When building my kr2, I took seat design very seriously. I knew well a professor at my local gliding club, who was on the European board for aviation safety with regards to gliders in particular. I went to him with my seat design and I planed to make it colapsible, so if there were any major impacts, it would crumble and offer some protection to G overload on my spine. Prof Tony ripped it up imediately. He told me that if you are going to be sitting on a seat, in a crash, you want that seat to be the strongest part of the aircraft. If its the only bit that survives, then the fact that you are strapped to it is a good start. Any breaking or colaspe of wood or thin fiberglass seats, would probably end up with a shard of ply or glass up your bum, severing arturies and doing untold damage.
To have the best chance of survival, sod comfort or erganomics, make it as strong as possible and sit on a pieve of Dynofoam energy absorbotion foam to decrease the G loads of impact to hopefully below survivable limits, as per all modern designed gliders and most modren composite aircraft designs. Prof Tony looked at the original old canvas seat and joked, saying if you had an acident in that with a canvas seat, good luck... So I have under each seat, two 1/4 inch ply ribs between fore and aft spar sitting on more cross braces glued to the floor and then 1/4 inch profiled ply seats glued onto the top of the front and rear spar. All that is braced and bonded together with lots of glue. Then I sit on an inch of Dynofaom, its expensive, but unfortunately I know it works. CH. _______________________________________________ Search the KRnet Archives at https://www.mail-archive.com/krnet@list.krnet.org/. Please see LIST RULES and KRnet info at http://www.krnet.org/info.html. see http://list.krnet.org/mailman/listinfo/krnet_list.krnet.org to change options. To UNsubscribe from KRnet, send a message to krnet-le...@list.krnet.org
