Flying

Anyone here ever take a stab at making some kind of flying machine? How'd it go?

When I was a teenager living in a trailer park in Texas, one of my neighbors was an old retired engineer from NASA who used to work at the center in Houston. He built a personal submarine out of concrete poured into a mold and buoyed by modified scuba equipment. He later also built an old-school wooden biplane in his shed (and later wheeled it out on the lawn so he could do the wings). Think like WWI red baron ѕһіt. My dad was also an old mechanical engineer, so we were all friends and he recruited me and my brother as assistants. It was incredibly interesting and one of the more fun things I've ever had the privilege to work on. Maybe he's just an oddball and they still have rare oddballs like him around, but it really feels like they just don't make that guy anymore. I only wish I got to fly in it at some point. I got to go on the submarine when I was way younger (too young to get anything about it) but he finished the biplane and did some test flights out at the airstrip for crop dusters down the road. Wanted to take me along, but I got caught up in school and teenager things. He ended up dying of pancreatic cancer before we got the chance. One of my most bitter regrets. I've always wanted to build one all on my own someday, try and finish what we started. But yeah, that's mostly old sentimental crap. From a technical perspective it was immensely satisfying. Had some real craftsmanship. I remember drafting the wing cross-section profiles from fuselage to tip, laying it out on big pieces of butcher table on his HUGE old drafting table from the 1930s, carefully shaving down wooden struts with a hand plane and putting them into the steam chamber to make limber so we could bend them and they'd hold perfect smooth curves under tension. Connecting them all together on steel rods with cable and turnbuckles to keep them light and rigid through the magic of tensegrity. Then stretching that sturdy but impossibly thin aviation fabric over it all to make it into a working airfoil; forgot what that stuff was called. We just rubbed it down with old motor oil of some kind to waterproof it. He built most of the motor, too. Used an old BMW motorcycle engine as a base, but turned plenty of the parts out of magnesium or aluminum or whatnot on lathe and did milling with a classic Bridgeport which was also pre-war. Everything was so fuсking beautiful. Built the cockpit and instrument panels out of shiny maple rubbed down with sailboat varnish, complete with huge analog gauges which looked like they came from the first industrial revolution or something. All the controls were a careful web of cables and pulleys hooked up to a control stick shoved between your knees. He was extremely fastidious about designing and neatly lying those out, because you sure as hell don't want one of those cables to bind. All pretty old-school. Not what you'd be likely to see these days. This was in the 1990s. Since then I've tinkered with a drone or two. Would love to finally build one of those cheap pulse-jet engines.

>>5097 I remember someone telling me that in aviation mechanic school in the 80s/90s they still taught making parts like that, and I think that wing surfaces were actual canvas. Having met old mechanics who explained that they actually had to build wings or small scale planes for class and them comparing it to now where it is mostly just patching and riveting and how to replace electronic systems makes me wonder if there are any schools out there that still teach those old school skills. I grew up around airplanes since my parents worked in the airline industry, but I never got a chance to appreciate the experiences around airplanes. I also heard that old motorcycle engines used to be common in old airplanes and home builds, I wanted to build an ultralight kit or something for a while now, but I don't have a big workshop or place to do it. There seem to be a lot of forums concerning home-brew airplanes that are untainted by politics, which are nice to read sometimes. When I was a kid, an aerospace engineer showed me how to do calculations for machining and making structural metal components for aircraft, but I was too young to really care.

>>5098 I was thinking about it more and trying to remember what kind of cloth it was on the wings, and I think it may have been some kind of nylon like pantyhose were made of? I remember hearing that things like pantyhose were rationed during the great war along with meat and steel and everything else, since it was needed for the soldiers. Not to wear lol but they made things like biplanes and parachutes out of it. You can still learn the old skills if you look. Engines: go to a vintage motorcycle club and talk to the mechanics. For the airframe, the old man told me that most of it is techniques borrowed from very talented shipwrights. That's where they got the methods of steaming and stretching/bending the wooden pieces and even the method of making a succession of smoothly-curving cross-sections to make an aerodynamic (or hydrodynamic) organic shape. Same way you build a hull from shiplap planks. Well, similar enough anyway. I built a boat too in my twenties. Always wanted to try the Viking method: no sawing, all pieces are riven with a wedge and hammer so that the same wood fibers run unbroken from stem to stern. Way stronger without losing flexibility. And no iron nails—they hammer tarred wooden stakes into the gaps, called "trennels." Apparently it's just short for "tree-nail." How they got that watertight is beyond me. The Norse could build a longboat that could roll with punches better than an ironclad vessel hundreds of years before those existed, and they could do it without a foundry or blacksmith in sight. Astounding. Kind of makes me understand why so much our language comes from nautical terms. But old skills never really die out. At least only in extreme rare cases, like Roman concrete or whatever. You might have to go way out in the country to find someone poor and crazy enough to still use them, though. I have been fixing old bike engines since I was around twelve. Rural life, didn't have a lot of money in the family so they couldn't drive me to school or later work and couldn't buy me a car. But you can always find a basket-case dirt bike lying around in the trailer park and teach yourself to get it running. That was my way of getting out of that hole. Had a neighbor who sold me an old broken-down two-stroke for a case of beer and got it going again so I could get a damn job besides working at the convenience store. BMW engines were especially ideal, I hear. Apparently part of the treaties after one of the world wars constrained German industries to not make wartime machines anymore, so they figured out ways to transition the same tooling to making civvie stuff. The BMW engine seems like it was always meant for a small plane. Outrageously reliable, because you can't pull over onto the shoulder in the sky. But if the Germans couldn't built planes anymore, you can always stick it in a bike frame. Lots of the same requirements, works extremely well. Just use better carburetors and redundant ignition systems if you go up in the air :) that's really the main difference. And avgas. My dad flew a crop duster for a while (and smuggled coke from Mexico after that didn't pay enough...) and he cheaped out on regular gas once. It froze in the lines and his engine stopped in the air one day. He ended up crawling out of the cockpit onto the outside of the fuselage trying to cup his hands around the fuel line, thaw it enough so it would flow again... Luckily he got it puttering before he augured into some cotton field. I remember he used to wear his armpit hair in big braids, because otherwise it'd get tangled in the wind when he was in the plane or on the motorbike. Lmao he was such a nut. I'd be pretty interested to check out those metallurgical calculations. I have a big stack of mechanical engineering textbooks left over from various competent men I knew in days past. I should look through them one of these days. I remember my neighbor going over it, but same deal—I was way too young to grasp most of it. All those days sure are nice to recall. I need to start doing stuff like that again so I don't turn into an old nostalgic fool :) thanks for the reminder