In our last episode, our intrepid BD- had built a bending brake but been forced out of his airplane factory by the sweltering St. Louis summer heat. Once the temperature dropped, I was able to make the bend for the middle of the BD-4C dorsal fin and then cut it to shape, ready to have the flanges bent. It looked like this (you can click on this photo, or any other, to see a larger view):
There was just one teeny tiny problem with having the fin look like that: The narrow end of the fin was too narrow to fit into my real bending brake.
My handmade brake was fine for tightening up a bend past 90 degrees but it could not start a bend. So I had no way to bend the flanges.
The solution was to grab some more scrap lumber, screw it to the edge of my handmade brake, and fabricate yet another handmade brake. It took four hands to make the bend (thanks, Al, for lending a hand or two!) but here is the result.
The flanges still needed some adjusting to get them “just right” so I have been doing that by hand with a Wiss hand seamer obtained from the aviation aisle of my local Home Depot. Here is the fin, perched on the top of the BD-4C fuselage at the front of the vertical stabilizer.
In addition to working on the BIG dorsal fin, I have been working on a tiny rudder cable guide. This piece was just a shade too close to the push-pull tube for the horizontal stabilator. The tube sometimes rubbed against the guide so I reshaped the guide a bit, to avoid this contact.
