Have metal, will mangle - November 14, 2006

Now that I have some metal (picked it up last Saturday), I decided to try my hand at a little part-making. To start off easy, I picked a part that was drawn to full-size in the plans (and therefore traceable), and was relatively simple (a 2" x 2" square of sheet metal). It took me a little less than 1/2 hour to create a roughly trapezoidal piece. Don't think that one will go on the plane.

I was actually thinking about cutting out one of the larger formers, but when I looked at the plans I became confused: I know the formers have flanges, but I didn't see them on the plans. I think the plans explain something about the flanges, but I don't totaly understand it...

...Back on the computer, I did some searches on the Sonexbuilders yahoo group, and found a conversation in which Kerry (at Sonex) suggested a web address for an online blueprint-reading tutorial. I'm working my way through that now. For those who are interested, the address is: http://www.tpub.com/content/draftsman/14040/

The yahoo groups can be a little frustrating. There are 16,000+ messages, starting chronologically in the late 90's. There seems to be a lot of good information in there, but you have to dig, since it's only grouped by conversation thread, and most threads run less than 10 messages. I'm pulling out nuggets as I come across them, and saving them as Word documents. I then group the documents by folder on my computer ("Canopy", "Metal cutting", etc.)

Tomorrow I'll spend some more quality time with the plans and see if that blueprint tutorial has sunk in. --Bill