Building the wings

Georg, who designed the wings for us, is ready with the core of the wings of his JS3. Andi and I are now using the detailed plan and tools he made to build three further sets of wings for the other three members of our team. Quite a bit of work. The foam cores were cut a while ago already. The next step is to prepare the thin abachi boards for the upper side of the wings, as well as the carbon fiber and kevlar inlays for the upper side (we always build the wings with the upper side down). Then we apply epoxy resin to the abachi and carbon inlays (we use 54gr for the upper side, of which about 2/3 remains in the wing), insert the wing cores and place the whole thing in a vacuum bag for 12 hours. We do this separately for each wing. Once the upper sides are finished, we build in the wing spars (different types of carbon and different types of foam cores for each spar), wiring and wing joiners (outer wings, winglets and main wing joiner), as well as thickened resin for front of the wing and to level out the underside of the wing. Then we close the whole thing up again with an abachi board which has the carbon fiber and kevlar inlays already applied with resin (wet in wet). We then put on the foam moulds of the underside and again place the whole thing in vacuum, again separately for each wing. Preparing the underside of the wings is most work, it takes around 4-5 hours to prepare the wing spars and different carbon inlays for a single wing. This will keep Andi and myself busy over the next few weeks, as we try to squeeze this between our other tasks. In parallel Georg and I will try to build one fuselage (we still need three) every second week or so (we leave the fuselage in the mould for 4-5 days to dry out after each build to avoid the glass structure coming through the paint, waxing takes another few days and then it needs to be spray painted before we can start the next build).

Leave a Reply