Plywood bonding to Aluminum fuselage structure ??

Hi guys,
thanks all for the responses. Doing further research I have an idea
of bolting thin furring strips to the aluminum fuselage structure.
Countersink the heads, washers, lock nuts. My idea is to soak these
and bolt them gently to the fuselage with so they can cure to the
correct curve. Then remove the furring and fully varnish it.
Re-attach via lock nuts. Then glue the fuselage siding onto the
underlying furring.

The benefits are removable of the fuselage skins can be accomplished
by unbolting the underlying furring strips from the aluminum. The
other benefit is I avoid a direct glue joint between aluminum and wood.


Comments ???????????

Candice

Candice,
Is there a reason you are using plywood? BD-4's are being built every
day with aluminum bonded to the outside of aluminum structure with
Proseal adhesives. WWW.bd-4.org will get you into their site. The
latest is the bonding of aluminum sheet to ribs as a finished surface
with only rivits on the trailing edge. When they want a covering to be
removeable it is fastened with an bolts and nuts directly to the angle
structure. If you are using tubing and penetrating it for bolts I
would be concerned about weakening the structure by the penetration of
the bolts. the tightening would also distort the tubes. Depends on
your structure. Jim Bede did a paper on the strength of fastener types
that is also available on the website. good luck with it and have fun.


Dean B.

Hi guys,
Thanks for all the comments. I should of explained the plywood
angle first off. I'm just trying to engineer a viable option of
building a full scale Siemens Schukert D4 which had a plywood fuselage.
The plywood in this case would just be for skinning and not for
strength, although I would think it would act as a stiffener on the
overall fuselage.

I'm doing this as an exercise because I was always interested in a
Albatros DII aircraft, again with the varnished plywood fuslage
skinning. The basic start with an aluminum tube structure is due to my
currently building a full scale Nieuport 17 by Airdrome Airplanes. I'm
very impressed with the overall strength of my N17 fuselage so it
seemed to be a good starting point for this evaluation.
I have a Rotec R2800 engine for that project. So..with the radial
engine that also makes a Siemens Schukert aircraft more attractive to
build since I already have an engine I can install from the Nieuport
should I go ahead.
I've heard that the Rheinbeck SIemens Schukert DIII had some
stability problems and wasn't flown much, although I'm not sure if they
even flew it at all. I've been building a model of the N17 in a
program designed to determine longitudinal stability of various
aircraft configurations. I will do a Siemens study in the near future,
but the plywood query was an exploratory question on my part since I
haven't worked on a wooden aircraft yet.

Thanks for all the help folks.

Candice Anne

"Candice" wrote in message
ups.com...
Hi guys,
Thanks for all the comments. I should of explained the plywood
angle first off. I'm just trying to engineer a viable option of
building a full scale Siemens Schukert D4 which had a plywood fuselage.
The plywood in this case would just be for skinning and not for
strength, although I would think it would act as a stiffener on the
overall fuselage.


fwiw, If you really want to hang plywood, I would think that the good old
fashioned plywood box with stringers would be less work and provide a more
"efficient" structure than aluminumn tubes with plywood attached for effect.
Glue it up and you are good to go.

--
Geoff
The Sea Hawk at Wow Way d0t Com
remove spaces and make the obvious substitutions to reply by mail
When immigration is outlawed, only outlaws will immigrate.