Handy Home Building Tips

Today we’d like to feature some handy homebuilding tips from the team at Australian LightWing.

We spend our waking hours focused completely on handcrafting and manufacturing Australia’s Safest Light Sport Aircraft, so we’d like to share our TOP TIPS on the subject!

Enjoy! And please feel free to share with us your best tips.

Tezza’s Top Tip regards drilling holes. If you take a small piece of fabric and place it between the drill bit and the alloy you’re drilling, it will give the hole a perfect even circle. Without the rag you’ll find the drill bit can catch and leave a ragged edge. Not what you want for the perfection required in building a light aircraft.

Nick’s Top Tip: Nick recommends you line all the parts up, neat and organised, in a clean working environment. Keep the area and the tools clean and respect your shed! This ensures the tools don’t go missing, things don’t get lost, and parts don’t get damaged.

Andy’s Top Tip was short and to the point. R.T.F.M. Thanks Andy 🙂

Bruce’s Top Tip is to ensure the hinges and pins on the control surfaces remain well lubricated. Don’t let weather or wear leave your moving parts in any kind of disrepair. In the air, your control surfaces are you’re best friend! (Bruce suggests using Wurth 2000 Spray  Grease, but this is in no way a sponsored tip. That’s just his two cents).

Shelly’s Top Tip is to organise your photos on your computer in folders. Under the parent folder of aircraft, then folders by aircraft type, into which the folders are named by date. This makes finding the SP2000 photo easy, as well as the GA 55 – 912.

Howie’s Top Tip is drink good coffee, buy a printer that works and invest in the Standard Practices Manuals. But that’s just today’s tips. He’s got plenty. That’s what our various Blog’s are all about!

Thanks for reading. Please do share your homebuilding tips – we’d love to hear them!

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Looking Back… Looking Forward…

Looking back over newsletters as far as 1986 ( a LightWing owner recently emailed me a scanned copy of the first newsletter we ever put out dated summer 1986! )… It read like a company history warts and all. Like the 2 cyl 2 stroke Sarich engine we planned fitting  to the GR-532, the engine never eventuated ! Float planes in, on or over the Richmond River, all great fun and nearly 30 years on, little has changed. Thanks to our new Richo colour printer, we now put out our newsletter in colour and print it in-house, but the fun is still alive and well.

We departed for NATFLY at Temora 2013 on a sad note with the death of Wayne Fisher. Wayne was a true aviation pioneer being the first to do legal aerobatics in his own re-designed Drifter. Wayne was testing a 2 seat homebuilt RV-12 when he hit the Lismore runway inverted. No reasons for the accident have been determined yet. The accident comes after detailed articles on test flying home built aircraft where published in the EAA January magazine. Wayne leaves three beautiful daughters and the same number of past wives, all of whom will miss him. No doubt the EAA saw the potential risks associated with test-flying new aircraft and sought to provide advice.

Well, a newsletter is supposed to contain news and we have this in spades. Our 6 seater progresses slowly toward its maiden flight in 2014, our Road-e electric car grows towards a very different form of sustainable personal transport, we recently tested the prototype at Evans Head airpark where a distance travelled of 90 km was recorded.  The re-design of the SP-2000 tooling, we hope, will contribute toward successful and pending joint ventures with not one but two Chinese prospective partners. Our trip to China last autumn  saw us visit Chinese start-up aviation company, Soar, located in Hebie Provence  (about 300 km north of Beijing), where their new factory was mind-bogglingly impressive.  Peter Addams  of Seabird Aviation, has signed a deal with Soar and we hope to follow suit in the  future.

Please call in at Ballina and have a look at our revamped showroom and lounge upstairs, check out our VIP in-flight prop, our CAN PC driven nav. software and soon, our latest flight school aid, our motion flight simulator. We look forward to seeing you soon and hope you enjoyed the NATFLY Temora fly-in.

at Temora 2013

At the Australian LightWing Factory Today!

Take a photographic tour through our factory to view Current Work underway at Australian LightWing today (May 5th, 2011!

Image # 1: You can see in this image a small slice of our Factory Aircraft Showroom. Feel free to arrange a visit to our showroom at any time to view and test fly our Aircraft!

Images # 2 / # 3 / # 4: Pictured here is the body of the SP6000 – the 6 Seat Australian LightWing Aircraft. This aircraft is currently under construction, and as you can see here, we are currently applying the fiberglass layer to strengthen the body of the aircraft, whilst also keeping it extremely lightweight. For more information visit the website at http://www.lightwing.com and visit the SP6000 Page!

Image # 5: Here you can see Nick Hughes applying the rego numbers to the Australian LightWing aircraft that is currently in the factory for some refurbishment, including a new paint job! You can see Nick here, lining up the spirit level, getting the angles correct for the numbers and checking all is perfect!

For more information or to request images of your aircraft, please visit our website at www.lightwing.com.au