New project using Wing Helper

[Wayne]

I know some folks checking in here may not venture to other parts of the forum so thought I'd share a link to my current build that is using Wing Helper with:

ALOFT: AH-100 Build (new title)

"The Wing is the Thing" I wish I could remember where I learned that. Perhaps it was an RC Soaring Digest article title. https://www.rcsoaringdigest.com I love that sailplane - so much that I built three of them for winch launch, and sold two of them to flying buddies. The third led to a...

forum.alofthobbies.com

I have come up with a few tricks to get a different construction method for my spars and doublers:

Shear webs are not shown in this simple dihedral brace detail.

This is a very simple wing, but I ended up reworking it many times, you can see the evolution in the thread.

Looking forward to seeing it come to life. Just a little fine tuning outside of Wing Helper and we can start cutting.

 

[alex_pozgaj]

Nice! I especially like how you are using an additional panel with the ribs next to each other to emulate the wing tip - that's a great idea!

 

[Wayne]

Someone else had come up with that idea. We may well use those for the final parts too. Or just take the first rib and cut it from thicker wood and let the customer shape as they like.

I just exported the design into my CAD package, is there an option to get a profile of the spars exported? At the tip joint I am using matching spars to cut the ribs for my plywood doublers, but would be handy if it could give me the shape for those little doublers. They would have the dihedral angles and I could simply join them into a single part and have my doubler shape. If not, easy enough to draw it up. They are pretty simple units.

(Would be handy if you could figure out a way to design doublers for these sorts of joints, but probably getting into a world of hurt trying to do that.)

 

[Doc J]

I know some folks checking in here may not venture to other parts of the forum so thought I'd share a link to my current build that is using Wing Helper with:

ALOFT: AH-100 Build (new title)

"The Wing is the Thing" I wish I could remember where I learned that. Perhaps it was an RC Soaring Digest article title. https://www.rcsoaringdigest.com I love that sailplane - so much that I built three of them for winch launch, and sold two of them to flying buddies. The third led to a...

forum.alofthobbies.com

I have come up with a few tricks to get a different construction method for my spars and doublers:
View attachment 18232
Shear webs are not shown in this simple dihedral brace detail.

This is a very simple wing, but I ended up reworking it many times, you can see the evolution in the thread.

Looking forward to seeing it come to life. Just a little fine tuning outside of Wing Helper and we can start cutting.
View attachment 18233

The expression "The wing is the thing" came from "B2" Bill and Bunny Kuhlmann (Did I spell that right?) who used to run "B2 Streamlines" - a really good and quite academic column on flying wings in RC Soaring Digest a few decades back.

Publications here:

On the 'Wing... the book

Doc.

Edit...going to hell for that one...Its that Al guy again...

Doc.

 

[jure]

look what I have found in an old pdf copy of the RCSD

:

 

[gp49]

look what I have found in an old pdf copy of the RCSD

View attachment 18295 :

glide.net.au

 

[jure]

thanks Marek !

 

[alex_pozgaj]

Someone else had come up with that idea. We may well use those for the final parts too. Or just take the first rib and cut it from thicker wood and let the customer shape as they like.

I just exported the design into my CAD package, is there an option to get a profile of the spars exported? At the tip joint I am using matching spars to cut the ribs for my plywood doublers, but would be handy if it could give me the shape for those little doublers. They would have the dihedral angles and I could simply join them into a single part and have my doubler shape. If not, easy enough to draw it up. They are pretty simple units.

(Would be handy if you could figure out a way to design doublers for these sorts of joints, but probably getting into a world of hurt trying to do that.)

I'm afraid my lack of know-how when it comes to actually designing a wing is showing, for I am not sure what exactly you mean. The profile of the spars at any given rib can be seen at that rib, as a cut-out, for all the spar types that are modifying the rib. But I suppose that's not what you were asking, right?

Cheers, alex.

 

[Wayne]

When building wings with glued panels we need to add some bracing to these joints as just glue alone will result in a weak connection. A simple peice of plywood will do the trick. That is what I am sort of showing here:

The green piece in the center is a going to be a plywood plate on the front and back of the spar assembly. This is not something your software currently offers, I used custom spars in Wing Helper to create this example. I'd love to be able to have this green doubler as an output from the program, but spars are not output.

Not a big deal, I can draw it up, it is a very simple shape.

 

[alex_pozgaj]

Ah, I get it now - I already looked into that in the past, it was not so easy to implement back then, because it's an element spanning two different panels, and all functions are strictly oriented towards per-panel operations.

It can be implemented, but it would be ugly in the code. And ugly places in the code are the places which - sooner or later - make trouble.

It was decided together with the Alpha-Test-Team (from where the idea came) that it's simple enough to produce it manually in the CAD, so that it's not necessary to include into the program.

Maybe I'll get around to adding it one day, but now I am concentrating on the fuselage. Hopefully I'll have something to show in the upcoming week or two.

 

[Wayne]

Totally agree - Easy enough to do it in CAD.

Thanks!

 

[Wayne]

This week have been playing with DevWing as I thought it might have a few advantages. As a test I built this same exact wing in DevWing. Keep in mind I am brand new to using this package, but I think it fair to say this was a slower process and well, feels like I time traveled to 1990. The user interface on all of the DevCad apps is very old, but hey, tools are tools. I plugged along and they do have a couple of nice features mixed in, and different ways of reaching the same goal. Some nice some not.

What is my take away? I much prefer Wing Helper. So much cleaner and easier to use. I think the output from Winghelper is of a better design standard too. Things like the construction combs are much better design from Winghelper. If I was to use these parts from DevWing I'd need to modify each part in CAD before I could cut the parts. The way DevWing does things, the parts are just more fragile. I'll keep playing in it as maybe there are some ways to modify the defaults.

I have found that DevWing does have some nice features, and some poor features. For example I could not get the shear web between my spar caps to adjust when I moved the top cap down into the rib! This is just stupid and will force me to spend time in CAD to fix this rather basic thing. Again, I'll play with his some more, but so far I see no way to fix this. Seems I am doing something the program was never designed to do. (I'm a glider guy, I want my airfoils perfect.) I could mess around and eventually get it via manual manipulation, but their 3D viewer is horrible, so not at all an easy process to do. I'm using these tools for accuracy! (Now that I think about this, I think I had to manually do this in WingHelper also, but their previews are much better and allowed you to get there with some effort.)

One big thing DevWing offers and what attracted me to it was diagonal ribs. I need to play with this a bit more, but it does seem to have a solution for this. How good it might be is yet to be tested. In my testing I found that what I wanted to do with these ribs was a fair amount of manual work, but the software managed to allow me this freedom. (I'm not sold on diagonal ribs at all as a design feature. I wanted to try some behind the spar to aid in torsional resistance.)

Another intersting feature they have is the ability to place in image into the program and then trace your planform onto that. I have not played with this at all. In their demo they show a Spitfire's elliptical wing. If this works, it would be pretty darn handy.

Just thought I'd share. Honestly unless I am after diagonal ribs or curved planform, I see no reason to look much at the DevWing program.