The workshop in my new house is a larger than normal single garage. It's a bit tight in there, but it's workable. There are a couple of sheds in the garden where I can store other stuff, so the workshop can be dedicated to plane building. I have insulated it with foil-back foam panels and plasterboard on the walls, chipboard over foil-backed foam panels on the floor and that multi-layered foil insulation in the ceiling. I also stuck some foam panels to the garage door. It seems to keep the temperature pretty even in there.
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I had some of the foam panels left over from the insulation, so I thought that it would be a good ideal to build an oven and do the post-cure baking of the rudder, flaps and ailerons. As you can see from the picture, it was nothing elaborate, just a double thickness of foam held together with tape and some straps. I cut a hole in the bottom and poked a fan heater in there to provide the heat. The components were held on a raised platform so that the hot air did not flow directly from the heater on to the surfaces. I installed a thermostat from a hot water cylinder and connected it to the power connection for the fan heater to provide protection against over-heating. I did some dry runs without anything in the oven and checked the temperature with a digital thermometer. The thermostat hysteresis loop was pretty large and temperature varied by as much as 10 degrees, but it did the job.
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The components were held upright in the oven with some wooden supports and baked for 18 hours each at 50 degrees. |
November 2008