Bébé love…

The question came from my wife, “That’s lovely, sweetie, where are you going to put it?” To be fair to my wife, Naomi, she’d had a day of supervising children’s homework and piano lessons, while I had been enjoying coffee and biscuits at the LAA AGM. The wooden box I was proudly bearing contained a silver trophy from that meeting, and represented the culmination of several long years of work in the garage behind our Guildford house. For quite a lot of that time, I was also not helping with children’s homework.

I suppose I’d had some warning of the reception it was likely to receive. One of my other hobbies is target rifle shooting, and if you are looking for a sport where the ratio of silverware to competitors is particularly favourable, target rifle shooting has much to recommend it. The sport has its origins in the Victorian era, where the skills of the long range marksman were in high demand, and the country was wealthy enough to afford a lot of silverware. Those pieces still exist, although the number of young men and women competing for them has diminished. As a result, I have taken home some spectacular and quite sizeable examples of the Victorian silversmith’s art, although my pride in winning them was not matched by my family’s enthusiasm for having the horrid thing in our house for the next year.

Right Please excuse the messy workbench.

To my relief, the Albert Codling trophy is an attractive silver Pitts biplane on a plinth. There are some great LAA names on that plinth: Lynn Williams, Barry Plumb and Dudley Pattison, to name just a few. At the end of this remarkable list was mine. It is awarded for the best part-built aircraft. “Part-built?” asked Mrs V, shooting me a suspicious glance. “I thought it was nearly finished?”. It probably wasn’t the best time to admit that a homebuilt aircraft is never really finished.

It started at Popham Airfield, in around 2004. Popham, if you don’t know it, is a delightful airfield set in rolling Hampshire countryside. The landscape around it could satisfy a lifetime of low and slow summer evening flying, buzzing about in little microlight aircraft over fields and streams, out over the scarp edge of Watership Down and over the valley beneath. If feeling brave I might venture south, out over the blue waters of the Solent and across to the Isle of Wight. And I was happy doing this until one day, there on the grass in front of the Popham café, appeared a thing of beauty: G-BUCO, an immaculate Pietenpol Aircamper built (I now know) by a gentleman called Alan James. Next to it my AX3 Cyclone microlight looked like, well, it looked like a flying tent. I had to get a better looking aeroplane.

This was about the time Amazon was simply a book store, and it had really opened up my access to books about flying. I had read (and still regularly re-read) Ron Wanttaja’s Kitplane Construction. John Urmston’s Birds and Fools Fly sits by my bed, and I love his light and humorous style of writing. John Isaacs’ autobiography is on a bookshelf next to my bath.

These started me to think seriously about building something. The LAA has a treasure trove of plans, particularly of the low and slow summer-evening variety of aeroplane. The problem was that the aircraft that I liked the look of, John Urmston’s Currie Wot, Arthur Ord-Hume’s Luton Minor, and the brilliant little Turbulent, were mostly wood, and as such they needed to be kept in a hangar. I could not see myself being able to find, let alone afford, indoor hangarage in the south-east of England.

There was, however, a design being built extensively in the US which caught my eye; the Circa Nieuport. Another Amazon purchase had been a book by Dick Starks about building a pair of these replicas with his friend Tom Glaeser. I have a particular weakness for anything that could be called a ‘flying machine’ rather than an aeroplane, and the Nieuport 11 (Bébé) biplane falls close to that category, particularly if one were to cover it in translucent doped linen and omit anything as war-like as a Lewis gun. But the Circa design is made of aluminium tube, not wood, so it would not mind being left out in the rain occasionally, at least during the summer. The only problem, and admittedly it was a pretty large one, was that it was not an approved design in the UK, so it could not be flown here.

In April 2007, everything changed. The CAA deregulated single-seat microlight aircraft. I could build the Nieuport if the weight and stall speed fitted within the microlight category.

The first thing I did was to order the plans from designer Graham Lee’s son. These arrived from Canada a week later. I was initially disappointed. Instead of beautiful draughtsman’s blueprints, I received a photocopy of a handwritten and hand-sketched series of instructions. However, after reading through them, they were clear, easy to understand and talked the reader through each stage.

Although Graham gave instructions for building an aircraft under 115kg (or 254lb, the US ultra-light weight) I was not yet convinced that it could be done. I created a huge excel spreadsheet, with one line for every part of the aircraft, setting out its dimensions, diameter, and wall thickness, and, by multiplying these by the density of aluminium, its estimated weight. I estimated the weights of wires, wheels, fasteners and covering. Working through an overnight flight to Hong Kong, I established that if a suitably light engine could be found and the covering kept light, it should be possible to build the aircraft within the 115kg weight limit. Finding a suitable engine was more of a challenge. The original had flown in the 1980s with a 25hp Cuyuna engine.

No such thing existed 30 years later. Builders in the US had used a 36hp Volkswagen: an excellent engine, but too heavy if I was to keep the aircraft within the UK weight limits.

The plans suggested a Rotax 447 as an alternative: these are no longer made. The 50hp Rotax 503 is available, but this was discounted in the plans as being too powerful.

On the internet I had read about an engine called a Verner 3VW. With three cylinders, the empty weight was said to be only 36kg. It produced 36hp, or 42hp for take-off. Better still, it was a radial so it would look right, and a four stroke, so it would sound right.

Learning to build

I needed to learn some aircraft building skills, so I signed up for two LAA courses. The first was about aluminium. In a Portakabin on a windswept and rainy airfield, I learned to use air tools to cut, shape and rivet aluminium, coming away from the day with an aluminium toolbox, and the realisation that I would need to buy a compressor.

The woodworking course was hosted by LAA tutor Dudley Pattison at his house near Swindon. Duds is a famous name

Above

Above in the radio-controlled aircraft world as the founder of Flair models, and I had built some of his kits, so it was a bit of an honour to meet him. He had just completed an immaculate wooden Flitzer biplane.

He taught us about glues, aircraft grade timber, making scarf joints and all the things one would need to build a wooden aircraft. But one particular piece of advice stuck in my memory. That was to ‘move the bolt’. Building an aircraft is a very long and difficult project. With pressures of work and life, it is easy for progress to cease for long periods, or end altogether. The many unfinished aircraft projects advertised for sale are a testament to the difficulty that many builders have in staying the course. Duds’ advice was simple: every day, go into the workshop and do something. If nothing else, just ‘move a bolt from one hole to another’. That way, you stay in the habit of working on the aircraft, and even if there are long periods when you do not have time to make any real progress, it always remains present in your mind.

I would need tools. I started to acquire these – a bandsaw and drill press were the first to find a home in the single-car garage behind my house. The Nieuport is mostly built using pulled rivets, so I purchased a compressor and rivet puller. I also needed strange temporary rivets called ‘clecos’ to hold parts together before I riveted parts permanently. These came from an aircraft tool supplier near my office, along with some 1/8 and 3/16 inch drill bits. Imperial sizes were a new thing for me. I was used to working in millimetres and decimals, and I regularly got confused in my mind between 3/8 and 3/16. In practice you can’t get confused: a 3/16 drill bit is thinner than a pencil, but a 3/8 drill bit is as thick as your finger.

First steps: building a rudder

As an experiment to see if I could actually do this, I ordered the materials for the rudder. The techniques for building a rudder are the same as are used in the rest of the aircraft, so this was a useful experiment.

One Saturday morning, when I was home alone, I carefully cut a main spar tube to length, and filed the ends into a fish-mouth shape where it would meet the tubular frame that forms the outline of the rudder. That frame needed to be bent around a wooden former so on a bandsaw I cut some scrap wood into a gentle curve, and screwed it firmly to the work surface. By clamping a long piece of the aluminium tube against this wooden former and pulling it around the bend, it was possible to bend the tube into the shape of the rudder outline, without the tube buckling. I slotted my spar into this frame, stood back and admired it.

Below left Thin aluminium gussets can be cut with hand shears.

Below right Joining the fuselage sides together.

Bottom left Fuselage detail, where three tubes meet the longeron.

A couple of other tubes formed ribs, running from the front to the back of the rudder. To hold it all together I cut diamond-shaped gussets from the thin aluminium sheet. These were easy to cut with scissors. One of these was clamped hard onto the spar and dented with a punch to form a dimple where the rivet would go. I drilled a hole, and inserted cleco to hold the parts hard together. I folded the gusset over the outer edge of the frame and back onto the other side of the spar. More clamping, and I could drill and insert rivets to fix them together permanently.

The next task was a rudder horn, to which the control cables would attach. This is a flat sheet of thicker aluminium. I had to use the bandsaw to cut this out, and then patiently file the edges smooth where the bandsaw had left teeth marks in the edge. These teeth marks are stress risers which can start a crack running through the material, so they need to be filed smooth. By the end of the day I had a rudder. I weighed my finished rudder. It was within my estimates on my spreadsheet. I covered it with heat shrink fabric, mounted the hinges on a workbench and held it horizontal with a cable to the rudder horn. I put a couple of bin bags filled with sand on to it, filling them and measuring the deflection until it took on a permanent set – that was the point of failure. Some calculations using formulae from the internet told me that this would be the equivalent of applying full rudder deflection at over 100kt, so it was certainly strong enough. Structurally the rudder looked to me to be the weakest part of the airframe.

Ordering materials

With things looking positive on both technical and domestic fronts, I ordered the aluminium tubes and sheet for the whole airframe, along with nuts, bolts and rivets from Aircraft Spruce and Specialty. One advantage of my spreadsheet was that it generated a full list of parts and materials that I’d need. I added a bit extra to everything to be sure I didn’t run out.

It was a few weeks before the call came in: “Delivery from the United States for you. You’ll need to come and pay the duty and get it.” “How big is the package?” I asked. “Thirteen feet long,” he replied. “And you won’t be able to lift it.”.

I hadn’t thought of that. Thirteen feet in length wasn’t a problem, it could go on my roof rack. But how would I get it up there?

“We’re not supposed to, but if you can come this afternoon, I can help you lift it on,” the voice said, kindly. I’d figure out how to get it off again when I got home.

I took the afternoon off work and drove to the warehouse. I had imagined that I would need to collect the package at the airport and pay the customs duty there, but in fact the warehouse was in an industrial estate in Slough. The warehouseman wheeled a long box out on a pallet truck. He and a colleague each took one end and, assisted by a good degree of profanity, lifted it onto the roof-rack. It was clearly heavy, and a brief mental calculation showed it should be: about half of the aircraft weight was in that box. After paying, I strapped it down and drove cautiously home. It stayed on the roof rack on the driveway overnight. If I couldn’t move it, I thought that the chances of it being stolen were fairly low.

The next morning, I persuaded my neighbour Glen to help me lift it down. Glen is a large New Zealander and, like so many of his countrymen, is particularly helpful to have around when it comes to moving heavy things. He was to prove equally useful a week later when a courier company left a second-hand lathe in the middle of the driveway.

We lowered the box carefully onto a couple of dollies: squares of plywood with castors on the bottom. Bridging these I had screwed two 14ft ceiling joists. My idea was to put the box on this wheeled base, so I could move it around in the limited space of the workshop, and take pieces from it as needed.

Above it, I built sides and a top, from MDF sheet and some more ceiling joists. This made a long, flat work table that could be pushed up against one wall of the workshop if needed, or wheeled into the centre so that I could get around each side. With the garage door shut, there was a foot spare at each end that I could squeeze around. After tearing my shirt doing this too quickly, I rounded off the corners of the table with a sanding block.

I covered the top of the table with wallpaper paste and lining paper. On the surface I started to measure out and draw the fuselage sides. This took quite a few evenings. Inevitably I would make mistakes, and have to rub parts out and start again, but eventually I had the fuselage drawn out, complete with verticals and diagonal bracing tubes. I cut scrap wood into small blocks which I screwed in at critical points to hold the tubing in the right place.

The rear fuselage was easy enough. The longerons are straight tubes, which just need to be cut to length, and fish-mouthed at the end where they meet the tailpost. Just behind the cockpit area they slide inside the front longerons, which are made of a slightly larger diameter tube. But the front longerons are more difficult to make because they are curved.

Below left Fishmouthing a half-inch tube at an angle on the lathe.

Below middle Using a wooden block helped to hold the tube against the mill cutter.

Below right The result, a perfect machine-made fishmouth end.

The plans suggest taking a wheel and tyre off a car, and slowly bending the front longerons over this. That didn’t work, the tubes were too thick to bend in this way.

What did work was to clamp in my vice a short length of steel tube which fitted neatly inside the front longeron. I didn’t cut the longeron to length, so that I could pull on the free end of the tube and exert some considerable leverage. By doing this I was able to coax the front longerons into a gentle curve for the top pair, and a more extreme curve for the bottom pair.

Fishmouthing on the lathe

The next job was the vertical tubes which fitted between the longerons, and the diagonal cross braces that go between them. Each tubes had to be fish-mouthed to fit the tube that it butted up against. Very few of the joints were right angles. Filing these accurately would be hard, not to mention tiring.

With my lathe I had purchased a set of mill cutters. These were like drill bits, but without the tapered point. I had one which was almost exactly the same diameter as the longeron tubes. If I could hold the tube to be fish-mouthed at the correct angle, I could move it slowly onto the rotating mill cutter and cut the fish-mouth shape. My first attempts did not go well. The cutter would grab at the tube and pull it into the lathe, scoring great marks up the side of it. Several pieces ended up in the scrap and I was worried that I would run out of tube.

During a sleepless night, I had an idea. I would remove the toolpost of the lathe, and put a large wooden block in its place. Through this, using a drill bit in the chuck of the lathe, I would drill holes of the diameter of the tube that would make the fuselage cross braces: 3/8in and 1/2in. These holes should exactly align with the centre of the cutter. Now, I could clamp the tube in the wooden block, at whatever angle the tube was to meet the longeron, and move it slowly onto the rotating mill cutter.

Unfortunately, the idea arrived in my mind at about 5am, so I had to wait until it was a civilised hour before putting it into practice. I did not think my neighbours would appreciate the sounds of drilling at that hour. At 7.30am (barely civilised) I crept out to the workshop and tried it out. It worked, and as long as I cut slowly the mill cutter would not snatch at the tube, but cut it cleanly. By now I had to go to work, so I left it to pick up in the evening, and set off for the office happy that it worked.

A fuselage takes shape

When I had made two fuselage sides on my workbench, I could start to join them together. This was an exciting task because I could see the fuselage starting to take shape. The upper longerons were mostly flat, so it would be easiest to build it upside down on the workbench.

I started by cutting a square out of plywood the same size as the cockpit width, and mounted it on the workbench towards one end. I strapped the two fuselage sides to it, and drew the two ends together where they would meet at the tailpost. It was important to get the tailpost absolutely vertical, so I cut two right-angled triangles from plywood and screwed those to the table top, either side of the rear fuselage, using electrical ties to hold the aluminium lattice frame to them. By careful filing, I shaped the ends of the longerons to fit the tailpost, then drilled and riveted gussets to hold it in place. I checked it with my spirit level: close enough. It was now a simple matter to cut, fish-mouth and fit cross members and diagonals along the fuselage bottom, up to the cockpit area. When finished I flipped the fuselage over and did the top.

My garage was just wide enough to fit the tailplane and rudder on my fuselage frame, so I strapped them on with some electrical ties and stood back to admire them. With a fuselage, and some tail feathers I could now really say that I had the beginnings of an aeroplane, not just some components. The tailplane and fin looked so good that I initially left them in place, thinking that as the next stage would be the firewall I would not need to climb around the back for some time. But I had underestimated how many tools were at that end of the workshop, so they had to come off again…

Fitting a firewall

The longeron tubes which form the front of the fuselage come together at the front, where the firewall will sit. The plans required me to make four aluminium plugs to fit the end of these tubes. These plugs have bolts passing lengthways through them, the shank and thread of the bolt protruding forwards, onto which you fasten the firewall, and engine bearers.

I had to make these plugs on a lathe. To my delight I found that aluminium rod is very easy to work with, and in an afternoon I turned four pieces to the diameter of the inside of the tubes. With the aluminium rod secured in the rotating chuck, and a drill bit stationary in the tailstock, I drilled a hole through the centre. Replacing the drill bit with a mill cutter (a big drill bit without a pointed tip) I hollowed out each plug most of the way down. A bolt now dropped neatly down the length of the plug, the head inside, and shank and thread protruding. I held the head in place inside the plug with a drop of epoxy resin. These plugs then fitted inside the longerons and were held in place with a further bolt passing sideways through the tube and plug.

I made up a firewall out of plywood, with a sheet of aluminium on the front as fuel and fireproofing. The firewall slid over the projecting bolt shanks, and I secured it in place with locking nuts.

Cabane struts

The final task on the fuselage was to fit the front upper wing cabane struts. These were streamline section aluminium tubing. The same tubing would also be used for the undercarriage legs. I managed to find the tubing from a supplier in the US but to ship it over separately would be very expensive. I was due to attend a meeting at a US law firm in a couple of weeks, so I asked the supplier to cut the tube into the lengths I would need, and flew to the US with an empty golf bag in my checked luggage. The aluminium tubes caused some surprise when they arrived at the law firm’s offices: their more usual deliveries being files of paper, and the Nieuport became something of a topic of conversation whilst I was there. They wanted to know what it was, when it would fly, how many horsepower it would have, and whether it could cross the channel to France. The fact that the first American pilots of the Escadrille Lafayette had flown Nieuports was of particular interest.

On returning to Heathrow, I presented myself at the red channel at customs and opened the golf bag to reveal six lengths of aerofoil section aluminium tubing. The customs officer scratched his head for a bit: this was far from the usual passenger luggage. He asked what it was for. I told him, at possibly too great a length, all about the Nieuport. He seemed less enthusiastic than my American hosts and waved me through with nothing to pay. ■

Next month in Part 2: Wings, covering, and a first hop…