This technique could easily be used for a KR wing but most of us picked the KR design for a reason. Maybe it was to build it sorta similar to a KR! ; )
In making my statement below more clear: The Wittman Tailwind ribs are regular old style made up ribs from strips of wood, you know, the truss type. The strips are 1/2" wide by 1/4" thick. The main and rear spars are solid spruce, the ribs are made with a slot for slipping onto the spars. They are spaced accordingly and glued into place. Then pieces of wood the width of the spars are glued on top of the spar caps as spacers between the ribs and aligns with the surface of the ribs. This is done so the plywood wing skins can be glued to the entire top surface of the spar and extra wide rib surfaces. One more thing to answer the one question someone had. I would definitely not attempt to glue plywood to urethane foam ribs, as usually used in the wings of a KR. Most of you have discovered or will discover that urethane foam has almost no tensile strength. Plywood would pull away from urethane foam in a blink of an eye in that case. Larry H. ________________________________ The Wittman Tailwind wings were originally built with wooden ribs, covered with aircraft grade plywood and then covered with the old fabric and dope technique. Now most people cover the plywood with a light layer of fiberglass and use epoxy resin as the glue and stiffener for the glass cloth. Most in the Tailwind community now use the West Epoxy System for this purpose. As most of you know West System was originally developed for the boating industry. It was developed specifically to adhere glass cloth and wood together or for wood to wood in boats. Most of us in the KR community use T88 Epoxy for gluing our wooden structures together as does many in the Tailwind community. There are some in the Tailwind community of builders who use the West System for gluing all their ribs together, gluing ribs to the spars, gluing the plywood to the ribs and for gluing the fiberglass cloth onto the outside of the plywood wing surfaces. Wooden wings are great, metal wings are great, the way we make our wings is just great as well. All of these techniques work as long as they are built properly. Larry H. ________________________________ I wonder if anyone has done a foam rib with ply skin attached directly to the foam? Would that even work? Fred Johnson Reno, NV _______________________________________ Search the KRnet Archives at http://www.maddyhome.com/krsrch/index.jsp to UNsubscribe from KRnet, send a message to krnet-le...@mylist.net please see other KRnet info at http://www.krnet.org/info.html
