Beancraft Banana_an Experiment

[SvenH.]

Sounds good, so the competition is on, but I would suggest, that we open up a new thread for this, as this is the build report about my Boston Beancraft Banana, and I would like to keep it like that.

[SvenH.]

After some absence here it is time to contiune the story of my Beancraft Banana. Work did of course continue and achieved some progress, so let's see...

[SvenH.]

...where was I, ah yes, I glued the left side of the fuselage directly onto the right one. This worked quite well

[SvenH.]

until I started to remove the double from the build-base after finished glue-up, but look yourself:

[SvenH.]

Spiros commented this by "That's quite normal, no worries, you can gule them back on after you separated them from each other" (or something like that    ), which kept my spirit up high, plus reminded me on the fact, that there was another scary task to come...the split...oh oh...

[SvenH.]

So I took the thinnest blade in my collection of Scalpels, I did not have any rasor-blade at hand even though Spiros insisted on me using that instead of a "thick" Scalpel. Maybe he was right, maybe it was my bad and too less use of glue, but the separation did not go that well, see below (upper Picture shows the right Fuselage after separation, the lower one left)

[SvenH.]

But with some extra glue and some extra time spent on the fuselage parts finally both halfes were finished

[SvenH.]

For the assemly-process of the two halfes and so creating a 3D-Structure, I decided to do each area, each tross if necessary, separately, though setting up the pieces on the base due to the drawing beneath and then gluing in the tross

[SvenH.]

See below the 2nd set-up, the first of the bottom trosses

[SvenH.]

This way I went all around, kind of at least, until I reached the inevitable more complex nose area, where the sides have to be bent to meet in the midle. Following my chosen method, I set up the fuselage once again, this time horizontically level (can bee seen in one of the previous pictures), so that I could use my 1-2-3 Blocks to push in the sides to their dedicated position, and keeping the sides square.

[Spiros]

Beautiful construction!

[SvenH.]

I decided to do the installation in the nose for the nose-block first (before finishing the glue-up at the rear). As mentioned before I use this build for testing several things I've seen at IIFI and/or YouTube that I find reasonable to have on a plane.
COncerning the nose I will follow the concept presented here by Tom Hallman, so I cut some thicker pieces of Balsa so that they work as connectors/brackets for the vertical walls that will guide the noseblock.

[SvenH.]

But to be able to follow this plan, I have to do the first modification according to the original drawing. I have to install 2 new beams/sticks (see picture below) on the front-diagonal, in order to give the upper brackets a 2nd place to be glued on, otherwise they would be glued on one spot only, which would be very weak.