

First I measured to the end of the bow, backed up a few inches, and drilled a rivet hole:



Insert a length of safety wire and push it to the end of the spar to where I can get at it.



Make a loop, reverse the direction, and get it over the end of the bow.

Note the inserts in the spar that give it extra strength at the compression struts.

[Frank Giger]

Twist with the safety wire until it's tight, pull hard until it's flush, hold in place with vice grips, drill a hole about an inch or so down from it and rivet to lock it down.

Cut the wire and remove:



Put a rivet in the hole. I can get away with this since it's not structural - it's a guide for the fabric around the end of the wing first and foremost. The compression struts and wires hold the wing together.

Scary time!

Gotta put the control rod mounts onto the aileron control horns. I don't know if Robert included the bolts for this, but I had some AN4-15 bolts handy that fit just right and didn't dig into to the kit parts.

Part secured using space-age materials:



Whew. Both done. Note that the rod mounts are facing in different directions. the mount will be on the outside (towards the wing end) with the curved strength piece on the top of the control rod.



A little idiot proofing for when I start putting on ribs. While they're identical on the table (the ailerons aren't biased either way in rib shape), it would suck to put the ribs on identically and have two left or right wings.



Marking the spars where the mounts hit. The problem is that the mounts are cut too shallow and there isn't enough seperation between the leading edges and the wing spar - the edge actually butts up against it.

I spoke to Mr. Baslee and he said spacers were just the ticket.



After much scratching of my bald head and half a pack a cigarettes, I went with using some PVC pipe that matched the diameter of the spar, cut and glued in a single stack.

To hold them in place I went with some aluminum ducting tape, as the adhesive won't corrode the spar and it's pretty strong. It only really has to hold it until the mounts are in...

[Frank Giger]

Deep breath!

Cutting the other aileron to length for the control horn. Finally a use for that mitre box; I sure as hell wasn't going to use it to build cabinets or something!



Lining up before locking down the aileron. Note:

2x4 boards were placed under the wing spars to get the aileron off the table, as they're thicker than the wing spars right after this picture was taken.

Spacers are in place under the mounts. Because the mounts themselves aren't perfect semi-circles a bit of whacking was required for best fit. The PVC gave admirably, allowing shallow cuts for a perfect alignment.

How I voted on Tuesday (see coffee cup).

This was also a good time to take a break!



I figured one of the best way to ensure I was dead center on the end of the aileron spar to the wing spar was to align the bows (since I know they're center...and they need to be aligned regardless).

Switched mugs to something more appropriate as well.



Not much clearance even with the spacers.

You can see how the mount mated perfectly with the spacers in the background.



While not optimal, I had to rivet into the top of the spar, as no amount of whacking on the mounts to make them curve around would give me enough purchase to put them on the sides.

With it starting to get dark, I called it a day!



This is where those "wax rings" come in. The aileron is locked in tightly - it rotates easily, but no left and right motion. Over time it'll get about a 1/32nd an inch play, which will let the thing flex a bit and hopefully avoid too much stress along the rivets.

Unless I have my physics and metallurgy backwards.