Some skin in the game
Having the front end ring fitted to the fixture is a nice thing to have behind me, and fitting the Tempest II skins to the monocoque section was oddly satisfying. The accuracy of our fixture and the parts that we have reverse engineered proved to be identical to those that last came out of Hawker’s tooling department nearly 80 years ago; a very good feeling!
Our next step on the way to completion was to rough trim the stringers. There are several different termination points for the stringers due to the narrowing fuselage section as can be seen in this image:
Another interesting thing about the Typhoon’s fuselage stringers is that they do not pass through the heavy frame at the front end, frame “A”. The stringers terminate immediately behind frame “A”, and start again forward of the same frame. On the aft side there are small clips that connect the ends of the stringers to the frame fasteners, forward of the frame there is no connection between the stringer segments and the frame itself. As the stringers have no connection to the frames, the forward segments are not installed in this image (whereas I was able to tuck the longer sections in place for the image):
Stringers “tucked” into their locations.
And then there were the skins! The skins on the Typhoon fuselage are 145.25” long (approximately); a standard sheet of aluminum is 12ft long, or 144”! When we ordered our material, we had requested a quote for custom sheets so we could cut multiple skins from one sheet, however the quote and shipping was nearly double that of buying one standard sheet for each Typhoon skin, so that is what we did. Having to orient the skins at an angle ensured we had the right amount of material, but left us with lots of large triangular scraps.
Rough cutting skin blanks.
The leftovers!
Originally I had thought there would be limited use for the leftover bits outside of smaller brackets and other parts, but it now looks like we will have plenty of material for our rear mono section and the fin….. AND many smaller parts! I’m very happy with this, and it was all for less than buying the custom larger sheets. We have now rough cut all 12 skin segments for the monocoque, and will begin fitting them over the next few days!
Our pile of Typhoon fuselage skin blanks