My aileron counterweights are 3/4" thinwall 4130 tubing filled with lead. It was awfully easy to pick up a pile of free tire weights at the Firestone store and melt them down in an old boiler on the hot plate. Takes a few minutes to melt them, ladle off the road scum on top, and then you've got yourself some fine looking FREE lead! Poured it into the end of the tubing (one end was stuck in a coffee can full of sand) and in a few minutes I had a nice leading edge aileron weight. One thing I'd do differently is pour some epoxy in the tube first, and tilt and rotate it so that there's a little epoxy to hold it in place. Otherwise when it cools off it will contract and slide around a little in there (kinda like mine did). My ailerons are different from everybody else's but use the weight in the nose principle that's been mentioned. I've never posted the photos, but I'm sure I have some somewhere and will post them after my plane is flying. There IS a little image of the aileron before I built it at http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford/frise.jpg , which shows a counterweight in the nose, but it turned out round and with no support other than the foam, plywood ribs, and carbon nose. I also have a photo of the ailerons somewhere, but just spent twenty minutes searching for it and finally gave up. Each aileron needed 25" of this tubing/lead stuff, and ended up weighing 3.5 pounds each. The weight is evenly distributed and support directly by the ribs and carbon fiber nose and end caps, which is better than a point load for the purists among us. Installing these things was a pure joy, and far simpler than I'd ever dreamed. I just built the ailerons as if they had no weights, then bored out the leading edge with a spade bit mounted on two 18" extensions and epoxied it in place, sealing it in with a carbon fiber plug on the end cap. Just to prove that I'm anal retentive, I encased them in shrink tubing to eliminate the possibilty of galvanic corrosion eating it's way through the carbon fiber. I can't see these things ever falling out. I'll post details one of these days.
Getting ready for some more Champ taildragger touch and goes tomorrow... Mark Langford, Huntsville, Alabama N56ML "at" hiwaay.net see KR2S project at http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford
