As promised, here are photos of the intricate woodwork in the otherwise aluminum Bede BD-4C. There is a 7′ long aluminum tube which runs through the fuselage to activate the horizontal stabilator. The ends of this push-pull tube have aluminum clad hardwood inserted into them.

I cut the wood roughly to shape. The .063″ thick [...]

I had been avoiding making the VS-16 spacer for the top of the rudder of my Bede BD-4C airplane for weeks. Everything else that I have made to date has been out of aluminum. This was the first part made out of 4130 alloy steel. I knew that this was a very hard [...]

Tonight I made a pair of brackets which will hold two of the pulleys for activating the ailerons on my Bede BD-4C. These brackets are made from .063″ thick aluminum, which is two to three times thicker than anything I have had to bend before. As the metal gets thicker, it is more likely to [...]

I have spent the last two weekends making a whole slew of brackets for the Bede BD-4C. That means that I have been turning 2″x2″x0.063″ aluminum angle extrusions like this into airplane parts. (Click on any of the pictures below to see larger versions.)

“Turning into” means that I start with a two dimensional drawing [...]

How I spent my winter vacation: Since I had the week between Christmas and New Years off work, it gave me a long stretch of time to attack the large job of installing the floor in my Bede BD-4C. I thought it would be simple but, in the end, I was very glad that I had [...]

I have finished the rudder of my Bede BD-4C! Well, almost finished the rudder. It still needs the counterbalance on the top and the weldment on the bottom. And it needs to actually be riveted together. But, other than those trivialities, the rudder is done. The two skins are trimmed to size. The piano hinge [...]

I have designed and fabricated my first parts from scratch! As I mentioned in Starting on the Rudder, I needed to design new, smaller ribs for my Bede BD-4C rudder. I did and they fit. Click the photo to jump to the on-line gallery where you can see larger pictures.

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I started on the rudder of my Bede BD-4C, again. A week or so ago, I had built two of the ribs that go inside the rudder, the VS-9 rib for the bottom and the VS-10 rib for the middle. These two were made out of 0.025″ aluminum but I could not make the top [...]

I had all five pieces of tail cone for my Bede BD-4C cut out but I had not been able to drill the screw holes in the top. The TC-2 (top piece) fits over the skins. That would have been just fine except the skins came pre-fabricated from BedeCorp, including having the screw holes pre-drilled. [...]