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Many thanks to Larry Wiechman, who, upon reading an e-mail
from me to the Cozy
Builder's group, offered a centersection spar jig if I came and got it.
Larry lives about 45 minutes from me, so, over the Christmas break, I hopped
in the van, drove over there and picked it up. As it turns out, this jig
was originally built by Dennis Oelmann, famed composites builder and the guy
who built my rudder pedals. Nice work, Dennis, as far as I can tell
this puppy has built in excess of 10 spars. |
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In the time that has covered those 10 spars, however, the
jig has taking a few bumps and bruises. Easy to fix, though, nothing a
few minutes with a level, straight edge, some screws and scrap wood can't
fix. |
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About 300 people told me to make sure I put plenty of tape
on the jig so the spar would not stick to it after the layups and joining
done in it cured. No worries, folks, I used about a half a roll of
packing tape. |
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One side of the jig had a chunk of particle board missing.
I repaired this with some pour foam. As it turns out, that was
overkill, there's no measurements made at this spot and the foam is plenty
strong enough to gap this missing chunk with no deformation that affects the
spar. |
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One side of the jig was a bit out of square, in a weird
way. This perplexed me for a while, it's easy to clamp things together
but how do you spread something apart without using up space for the
spreaders where the spar needs to be?
I thought about this for a couple days and came up with this solution.
The jig is fixed to the table in several places with drywall screws.
So, to pull this section 'back' to make it square (it was under square, 87
or 88 degrees if you will) I added some all-thread and nuts/washers. I
put a tiny bit of tension on these, say a half-turn once touching, and that
was enough to make and keep the jig square again. |
Chapter 13 Step 11
Chapter 14 Step 2 |
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