Off topic Re: REFLECTOR:Wing Voids in Shaw's Wings

[reflector@tvbf.org]

When we (Berkut) were looking at doing molded wings we looked at a set of 
Shaw's and found many voids up to 1/2", and one very large one 4" x 5" or 
so.  Also the set we looked at had bulged a little and didn't fit a set of 
plywood jigs made from original templates.  Shaw had a set of Long EZ wing 
molds that we could have bought for a song, but we elected to make our own 
and use conventional sandwich construction with 5mm PVC foam.

I experimented a little bit with his method.  I couldn't hot wire foam 
accurately enough (and at that time we were hotwiring a set of wings per 
week).  I *could* hotwire and sand down, and get close, but even then the 
cores just didn't fit the molds well enough for me.  And to get a good 
surface I had to load the skins up with resin.  There was no vacuum to pull 
out the excess resin, of course.  So they ended up much heavier than we 
were getting with vacuum bagged blue foam.  Our sandwich wings ended up the 
same weight as vac bagged foam, about 10 lbs lighter than straight wet 
layup uni.

BTW, we tried non-bagged biaxial over blue foam at one point, since we were 
using it in our fuselages.  That came out amazingly heavy, just because of 
all the epoxy filling up the open weave.

As for Atlantica - don't use a consumer level software package (X-plane) to 
design an airplane that will carry people!!  At LEAST do a large scale 
(50%) model.  And if you do a truck test, instrument it, even if your 
instrumentation is crude!!

At 04:59 PM 8/26/03 -0600, you wrote:
> From the same unnamed source I was told the worry level at Velocity was 
> pretty close to zero, that Alan would progress to the point that he could 
> actually sell a single kit.  A real kit mind you, not a promise.
>
>The apparent progress since he crashed the proto in the first flight is 
>not promising.  I'd love to see the Atlantica a success.  I was a follower 
>for about a year. Flying wings have such a checkered history.