Harvard Build Thread
As promised, here is the start of the Harvard thread. I recently grabbed this Top Flite Harvard that has been hanging on the wall of our local flying club for many years. I had been staring at it every weekend and finally decided it would look much better in the air.
To do that I had to build them a replacement, and I was able to give them a Chipmunk done up as one of two they have in the CHAA stable.
To say this plane had been built to "Display Standards" is putting it mildly. That description may have applied if you were looking at it from across the room. There were several areas I had identified as needing attention, but that was only the start of some serious work on a LOT of the structure.
As it was, I had to remove the tail feathers and rebuild or reinforce them to withstand flight loads and/or work as they were meant to. This in itself was not such a big problem, although one side of the rudder was over twice the width of the fuse. Adding a steerable tailwheel required a bit of structural alteration to the bottom of the fuse. It's a bit further back than stock. Oh well.
My plan was always to install retracts, then flaps if I could figure out how. Those two functions likely are going to take most of the work to complete. Along the way, removal of some of the skin and structure revealed some VERY suspect glue joints, to the point where only 30% of what I could see was actually bonded together. Off came the lower skin. That way I can get at anything that may need some better work and add bracing. There will likely be some C/F tape along the spars, especially at the intersection of the different panels. Luckily there won't be something still hidden that will contribute to the plane rekitting itself in the air.
I have a lot of the work done for both gear and flaps, just final tweaking and bending of the gear legs to get them to fit the wheels into the wells. The kit was originally designed for Robarts, but a mechanical set I bought at the London Swap meet now resides in their place, (a bit of humour involved with those, as on the return from the meet I showed them to my friend, to find they had originally come from one of his planes).
The split flaps required a lot of structural redesign and even though there was a lot of work with the saw, file and dremel I'm happy so far with the results. Copying the original setup with center flap as well I was able to keep the mechanism internal so there will only be the aileron servo arms protruding beneath the wing.
__________________
I know there's money in aviation........I put it there!
Last edited by Cougar429; 01-01-2011 at 11:16 PM.
|