Allan Perret who is one of our club members, can come up with some of the most innovative tools I have ever seen. His genius really shows through with the various jigs he has come up with to help make building models so much easier. When he first approached me about kitting Otto the Giro by Dick Mathis, I thought he had lost his mind. Allan is an expert stunt flier and takes competition very seriously. I, on the other hand, am a fly for fun type of person and have never taken myself or participating in stunt contests very seriously,so I guess we compliment each other very well. Allan also likes the fun stuff too I might add.
Anyway, I digress. Allan came to me about kitting the Gyro and when I first saw it I thought, "Yeah, I might sell two of these things if I am lucky, probably won't even make enough to cover Eric Rule's CAD fee." Well, butter my buns and call me a biscuit, I ended up taking orders for 18 of these silly things...I am still in shock.
When I saw the plan, Allan told me that the hardest part to manufacture would be the rotor hub because of the angle the rotors had to sit but he had an idea of how to do it and be cost effective since there had to be one in every kit. He came up with a jig to manufacture the hub out of a polystyrene material that ended up working great. The other thing we had to figure out was how to put an airfoil into the rotor blades themselves and not have the customer spending hours razor planing and sanding an airfoil into to each one. We had 36 blades that had to be shaped out of 3/8 x 3 x 18" balsa and included in the kit. Allan came through with a jig that made it very easy and I wanted to share with you what he came up with in order to resaw the material to make a leading and trailing edge forming an airfoil. The pictures are included...Thank you Allan, could not have made this kit possible without your help.
Mike
Topic: Jig Genius (Read 1301 times)