More glider stuff; a different way of construction.

Posted by thewildweasel | Apr 13, 2015 @ 03:08 PM | 12,476 Views

It's been a while since I posted - or for that matter, built - anything, but this is what I've been working on for a month or so now. I say 'working', but mostly I've been doing research, realising what I thought I knew was incorrect, going back and re-learning things and doing a lot of head-scratching and figuring things out.

The result of all of this will hopefully be a simple, quick and cheap way of making DLG wings - moulded ones. To start with, I took G_T's original Synergy wing, and taking him at his word in the very informative thread on its development that it's a forgiving design that can take a little extra wing area, I added 1cm to the chord, root to tip to give myself another 1.5dm sq. to bring the wing loading down a little. I chose the Synergy as it's been designed from the start to be an easy wing to fly, with good performance and minimised bad habits.

I'm making moulds out of either crystacal or dentastone, whichever the local builder's merchant has in stock, and then using them to heat and compression form depron skins, two for each wing half, that will be joined together just like an Airfix kit. I did some experimentation with this technique some years ago, and other than the gypsum I used then (cassini's) venting off formaldehyde when heated to forming temps, it worked well.

To make the bucks for moulding from, I made a jig 4cm wider than the root chord using a sheet of plywood, some balsa and some spruce. I'd have been better off using piano...Continue Reading

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Experiments with gliders.

Posted by thewildweasel | Mar 02, 2014 @ 09:29 PM | 15,037 Views

So. After quite a break from RC I'm feeling the need to get back into it. What's taking my fancy now is the realisation I live on the coast, there's more onshore-breezes and cliffs/beaches/wild, wild moors near me than almost anywhere else in the world, and I love the idea of using the wind to power a plane the same way I used it when I was a kid and raced my Mirror dingy.

In other words, I'm into gliders now; and especially designing them. First own-design wing built was... very solid, 40g for 1m span uncovered. Could chop a tree down with it,

but it's too heavy and I can do better - either lose the weight and keep the strength or keep the weight and gain control surfaces and have it as a two part wing for example.

My next step is to experiment with different construction techniques to figure out how close I can get to having my cake and eating it. I think I've come up with a way of rapidly making test structures good enough to stress-test repeatably enough whilst still being able to form a good aerofoil.

I'm expecting this to be an on-going project over many years, hopefully leading to me having a better (some would be nice) knowledge of the principles of aeronautic design and some models I've designed myself to share back with the community after all of the plans I've downloaded and built over the years. Most of all though I'm expecting this to be fun.

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