Bill of Materials for an Ultralight Aircraft carbon fiber wing kit

If you are looking to build a FAR Part 103 legal ultalight aircraft, such are Belite 254, you will want to know what comes in the kit.  This particular post covers the wing kit, which is the starting point for most projects.  A photo is at the bottom of this post.

Here's an itemized list of what you get:

a) 4 Carbon Fiber wing spars.  The load carrying part of the wing.

b) 10 Aluminum Ribs.  5 used on each wing.  They slip over the spars and are glued in place.  The glue acts as a corrosion barrier in the area of the glue joint. 

c) 4 Birch CNC cut wooden ribs (used as end cap ribs on wing).  These work better than aluminum for end caps, due to the ease of fabric attachment.  They should be epoxied or stained, so they will last a long time.

d) 0.75" x 0.035" 6061-T6 aluminum tubing, used as sail/anti-sail braces.  You cut them to length and crimp the ends of them in a vise (using blocks of wood).

e) 2 push-pull cables, low friction.  They go to the flaperons and thread out the wing, for routing to the aircraft controls.  (Flaperons are not included.)

f) 4 machined CNC 6061-T6 aluminum strut attachment fittings, for attachment to carbon fiber tubing.  They are connected to the carbon fiber spars using carbon fiber sleeves.  A corrosion barrier of flexible epoxy is used to bond the aluminum to the carbon fiber.  We do this for you!  (NOTE:  aluminum spars DO NOT use these strut attachment fittings, they use a different strut attachment methodology, not pictured)

g) 10 10" x 0.5" .025 6061-T6 aluminum straps, used for attaching ribs to front spar.  Two rivets attach to the bottom of the rib, the strap rolls around the front of the spar, then two rivets on the top of the rib.

h) 6 channel 6061-T6 right angle aluminum, for flaperon atachment.  These bolt to the ribs, and also accept the flaperons, when you install them later.

i) 36 false ribs, constructed of CNC cut plywood.  These slip through the 'false rib spar', which is 0.5" aluminum tubing.  They are then glued in place.

j) 4 root spar doublers (2.75" x 0.125 wall x 1.50" length).  These slip over the root of each tube, and are epoxied and riveted in place.

k) Plastic pitot tubing line, runs from pitot tube to your airspeed indicator.

l) Bent aluminum pitot tube  (straight pitot tube also available).

m) left and right machined CNC 6061-T6 flaperon dropper brackets.  They bolt to a rib.

n) 5 various aluminum trim pieces (0.016" 6061T6).  These go around flaperon cable exit points, etc.

o) 4 CNC cut 6061-T6 jury strut attachment fittings.

p) 6 0.75" square x 0.035 6061T6 hard point attachment tubes (for sail/anti-sail attachment).  These rivet to the aluminum ribs, and bolt to the sail / anti-sail tubes.

q) 6 trim pieces for flaperon right angle trim (0.016" 6061T6).  These go around the right angle pieces.

r) 24+ feet of prebent trailing edge aluminum.  These rivet to each rib.

s) 24 feet of 0.50" x 0.035" 6061T6 aluminum tubing, for false rib spars.  These slip through all the ribs and false ribs.

t) Blue print for wing.  Accurate measurements for the entire wing.

u) 5 bags of hardware, with all rivets, AN nuts, bolts & washers.

This is EVERYTHING you need to build two wings, with the exception of glue, fabric and tools.

WING KIT with aluminum spars --- $1430.
WING KIT with Carbon Fiber spars --- $3630.

Crating on a wing kit is $150.

Truck delivery to your location is by quotation.  Let us know where you are and we'll get a quote to you right away!

Here's another photo of that wing kit:

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Carbon Fiber Ultralight Airplane Wing Kit

I've often wished we had a good photo illustration of what is contained in our wing kits.  Today, we finally took the picture.

Shown below is a wing kit complete with carbon fiber spars.  The kit with aluminum spars is identical in almost all respects. 

The wing kit has everything except glue, fabric and paint.  In a future post, I'll run through the list of contents in this kit.

With aluminum spars, this kit costs $1430.

With carbon fiber spars (as pictured), this kit costs $3630.

A complete description, with many, many pictures, of how to build a wing from this kit is included in this link.

And here is the photo of the wing kit:

Hirth F23 twin has a redundant cylinder

After reading this, some of you will shoot me down.  It's OK -- I'm vowing to share what I know, no matter how embarrassing.

On this two cylinder engine, one cylinder is optional.

It seems like months ago -- but in fact, it was only two weeks ago:  we had two days of glorious weather.

Our airport was alive with activity.  72 degree high temperatures (in January) brought out one helicopter, some gliders, along with their towplane, our ultralight, and a buzzing crowd of powered paragliders.

My crew was working hard on getting another plane ready for delivery; we'd just swapped a brand new F23 Hirth twin boxer into one of our Belites.  (This particular plane is headed down to Texas and Florida to be a dealer demonstrator on floats... stuff for another post...)  The F23 had already been running for a couple of hours, as we slowly cranked up the power and prepared the engine for first flight.

(Another person was performing the extended runup).

I did a careful preflight, ensuring that everything was OK.  The airframe had already flown, (briefly), but it would be a first flight for this particular brand new engine.

The electric start on the engine kicked it to life very easily.  A check on the 4 point safety harness, and I taxiied out to the active.

A quick runup, and I was accelerating down the runway -- albeit slowly.  I shut it down and taxied back to the hangar.  Realizing that power was low, I quickly (and incorrectly) concluded that the propeller had the wrong pitch.  I had Gene fetch another with a better bite from our inventory of props, and a few minutes later it was torqued down and ready to go.

I taxied out again.  I applied full throttle, and the engine powered up smoothly.   Something was still wrong; RPM was quite low (at 800 RPM below full power); but the bird still wanted to fly, and I did to.  So I let it take off.

I made a couple of circuits of the field, enjoying the perfect weather, and also enjoying harassing the powered paragliders that were hanging around the east end of the pattern.  I sure wasn't happy with the power, though - it just didn't have nearly the snap I'd come to expect from our F33 installations in our Superlite models.

I landed the bird and taxied in.  As the bird rolled to a stop, I told Gene I still thought we had a real problem with the engine.

He pulled the top off each carburetor in turn, inspecting the linkage.

Well, it turns out one of the ball swages on the twin carburetor cables had failed (they'd passed a pull test in the vise!) and one of the two carbs wasn't advancing past idle.

So I'd been flying with one cylinder.  With a F23 Hirth, the second cylinder is not necessary for a good flight.

Wiring an ultralight instrument panel into an Ultralight Aircraft

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Let's wire up an instrument panel, using Belite' featherweight avionics.  Our completed panel will weigh about 12 ounces (0.35KG), and it will look like this:

That's a lot of functionality.

Anyway, let's build it.  We're starting with our precision machined aluminum panel,