LETS BUILD A 50% CANOPY

[SleepyC]

Well, Mike and Mark are at it again, so were going to call this PART 2 of the previous leading edge article: Dyno: lets build some HP together! If that thread isn't a big enough project, The guys decided to jump back into their 50% Extra 300 thread, and get the canopy done.

Once again Mike is pushing the boundaries of our hobby, taking things into his own hands, and conferring with all the FG members on how he should proceed.

Mark Mcclellan is the man cutting the foam canopy plug for Mike Chandley. I'll let Mark describe in technical terms what they are doing, but for us laymen, basically he's taking a 40% Carden Canopy (with PERMISSION) and blowing it up to 50%.

I asked Mark to briefly describe what exactly the process is when blowing up a canopy and creating a plug out of foam, so here is his description:

	Quote:
	The Basics: We are using a 3 axis bed mill , it is an ATRUMP with a CENTROID M-400 controller with digitizing and scaling software turned on . The process: First I made sure the kit maker Carden was OK with me doing this and as long as I'm not producing kits to sell Dennis said it was OK. In fact he said maybe someday he will kit these 50% planes ! So we took the 40% Carden Extra 300 canopy and mounted it on a board and then mounted that to the table of the mill. We then put the probe in and turned on the digitizing software, set up some parameters and hit go ! The machine mapped out the surface of the canopy for us. So then we took and figured out how big of a block of foam we needed to have to do a test cut. That block turned out to be 38 x 15 x 12 inches . (RATHER LARGE!) We then cut the block of foam and epoxied a couple boards to the bottom so we could mount the block of foam to the mill . We then put a cutter in the mill, turned on scaling, set a few more parameters and hit go. Foam starts flying, and after a decent amount of time, you have it a 50% canopy plug !

Pretty cool stuff if I don't say so my self.
I can't wait to see the progress continue , and eventually see this beast fly.

Once again, Thanks to Mike and Mark for keeping our hobby interesting, and pushing it into the next level.


Please follow this link to the EXTRA 300 thread,
The canopy construction starts around the last few pages, but if you haven't had a chance to read the entire thread, please give it a good read, it's another example of a Flyinggiants group effort going really, really well.


EXTRA 300 thread
can be found
here
--------> http://www.flyinggiants.com/forums/f...tra-300-a.html

[SleepyC]

To keep the questions and traffic on the actual thread, I'm going to close this one, and just leave it as a re-direct to the actual thread.