Monday, March 23, 2009

Bits and brackets





Work is plodding along with all the "fun" little jobs being done.These are the countless little brackets that hold a Spitfire together.Not terribly exciting but they all do a valuable job.Longeron brackets are relatively straight forward ,just a triangular gusset for the datum longeron and angles for the bottom.The real "fun' ones are the intercostal brackets as they are a triangular bracket,port and starboard handed,forward and aft handed and with the curvature of the fuselage different angles above and beneath the datum point .Drove Nathan the draftie nuts figuring it all out.
Other news is Frames are progressing well with Frames11,13,16,17,18a and half of 12 being completed.Thats flanges formed and holes flared with buttstraps holding them together.Will soon be looking at cutting our lengths of intercostal material to length for each section.
Our longeron material has been sent to Brisvegas and a test fold has been done for the lower rear Longerons.The cross section is a "W" but the tricky thing is the angles change over its length of 12 feet.Nothing major you ask but the change is in something of 25 degrees from front to back.
A few sets of formers await to be cut to finish off the fuselage so time is being spent on reorganising the project.A flow chart has been drawn up to help smooth and speedup the workload and also new shelving and parts storage ID system being put into place.All our 3D drawings have been updated to their latest issue so we can start filling in gaps on what needs to be done to finish off sub assemblies.
Also our Cincinatti miller has been bought back to life thanks to the sparky guys out on base.A BIIIIIIG thank you to them.Also a huge thank you to the Boeing guys out there who have lent a helping hand in getting some of the more technical jobs out of the way.We are in your debt guys..Anyway onto the pretty pics...