Working on the Plane…

There is the old engineering joke about a plane in the mountains with a whole lot of polish nationals on it. The pilot pounted out a mountain on the left side. All the polish rushed to that side and it caused the plane to hit the mountain on the left thanks to the shift in weight. The moral is that you should not have too many poles on the left side of the plane. If you got thaty then you are really an engineer. And it has nothing to do with aeroplanes, and has everything to do with graph paper.

But that is a digression. Yesterday I spent most of the day building a wing jig at my friends house. This is for a real aeroplane, and we are picking up the wing parts during the week. So we needed to build a jig to mount the wings on during construction. This is something that I had not thought too much about, but richard had. The frame needed to be 4×4 in the old imperial measurements, so he had made it from 2×4, and it worked well. We needed to bolt the jig to the concrete floor so that the wing would work.

So I get out the rotary hammer drill. Richard had not seen this, and was amazed. It went into the concrete almost better than his drill went into pine. His comment was that “It should be illegal”. No. The drill is efficient, but not all that powerful. It is actually just under one Horse Power.

One pole is bolted to a wall with a horizontal. The other one goes to the roof. To distribute the force, we used a 1000mm 2×4 with screws at 450mm to bolt into the beams through the gyprock. First try we put the screws in out by 20mm. Next try worked better. Much better. So that was bolted into the roof, but we stripped the head on one of the bolts. OOps. So we needed to put the upright under compression to hold it. After some playing we decide to chock from below. But we are out by about 5-8mm.

So I notch the top. Use a hacksaw to cut the slots, and then start cutting the wood out with a hammer and screwdriver. Not working well, and richard threatened me with the camera and a trip to Westmead Hospital. We we borrow a real chissel from Richards father. Worked perfectly.