To All:

By the time Whatzhiznamez Inter-Plane Winglets had crossed the Pond
they found a buncha Frenchmen just waiting to pounce on them. These
French fellows didn't care for 'tail feathers' nor 'hull' nor any of
them other home-grown Ami Rican definitions and you could bet your
beans they weren''t gonna allow ol' whatzhizhame to call inter-plane
winglets Inter-Plane Winglets for damn sure. Winglets was O.K.
(although the O.K. had to go) but Inter-plane? I mean, come on...
Inter-PLANE? Ain' no Way they were going to allow that. Aviation was
FRENCH, not American. Didn''t matter that them bicycle boys were
flying two-up, graceful as a swan all over Europe and even England
too. But it's best not to talk about that. They already had a form
to fill out. If you wanted to fly in Europe you'd better be ready to
fill out the form. And pay the fee, of course. Always a Fee when you
gotta Form to filll out.

Ailerons. That's what they became, once the French got their
bureaucracy in gear. No mention of Winglets because, as any fool
KNOWS, you can't have WINGLETS unless you've got WINGS. And there was
ol' whatzhizname calling them PLANES! So I guess we showed you, eh?
Didn't we? You Ami-Rican motorcycle man you, eh? Following your
Bicycle Brothers with your pockets filled with Patent Attorneys.

I won't even get into JOYSTICK.

For some time now I've been making perfectly good joysticks outta
exhaust pipe and matching pipe clamps. Heavier than hell but then
you only need a couple inches of the stuff; just enough to give you
enough pipe so's the thing will rotate in your muffler clamps.
(What's that? Yousay I called them muffler clamps in one message an'
pipe clamps in another? Okay, what's wrong with that? You obviously
knew what I was talking about.) Truth is, just about anything that
gets the job done is okay to use.

So... what IS the job, exactly? It's to make the ailerons move, isn't
it? I mean, we got rid of the shoulder frame and the hip frame and
all them other methods and got it boiled down to a simple stick, once
the French jumped in and told us what it was. And then we tied it to
the elevator too. Again,with more help from the French. Push or
pull, the stick... nobody calls it a JOYSTICK any more... push it
left or right to move the ailerons... which have been defined, legally
and otherwise, as a miniature WING. Push the joystick in one
direction, the aileron goes Up, wing goes DOWN and the the whole damn
plane starts to turn into the low wing. Lovely, graceful evolutions
in the air.

Need to make one. Joystick, that is. Kicking around under the
bench... nothing handy comes mind. I've got a whole box of Teenie Two
control sticks. Kinda cock-eyed and sensitive as hell on the elevator
AND the ailerons. (Sensitivity has to do with the input-output
ratios. Input has to do with where you grab the stick, whereas the
output is the distance between the pivot and the rod or cable that is
being acted upon. Teenie Two, the distances is less than an inch,
meaning it's sensitivity is right up there. Not the kind you'd want
to risk passenger's lives upon.

I keep poking around, find some thin-walled SQUARE steel tubing, 3/4"
on a side. Just the thing! Because I've also found the perfect stuff
for bearings. It's a remnant of a kitchen cutting board, half an inch
thick and about a foot long. I whizz it through the band-saw, lopping
off a piece 2" wide. Find the miter gauge and lop the long piece into
a stack of short pieces, 2" x 2" and smelling faintly of kitchen
stuff. It's about 1630 and my back is hurting enough to kick
everybody out soz I can have some time to myself.

Little corner jig goes onto the drill-press table and is adjusted to
make a hole... somewheres. In the corners of each piece and identical
but I haven't bothered to measure anything. Dig around for some
scrap; something I can cut without needing too much strength. Find
some mild steel willing to get sheared. Center-line has to be 4" plus
enough to bend over to give me a ninety degree bend so I can bolt it
to the structure. It's going to be pretty limp so I leave room to
bend the edges. start filing then take a break for chow.

By the l get back to the shop I've got it pretty much laid out in my
head. I use a chassis punch for the big hole and a drill for the four
#10 fasteners. The sheet-metal screws are substituted for the chassis
fasteners and the support brackets are mocked up on a piece of pine
with the precise distance between them. That allows me to mark the
total length of the part and where the aileron connector must go. The
connector must be four inches long and needs to be welded so I get
things all shiny bright, rig a couple of bricks, make the lower end,
which is .090, weld it to the leg and do a bit of grinding to get the
precise four inch length needed by the arm. Tack that then hammer on
it a bit. Do another tack and everything is straight. Weld one side,
then the next, then close each end.

I gave the steel parts a spritz of paint then hung them to dry while I
made the last pieces on the lathe. These were chunks of 3/4" aluminum
plate turned to a diameter that would not interfere with the #10
fasteners securing the cutting board to the brackets. And I was all
done. At least for this article :-) I still had to make the joystick
itself but that was liable to take several tries, filling it with dry
sand, raising it to a red heat then bending it to conform to my
pattern... a piece of welding rod.

And for the bearings, of course. But everyone knows how to make a
bearing for a piece of square tubing, right? Right?

Gotta go see what the Easter Bunny left me.

-R.S.Hoover