Monday, February 21, 2011

Slow Progress.... But Still Progressing!

Thanks to Dave's comment about manually bending the center bend in the longerons I gained some more motivation to face the evil beast again. I went back to the workbench and took a fresh look at the bend, found misalignment and went a few inches back to the aft and started bending again. It appears that the manual method could work very well if you have a sturdy workbench that is firmly attached to the wall and or ground. This is not what I have in my shop though. So in the area of the strongest bend doing it manually moves the bench around to much and relieves the force you intend to put on the angle. So back to the mallet again it was. This time though, with some additional experience under my belt, it worked much better. I have it down to less than 1/32" precision which is all they asked for. I let it sit for a while and checked again later with fresh eyes and still liked it. I will do this again tomorrow evening and if I still like it then I will pass it through quality control and work on the aft bend (which hopefully won't take another day to finish).


Looking at the image I think the light is playing tricks on it as the fit looks really bad in it. Look at this one taken with a flash and I tell you I didn't move it in between!


The hours worked on the Big Bend in my log are quickly adding up. I think I can honestly say that the Big Bend is much more dreadful than the task of opening the angle which really just comes down to having the right tools and setup to get done relatively quick.

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