my next project

Hey Tony, I know WHERE this will fly… but when?

2nd question. Swamp Gas?

By the way Tony, great video and great explanation of laying up tubing. Haven’t seen the nose cone vid yet. I guess I’m lazy. After making several airframe tubes I decided I could buy better than I could make myself and the same with nosecones if the shape I want is commercially available. In the end, I’ve focused on doing tip to tip fin layups and machining electronics bay and other miscellaneous parts. Very impressive work.

One comment here, I use chip brushes to apply the epoxy pretty heavily, but then I use various auto-body work plastic squeegees to spread the epoxy and force it into the fabric weave and in general work it around and tighten up the weave onto the mandrel as well as work the weave to keep it straight.

The best tube I ever made was done on a 38mm metal mandrel quite similarly to how you did this layup, but then I slid a top layer of carbon bi-axial sleeve over the whole layup, wrapped the thing in another layer of mylar and then slid the whole thing into a 1.75″ diameter piece of heavy heat-shrink tubing and then the whole package was heated from the center out with a heat gun to force the excess epoxy out the ends of the layup. Finally it spent a couple hours in my wife’s oven to fully shrink the heat-shrink and heat cure the Aeropoxy. The final surface was like glass and took very minimal finish work.

Question… was the number of wraps determined by computing axial loading or just to provide a convenient wall thickness?