Tag Archives: SolveSpace

Aluminum Angle Bundle 15

I cut the parts I previously drew in SolveSpace.  I noticed one of the parts had been rough cut too small–I cut the dimension for one side of the angle and didn’t notice the other side was longer.  Instead of fixing it, I decided to cut out the rest of the parts out of that sized angle to make sure I will have enough–looks like I will.

Some of the longer pieces have measurements to within 1/32″.  My 3 foot ruler only does 1/8″, but it also has a mm scale, hence the graphing calculator in the image.  I’m pretty sure I could have fudged it, but this is half the fun.

Edit: I later noticed the plans also show millimeter measurements, so no need for the calculator.

Almost forgot to mention I bought a 3lb hammer and used it to open the two small parts to 95 degrees.

Aluminum Angle Bundle 14

I bought a bench vise off Craigslist and decided to put it to work bending parts I have been skipping because they are not 90 degrees.  You’ll notice the vise is not bolted down–I’m considering building a smaller workbench for tools.

The bend was 86 degrees–so small it seemed insignificant, but this picture captures it well.

I decided to use SolveSpace some more to draw parts that are presented in the plans at other than full scale and print them out full scale.

Aluminum Angle Bundle 13

Didn’t spend much time actually constructing anything on the airplane this week.  The last part I was working on is the flap detent angle.  This has notches where the flap handle rests at 0, 10, and 30 degrees.  Other people have added a detent for 20 degrees so I decided to give it a try.  I spent far too much time researching other peoples’ designs and noticed some people added nibs to more than just the 30 degree detent as shown in the plans.  Then I noticed a couple people mentioning the flap handle getting stuck in flight and it seemed to be due to the flap lever bending within the detent and getting jammed in–easily solved by modifying the geometry of the detent.  Needless to say I fantastically over-thought the part and decided to go even more extreme and draw it in CAD.

I found SolveSpace, a simple parametric CAD program that is very intuitive, and drew my own version of the flap detent angle.  Then I decided to cut it into aluminum on my wood-cutting CNC machine.  I was trying 25ipm with .03″ passes and it was estimated to take about 20 minutes to cut.  It was obvious I was cutting too fast–the tool was chattering like crazy so I quit and will cut it with the band saw.

I’m not counting all the time I spent messing around this week to my build time :-)

Here’s a video of me creating the part in SolveSpace: