During one of my last building sessions I got the entire airplane covered and the Polyspan covering heat-tautened uniformly smooth and tight. During that part of the process of covering and finishing Polyspan is a bit like the popular one step iron-on film coverings. (If we had been using a traditional covering material like silkspan, tissue, or […]
Get yer pants on! The TigerKitten as presented in the Premier Balsa kit uses wheel pants derived from the original molds I made over twenty years ago. For a time I was offering molded fiberglass pants for sale on line, but those are no longer available. The Premier short kit includes vacuum formed moded plastic […]
FOR DIRECT ACCESS TO ALL OF MY BLOG ENTRIES ON THIS (OR ANY OTHER) PROJECT, GO TO THE ARCHIVES TAB PARTWAY DOWN MY HOME PAGE AND CLICK THE APPROPRIATE SUBJECT UNDER CATEGORIES. When do we get to the good part? For me that’s a hard call, because they’re all the good parts. Covering, however, is […]
FOR DIRECT ACCESS TO ALL OF MY BLOG ENTRIES ON THIS (OR ANY OTHER) PROJECT, GO TO THE ARCHIVES TAB PARTWAY DOWN MY HOME PAGE AND CLICK THE APPROPRIATE SUBJECT UNDER CATEGORIES. There are a couple more jobs waiting to be done before we can move on to putting some covering on this airplane, and I […]
This time around I want to work on the cowl enclosure. Once upon a time we would have called this the “engine cowl”…can we still say that? Whatever you call it, the cowl on the TigerKitten is supplied as a one-piece plastic molding consisting of the cowl shape itself surrounded by a margin of extra […]
The next step in getting this TigerKitten ready for covering, finish and flying is a process generally referred to as “fiberglassing”. That can mean a whole lot of different things…way too many for me to explain them all in this blog entry. Let’s talk about what I want to accomplish on this particular part of […]
The fuselage is beginning to look like it is really going to be part of an airplane, but there are lots of things left to be added, or stuck in place, or sanded, before we can think about heading for the field. You guys who know me already won’t be surprised to learn that the […]
There’s a lot more work to do on the fuselage, but now we’re getting to the parts I find most interesting. Let’s build a top deck. When I designed the TigerKitten over twenty years ago, I used a combination of dowel pegs and a neat little custom made tube-and-wire latch to hold the top deck […]
The TigerKitten fuselage construction is about as traditional as it gets …two identical side frames built up from balsa strips with a few shaped pieces in critical areas…but we get to combine state of the art stuff because those shaped pieces are laser cut. We could also use a more traditional adhesive like aliphatic resin […]
This one was worth waiting for. A couple of weeks ago my good friend Gary Ritchie, who does all the flight photography you see here, called me and suggested that the weather was about as good as it would ever get at this time of year and did I want to go flying? As it […]