Biplanes have struts (most of them do, anyway), and the Great Lakes offers plenty of opportunity to learn how to build them. There are no bracing struts on the tail assembly, but we have a whole collection of them in the landing gear assembly, the usual interplane (outboard) struts, and the cabane struts (which hold […]
If you go back and look at the first entry in my series on this airplane, you’ll see that the plans describe building the fixed horizontal tail (stabilizer) as a single piece to be glued in place as part of the tail assermbly, with the intention that the covering of the stabilizer and that of […]
Well, it cost me over a month of not-so-patiently waiting, but now I can tell you that the little Ercoupe FLIES. Getting it to that point turned out not to be quite as easy as I expected when I posted my last entry on that model on March 10. It turns out that I have […]
The next step in building the fuselage is the addition of all the stringers, which are those narrow strips running nose-to-tail with the primary function of creating a more or less rounded cross section. Stringers differ from longerons, which are primary structural members. On this airplane there are stringers on the top, bottom and both […]
From what I have heard, just about all of us have been having less than ideal flying weather recently. Here in the Pacific Northwest we don’t get much snow, and it seldom freezes, but we have more than enough gray, rainy windy weather to share with the rest of the world. Just last Saturday, (the […]
As with a lot of older kits, there isn’t a lot of specific detail on the drawings to show you how the lower wing and landing gear are supposed to be attached to the rest of the fuselage. (The same goes for the upper wing and cabane struts, too, but we’ll talk about that later.) […]
Let’s get started on the fuselage. This kit is “old time traditional” in that the fuselage consists of two identical side frames built up of “sticks” (3/16″ sq. balsa) which are subsequently joined by more 3/16″ sq. in the form of crossmembers. Once the basic “box” structure is established, we add formers cut to specific […]
The next step is the addition of the leading edge sheeting and the capstrips to the wing structure. All of the assembly up to this point has been done with the wing flat on the building board, kept in alignment by various built-in jigs and spacers and held in place by those big lead building […]
OK…now it’s time to get started on something that will make it clear just how BIG this model really is…let’s build the wing. As it turns out, even if my workbench were long enough to lay out both the right and left panels of the wing at the same time, I would have to walk […]
The vertical tail assembly…the fixed vertical fin and the rudder…are built in the same way as the horizontal tail. That building task also presents me with a chance to talk about some of the reasons those parts are designed, or engineered, the way they are. You could build all the tail surfaces on this airplane […]