🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <BztyrF.22A@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu> ntaib@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (Iskandar Taib) writes:
|In article <2569@rnivh.rni.sub.org> torsten@rnivh.rni.sub.org (Torsten Leibold) writes:
|>dqwelch@sgidq4.sdrc.com (Mike Welch) writes:
|
|>>I was wondering what kind of covering material to use?  I realize
|>>that Monokote is too heavy.  I have used some stuff called
|>>Flite Cote.  It was light, but not very strong.
|
|>>Would tissue and dope be advised?  Any other advice?
|
|>No !! Don't use tissue like silk or nylon if you'd like to get a light
|>covering. It needs vast amounts of paint to get enough tension and
|>that will make the covering much heavier than any film covering.
|
|I disagree. Nylon or silk may not be awfully light, but Silkspan is. 
|The amount of dope needed to fill the tissue isn't much and the covering
|adds a huge amount of stiffness to the structure.

Well, I'll add this: silk can be light, if you know what you're doing.  The
last airplane I completed, a Sig Skybolt, is silked.  When I told fellow club
members that I intended to silk the plane, all of them, to a man, told me
that I was looking for trouble, that my plane would never fly `cause it
would weight ten pounds.  It weighs six pounds, full up.  The covering,
including color paint, is lighter than Monokote would have been.  And it
lends MUCH more structural integrity, and is completely fuel-proof.  The
technique for making silk light is rather involved, and takes a lot of
work, but it is quite possible.

Oh, if you cover using Nitrate dope, then fill with one coat of Nitrate then
only white butyrate (the white fills better, and weighs no more than clear)
for filler, tension is no problem.  My open wing structures are drum tight
(tighter than Monokote gets) and *will not* sag.  The white areas have a
total of four light coats of dope, the red and black areas have five.

It also looks and feels *wonderful*.

			Dave Svoboda, Palatine, IL