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Suprisingly I keep coming back to wood as material for mass production
since the whole of the structure could be made of one material. There
are obvious logistic benefits there, and I think most wood techniques
could be practically achieved robotically.

Wood, especially good wood, is getting scarcer all the time.
Consistently good wood is hard to find. It's the reason ladder
manufacturers went to aluminum and/or fiberglass a long time ago. The
big Sitka Spruce and other types of trees that gave us good
aircraft-grade wood mostly went to build houses a long time ago when it
seemed we'd never run out of the stuff. What's left is protected in
parks.


The airplanes mentioned in the original post were, I'm pretty sure, cold
molded - a very labor intensive process of laying individual strips of
veneer - each trimmed to shape - over a plug and either stapled of vacuum
bagged until the laminate cures.
But other methods exist to build wood stressed skin structures. e.g.
"Constant Camber" is a boat building method where full sheets of veneer are
placed in a somewhat generic female mold and vacuum bagged - the mold does
not have compound curves, but by changing the position of the layup, you get
different shaped panels that then can be assembled into whatever.

Another option is "tortured plywood" where thin plywood is forced into a
compound shape.

Amateur boat builders are also using a "stich and glue" technique to make
plywood hulls - I wonder how long before someone tries it for an airplane?

Or - consider a structure like a KR-2 - a plywood box with some sticks to
reinforce. Not a swoopy looking as a Mosquito bomber, but it works and it
doesn't require "premium" lumber

The hard part would be to come up with a reasonable replacement for the
spars in the wings. To avoid the big expensive spruce planks, one might have
to consider an engineered product like Laminated Veneer Lumber (LVL)...


--
Geoff
The Sea Hawk at Wow Way d0t Com
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