Monnett Sonex

[Bomarc]

Nice. This was every day CA, not the "black ops" stuff? Tooling Al is pretty soft, how rigid is your "longeron" (that's what it looks like to me)? Do you see it, combined with formers, stringers, etc, to be a sturdy substrate for skinning?

Carefully following in your wake.....

Mike

[Gil]

Originally Posted by Bomarc

Nice. This was every day CA, not the "black ops" stuff? Tooling Al is pretty soft, how rigid is your "longeron" (that's what it looks like to me)? Do you see it, combined with formers, stringers, etc, to be a sturdy substrate for skinning?

Mike

Yes, it's the regular gap filling CA. The implication is that if it works at this level then the more "mastic" variety CA will work even better. The point here being that the CA "must" bond to the aluminum surface and that has to work else there's no point in pursuing its use.

The tooling foil is soft and "floppy" as regards trying to build something "rigid" with it and that's been behind all of these "mini experiments". Just testing the feasibility of building with "all aluminum" has proved an interesting task. "Working" the aluminum tooling foil stiffens it through "work hardening". Just pressing out imperfections on a glass plate is enough to harden it enough to be used to form channel stock.

I've been debating whether an "all aluminum" style build has enough merit to warrant the pain and agony of developing all the necessary skills for its realization. An alternate plan involves using card to buildup the underlying framework and then simply "coating" the exterior in aluminum somewhat similar to what's occurred in the plastic modeling world which is an extension of "paint" on the model in that context. I started out with this in mind and at first made an assessment survey to ascertain whether any candidate commercial paper models suitable for the purpose were available. The conclusion reached was that none existed that had the necessary underlying framework required for such a build thus increasing the amount of work necessary to realize the goal. This is when the decision to "keep it simple stupid" kicked in and the idea of using an all metal homebuilt as the basis was decided upon (simple and straight forward decision in retrospect). One point before leaving this paragraph is that I haven't given up on an idea that this investigation sparked but that's for latter...

Even after deciding on an all metal homebuilt as the subject I kept kicking around the idea of an aluminum paper hybrid style construction which has merits. One, patterns need to be laid out on the aluminum and the best way is to use the paper model technique in which the "foiled paper" has a thicker foil laminate layer (see aluminum clad paper). Note that paper bonds well to aluminum because paper is porous and "breathes" allowing water to evaporate in the adhesive "curing" process (does not work with some types of coated paper though). Paper to paper or paper to aluminum bonds are easily accomplished using PVA style adhesives. An additional benefit is that zinc chromate colored interiors can be printed as part of the pattern sheet.

I'm still waffling on how to proceed with the Sonex. The pattern sheet can be printed out and stuck onto the aluminum with tacky spray so that it can easily be removed from the substrate. I'm leaning toward building it as closely to the original as is manageable meaning the interiors will have to be sprayed zinc chromate green prior to full assembly but use of an airbrush is a foregone conclusion in this project. It does appear that I'll be doing a lot more "metal bending" than I first thought...

The aforementioned is a synopsis of the short reply......,

+Gil