Travels with FatCatAir

Friday February 17, 2006

Composite class

I haven't had much to say lately, I need to work on that. Last weekend I flew down to LakeLand Fl (X05 to be exact) for an EAA class on building with composites. Since the airplane I order is all composite I figured it'd be good to try it out on something that wasn't so critical or expensive!

Here's the result of one of the projects we did, a mini canard



We hotwired the blue foam and then did the various layups over the two days. The blue foam is very similar to the stuff you'd see at Home Depot or Lowes except the the cell size is larger in the "aircraft" foam. You can maybe see it in the photo. It came out pretty well.

We also did a layup of a molded fairing and also constructed a bulkhead. There was also a demonstation of vacuum bagging. In the construction I have to do there'll be no vacuum bagging.

There were 12 of us in the composite class. Only two of us were actually committed to building an airplane. Three people couldn't follow directions on the canard that were repeated at least 3 times and ruined theirs. They should probably avoid building an airplane!

Now I'm all excited about starting to work on the plane but the parts won't be here until June. Putting in the mezzanine in my hangar should keep me busy.

Feb 17 2006, 03:42:03 PM EST Permalink