The first fuselage of the Neukom Elfe S3 is out of the mould and it looks great. We spent almost six hours building up the fuselage in the mould – longer than expected. This because it’s the first time we are building in this mould and we were still “getting to know it”. An additional challenge was that we decided to use up an old stock of “atlas” glass cloth – which has a finer weave and is lighter, but was more difficult to place into the mould (and kept on making little “waves”). Plus we used our new epoxy resin, which only has 50 minutes before it starts curing and becomes too thick (i.e. we had to use multiple small portions but were still faced with tools that got stroppy and lower layers of glass where the epoxy was curing faster than we would have wanted). Considering all these challenges, we were surprised that the fuselage came out so well.

In the excitement of seeing the first fuselage we had to fit the horizontal stabiliser and rudder that Georg has already built, as well as the prototype of the canopy (we are awaiting the rest of them in the next few weeks). We’ve still to weigh the fuselage and check for air pockets.

I’ll give an overview of the glass layup of the fuselage in a next post.