Cantilever (no struts) Carbon Fiber Wing shows greater than -4G test load

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Belite R&D Ultralight Aircraft sneek peak:

Here's what you can do with a one-off carbon fiber / titanium wing design (combined with some great chromaloy steel work on the fuselage).

What I am showing you is a Belite research project:  a fully cantilevered, strutless wing design, built using a 24 pound carry through carbon fiber spar (a fully custom, 4 inch diameter monster carbon fiber tube, with about

UK and Ultralights

Interested in a British legal SSDR ultralight aircraft?  You can sign up here for our upcoming formal product announcements.

But before the formal product announcement comes out, I wanted to talk to you, my loyal blog readers, about a substantial upcoming addition to Belite's aircraft lineup.  It incorporates a significant design change, resulting in lower takeoff and landing speeds, along with increased climb performance.

It looks like this:

What's different about this Belite?  It has lower weight, and a bigger wing.

Installing a gas tank in an ultralight aircraft (such as the FAR Part 103 Belite!)

Another easy task is mounting our 5 gallon, spun aluminum gas tank in our ultralight aircraft, the FAR Part 103 Belite aircraft.  These tanks weigh less than 5 pounds, are extremely rugged, and are painless to mount and use.  They are clearly preferable to heavy plastic tanks used on certain earlier ultralight aircraft.

(If you are new to this blog, you'll find several other detailed construction posts on other topics [such as building carbon fiber wings].  Just poke around the search box until you find them.)

The major component of this tank installation is the aluminum tank.  We use an off the shelf 'dune buggy' style tank.  They are available from many different vendors online.

Before starting installation, consider the usage of a fuel sender -- this requires tank modification before

Attaching Flaperons to an Ultralight Aircraft (such as the FAR Part 103 Belite Aircraft)

I hope you've had a great Christmas season!

In this continuing online assembly manual, we'll attach our flaperons to the wings of our ultralight aircraft, the FAR Part 103 compliant Belite.    This assembly procedure is designed for our Belite aircraft, but the procedure is educational for any ultralight aircraft builder.

This is easy:  all we need to do is to clamp the flaperons in place using vise-grips; a couple of alignment templates make accurate alignment very easy.  After everything is lined up, the flaperons are bolted in place using AN3 hardware (bolt, washers, nylok nuts).

Here's the view looking down the flaperon, with three vise-grips already in place.