After spending much time and effort to properly create the large fuselage skins for my Bede BD-4C airplane, you would think that I would want to keep them nice and whole. You would think wrong. Two of them needed large holes cut into them. The top skin needed a hole for the vertical stabilizer’s spar […]

Big weekend: I have bonded the first fuselage skins onto my Bede BD-4C airplane. I painted 3M Scotch-Weld #10 Contact Adhesive onto both the skin and the fuselage angles and then “just” stuck the two together. Here are a few photos. There is actually more adhesive on the plane than is visible in the pictures. The […]

The rear part of the fuselage of the Bede BD-4C airplane that I am building is about 11 feet long. There are eight pieces of skin which cover it. The aft-most pieces are 0.016 inches thick and about 7.5 feet long. The four pieces farther forward are 0.020 inches thick about 3.5 feet long. I […]

I have made a bunch of progress on the first piece of fuselage skin for my Bede BD-4C airplane. This is the piece on the top of the fuselage, at the rear. It sits under the vertical stabilizer so, no surprise, I got to cut a hole in the skin for the stabilizer’s spar to […]

Tonight, I screwed up my courage and made a diagonal cut along a 4 foot by 8 foot sheet of aluminum. This is the first piece of fuselage skin for my Bede BD-4C airplane.

If you have been following my progress building a Bede BD-4C airplane for awhile, you might have been wondering where I have been and why I have not posted anything for several months. Frankly, I hit a terribly frustrating phase and have been too discouraged to write about it. I finally got past it, though, so […]

June 29, 2013 was a perfect day for putting the wings on my Bede BD-4C airplane for the first time. “With a little help from my friends” and family, we carried the wings out of the garage, rolled the fuselage out into the sunshine, and then installed the wings. Here is a shot of the […]

The main spar of the Bede BD-4 is a 6 inch diameter aluminum tube. This is, literally, the piece from which the entire airplane hangs as the wings fly through the air. As you can imagine, it is kind of vital that the fuselage be well attached to the spar. Here is a photo of […]

I finished the right wing aileron of my Bede BD-4C airplane tonight. Both ailerons and both flaps are now complete. Here (again) are the flap and aileron for the left wing: And here, in its debut appearance, are the flap and aileron for the right wing: Eventually, there will be a lead counterweight attached to […]

Bonus photo: With the aileron ribs bolted to the torque tube, I did a test installation of the aileron on the left wing of my Bede BD-4C. Wonder of wonders, it fit perfectly with no side-to-side wobbling and no trouble installing the last bracket. 🙂 After confirming that the ribs were exactly the right distance […]

I am starting on the left aileron for my airplane. On the Bede BD-4C, the ailerons are operated by 10 foot long torque tubes which run from the fuselage, through the flaps, all the way to the wing tips. Here is a picture of the torque tube for the left wing with the aileron ribs […]

Check out this photo of the outer half of the flap for the left wing of my Bede BD-4C airplane. (You can click on it to see it larger, as with any other photo.) You may think that this photo looks just like the ones that I posted on May 20 or perhaps even the […]

At long last, I am doing something large that actually looks like an airplane part! 😀 I am making the flaps for my Bede BD-4C airplane. The wings are 10 feet wide; the flaps are made of two 40 inch wide halves and the aileron is another 40 inches. To make each half of the flap, […]

Last night I installed the outer aileron support bracket on the right wing of my Bede BD-4C. Here is a bonus photo with all of the brackets labeled so you can see what all I have been babbling about for the last couple of weeks. Click on the picture to see a larger version. The […]

Having completed the mid-flap support brackets on the wings of my Bede BD-4C airplane, I continued working along the wing to the inboard aileron support bracket, which supports the outboard end of the flap and the inboard end of the aileron, and then to the outboard aileron support bracket. The outboard bracket was easy; it […]

The original wing design for the Bede BD-4 used a one-piece flap, about seven feet long. The new metal wing on my Bede BD-4C airplane uses a two-piece flap, with each half being about 3.5 feet wide. The ribs at the ends of each half are tied together with a pair of 1/4 inch steel […]

I built a jig to help me assemble the flaps and ailerons of my BD-4C. Note the use of aviation-grade aluminum gutter flashing to face the jig, obtained from the aviation aisle at the local hardware store. Here is a shot with a flap skin and three ribs set into the jig.