Got skins?

Friends,

After finally getting my assembly table rebuilt and getting back to work, I spent the last several days cutting skin blanks for the elevator, slats and flaperons. I decided to go ahead and bend up the slat skins first, as they are the most complicated skins to bend. The nice thing is that they can all be done on the brake, but there is a lot of setup time in between certain bends. And with 4 bend lines on each skin, there is a lot of time laying out the part for bending. 

As always, with the complicated bends and large pieces, I made a test strip about 20mm wide to determine my bend pattern. I got very lucky on the first try (although now I'm so familiar with how the brake bends, that it was a sort of "educated guess" about where to put the bend lines). Here are the results:

Test skin pattern next to slat rib and slat tip. Not the opposing flange bend at the lower right:

Test skin pattern clamped around rib to check measurements:

The first inboard slat skin bent to tolerance (it's perfect!). I bent this skin up from start to finish without bending anything on the other three skins, so to ensure the part would turnout correctly. It is approximately 6 feet long:

 Another view of the first slat skin. These skins are made in .016" and they are extremely flimsy. Care must be taken to avoid kinks and smileys:

 

All four slat skins bent to tolerance...2 inboard and 2 outboard skins (the outboard skins are nearly 7 feet long). Once the first skin was completed, I switched to "assembly line" mode, and performed the same bend on each skin before setting up the brake to perform the next bend. This saved a lot of setup time compared to how I bent the first skin:

 

Another view of the slat skins:

I shot a full video on how I bent these skins and it details the bending brake setup issues. The video also includes some of my reasoning on the "how and why" I did things the way I did. I'll get that video cut together soon and post an update with it. I also still have hours of other videos to cut together, particularly the remaining parts of the Horizontal Stabilizer Build. That's all for now!

Cheers,

Greg