<< WEEK 5

2004-07-26, Monday
Nicki Lui
Clark Willison

Today, the team met in the morning to divide up tasks to be accomplished by the end of the work day. Mike Lavara, an engineer and our future RC pilot, came and spoke with each working group to help brainstorm ideas and give suggestions and tips. A couple people went on a trip to the local hobby shops to purchase supplies for the team. A few people worked on mounting servos in the wing, while others worked on designing a way to rotate the wingtips to control twist. Others worked on designing and building a boom and tail and a method of attaching the two. The membrane team continued to work with rip-stop polyester, trying to play with the curvature of the outer wingtips. Later in the afternoon, John Rubin from National Geographic came to interview the team and look around at what was being worked on.

2004-07-27, Tuesday
Luis Torres

On Membrane Design

Today we built the new wing with a spar attached to the body and a wing with chamber and some reflex. It flew ok but the small mistakes on the small wing ended up being a problem and made the wing unstable. But with the chamber, it had a forward pitching moment which let us get rid of the nose weights.

It was decided that we will make two identical bodies one with a fixed main spar, one loose, and have adjustable tensioning systems for the from and back. We will continue with the 3’ model for a day or so and then move on to a 6’ model with servos the control the tension.

2004-07-28, Wednesday
PJ Thompson
Marianne Kvitko

In the morning, various groups spoke with RC expert Mike Luvara regarding various aspects of the pterosaur design. Among the items discussed were wire routing for the servos mounted in the foam wing and methods of lifting/lowering the head. The tail group continue work on the vertical stabalizer which was ready to monokote and be mounted to a spar which would connect to the back of the pterosaur. Julia worked on the horizontal tail making it so that the two individual elevator sections would move simultaneously in exactly the same direction. Later into the morning PJ, Clark, Nicki, Jeff, and Pey-Jin took a trip down to Sheldon's Hobby Shop in San Jose. This was the first trip to this particular shop and proved a very successfuly expedition. There the group found lighter competition balsa wood for the elevons, servo wire, connectors, and crimping equipment for making the servo extensions into the wing, a more powerful servo for the head actuation, rods for various parts including tail mounting, and monokote for the tail. During the hobby shopy trip, Marianne was busy hollowing out the pterosaur's final foam body. Also during the hobby trip Marianne, Ben, Axel, Jessa, Julia, and Brian were flying the 1M balsa pterosaur model from the balcony outside our building. This group was looking at stability of the 1M model. The trip took this group of students until 3:30PM and by this time the day was pratically over.

2004-07-29, Thursday
Luis Torres
Nicki Lui

Though Thursday, the 29th of July, was a day of few people (only five team members came in), it was a very productive day. After Arthur made the regular morning plan with the team, every team member went straight to work. The membrane team started designing the 3-foot membrane and shaped a piece of aluminum tubing to fit the membrane. The plan was to make two three-foot wingspans with two fuselages. The only difference would be that one of the spars would be flat, while one spar would be loose. The other members who were here that day went to work on the vertical tail, and by then end of the day had finished it.

WEEK 7 >>