Pietenpol Lessons Learned - Tail Feathers & Wing Ribs

[@nigelsnell9770]

A good tip for everyone, is to study the drawings as often as possible, because it will help you to plan your approach, sometimes it will make your life a lot easier to make a simple alignment jig, for instance, ensuring that wing spars and centre section will be identically spaced. A point for all builders to be aware of, is that, although your computer drawings on screen will have the accurate measurements, most home printers suffer from inaccuracy the further away from the centre of the print. If you draw onto the building board, the actual position lines for the leading edge, the spars, and the trailing edge, you can then position your printed papers relative to the fixed lines that you have drawn on the board. Any minor errors will be absorbed by the diagonal bracing positions. Personally, I prefer to simply transfer the drawing dimensions directly to my building board, as it helps me to work out my jig design as I draw. Hope this helps anyone planning a build. Happy building and blue skies.

[@robertglab8886]

Man, how cool. I made a few of the same mistakes and had to redo some stuff. Nice work. I ended up buying a complete plane and I am now working on a corvair engine for her.

[@jamesburns2232]

Wood is very forgiving. You can use a sander to shape it with the grain or across the grain. Even rectangular pieces can be shaped with a hand sander and a belt sander for leading and trailing edges.

[@boeinguy727]

PS, I've seen plenty of photos where builders did not trim the edge (the "T") off and "nested" the gussets against the edge. Not saying it's wrong or OK, but I guess some are flying like that. At 4:38, you just have to think ahead as to your hinge....what type and will you be able to get the bolt in. By the way, ribs...Andrew Pietenpol spoke with me and was adamant that the entire rear spar be 4 3/4" (don't sand down the rear part).

[@roki5941]

Is that manual available for downloading ?

[@glenturney4750]

Do you know what works good to plane down the ends where your hand plane had difficulty in trimming, 'cause of the other beam not being cut and glued correctly? An electric hand-held disk sander. It can be used to carefully sand down the beam that is glued together with the grain of the wood in the incorrect direction. An electric hand sander would take that leading and trailing edge down very nicely and can be gently blended to match the long beam that your hand planer is doing for you. Either that, or a router with the correct shaped bit will work very nicely to shape the entire length. 🙂

[@FPVav8tr]

I’m curious why you didn’t base your rib jig off of the one piece full size paper rib?

[@markbits1960]

I didn't buy it. I was cheap, and also I wanted to draw it in cad so that I could get gusset plates laser cut at the shop at my school. In retrospect I might have done it differently.

[@maineflying3564]

Those are two different ribs. If you plot the points on his plans adjacent to the printed full size, the profiles are different. Notice on his print in this video, the vertical beams for the ribs are not pictured, and just the spar is there (but he added them adjacent to the spar). Also, the printed one on the full size paper is not to scale. The distance between the spars is listed as 27 3/4” but it is actually 27 7/16”.

[@davidfw190]

Use a sanding block instead

[@valerypilot882]

I feel dizzy from this video. Slowly, I'm recording.