Workshops and Tools

Workshops

The project has had a few homes over the years:

• The Apartment
  The project started in a one-bedroom apartment in Menlo Park. My landlord eventually found out, but not before I'd built most of the pod frame, the tail feathers and control surfaces. And turned the bathroom into a 100degF autoclave. I tried to be nice to the downstairs neighbors by putting the vacuum pump on a pile of towels, but I'm not sure it did any good.:
  

• The Workshop
  Then I got a shop! 1400sqft in Menlo Park not far away from the apartment, and it had a shower, ac/heat, kitchen and washer-dryer suitable for bachelor-airplane-builder living. It was just over 42 feet in the longest dimension, which was a stroke of luck since I'd already designed a 42' wing. I got out of the apartment just before the pod structure became a "ship-in-a-bottle".
  

• The Hangar
  The boom/cabin/engine/tail assembly moved to the hangar in mid-Feb 2010. The wings followed in June.
  
  

Tools

I've used or built some special tools on the altitude airplane:

• Lasers: I used lasers and a smart level for most of the alignment before match-drilling the wings and fuselage boom. And everything is cooler with lasers.
• Timer: For some reason Home Depot doesn't sell a non-recurring 110VAC timer. But they have the parts to put one together in an hour or so. Works great when you have to set the vacuum pump running but won't be back for a while.



• An airplane project would be impossible without some improvised tools. The bathroom autoclave made a return to cut a normal 12hr cure time (for 30min epoxy) to an hour or so. Several temporary paint booths let me shoot primer and fabric coatings without having to relocate to a proper paint booth. These were sometimes done with plastic tarps and existing structure (the boom was sprayed in a booth made from the left wing), or a cheap tent from Target.