Making Brackets

I've been doing a fair bit of work on the plane recently. One of the things I've been doing is making brackets. There are lots of them and of varying thicknesses, from .035" up to .090". Ages ago, I made templates out of poster board of all the brackets required for this plane. They're all on one big sheet in the plans.

The first thing I did to make the brackets was to trace over the poster board templates with a scribe. I tried to fit as many as I could into the smallest space possible. No need to waste metal if I could avoid it. The limiting factor to how closely I could squeeze them together is being able to cut them out while not cutting into the outlines. If you're creative in the cutting, you don't need to waste much metal.

You can see my tool of choice here—or rather the tool that I have that will work. A band saw might be better, but to cut steel, you need a band saw that will let you run the blade very slowly, and I don't own one of those, nor to I have the money right now, nor do I have the space. The angle grinder actually worked really well.

Photographs of sparks are really cool. By the way, watch out for super sharp edges after the cutting. Also, the metal gets hot. I just let the pieces fall onto the concrete floor after cutting and let them cool off down there.

The next step after cutting out the raw bracket shapes was to get the corners ground off and get up to the lines with a bench grinder.

A nice pile of brackets, edges filed and sanded smooth. The two brackets on the left center are the aileron horns. They attach to the inner end of the aileron torque tubes, and control wires attach to their two ends. Anyway, those are aluminum and are actually .125". The rest of the brackets are 4130 steel.