Building an Airplane TAIL from 100-Year-Old Blueprints!

Hey everyone, it's been an awesome year. I'm so excited to share that I got my medical back, we got the Mental Health and Aviation Act introduced to the Senate this fall, and we won a Shorty Award for our effort. Dude, no one cares! Where the heck is the next plane video? This project was made possible by the Sloan Foundation and IMI. Tail feathers. This is the part of the plane that I was told to start with, mostly because when you're done, you can just hang them from your wall instead of spending two months waffling on how to awkwardly hang a fuselage from your ceiling and using that as a method for procrastinating Other good methods I've employed include launching my own Estes line and spending two weeks at the Broadhead peat and pole fly-in and then Oshkosh, which, side note, was absolutely worth it. So this peat and pole is actually one of the Bernard Peat and Pole peat and poles. I got to meet so many legendary builders and remind myself what I'm working towards as I slog through building these tail feathers and then, even worse, editing this video. And then I spent a few days staring at the cedar stripping, willing myself to pry them off and store for later. But I did pry them off and I weighed them, which I've put into its own little video on my offcuts channel that I will linky link right here. Place your bets on the total weight of the cedar in the comments before heading over to find out. I dare you. In this video, I'll be tackling the complete tail assembly. And believe it or not, all five tail feathers are defined by just this one drawing. And really, just this part of this one drawing. But anyway, I'm starting with the runner. So the first thing I need to do is transfer the drawings from the tiny blueprints onto the giant sheet of MDF. Okay, so I got a little derailed yesterday and I didn't get to cutting, but now I'm gonna cut stuff. Okay, so this is the main beam here. I've loosely drawn on what I'm cutting. So three quarter up and three sixteenths in. And that will leave me five eighths across here. So I'm just gonna set the table saw up to run these cuts. And here I'm doing the same thing but for the trailing edge. And you'll notice that the trailing edge tapers all the way off and I'll do that once it's fully assembled. To make the forms, I'm nail gunning little pieces of plywood up against the lines that I've drawn on based on the drawing. And those will just hold all my pieces of wood, which means that as I cut and glue them together, they'll always be held in the exact same place. There's a secret little peat and pulp quirk that I had a little bit forgotten about, but not fully forgotten about, which is that if you follow the plans exactly, you end up five eighths off on the rudder. The rudder will stick down under the fuselage tail by five eighths of an inch, which is like inconsequential. It might catch some grass here and there, but it doesn't look that good. What most people do is adjust the rudder. So I'm gonna do that real quick. I'm gonna use this moment to highlight my appreciation for the peat and pulp community too who saw that I started working on the rudder and they were like, don't forget! I fixed it. It only took me 20 minutes. And, uh, I am so sure I will be grateful that I did that now instead of later. So there's kind of this annoying taper problem, which is that all of these are different widths according to the plans. And then it doesn't really tell you what to do with these. And so what I did is mark inside the rabbet, but the gussets, because I rabbeted all the way to the edges on the top and the bottom here are going to go to the edge, but I need to rabbet this so that the gussets won't protrude once the fabric is on. Okay, it's been two weeks. I keep getting derailed by travel and I'm so over it. I gotta start saying no to more stuff, but I'm finally going to taper these side pieces. To glue everything together, just like I did on the fuselage, I am first painting a thin penetrating epoxy on all of the surfaces that are going to get glued. And then I go in with Thick Sew by Bottle Tote, which is a colloidal silica thickened epoxy. It's just pre-thickened and that's where a lot of the strength comes from. Good morning! It's the next morning. And, theoretically, I have the beginnings of a rudder. Now that this is glued up, I'm actually going to just pull all of this off so that I can have a flat working surface that still has my template on it. You don't need to watch me do this. In Dezin, I went in with a hand plane and then a sander just to clean up any of the glue squeeze out and also just like make all of the glue joints meet up perfectly. And then it was time to move on to the gussets, and the gussets are where most of the strength of the bonds come from. There's literally no measurements in the plans for like what the correct shape is. Just like a loose drawing. On future tail feathers, my plan was to go a little bit more new school in the way I designed and built them, but for the rudder, I wanted to like show you guys exactly how I would do it to plans. And so I literally just drew shapes that I thought were appropriate onto the template. I traced them onto printer paper, cut them out, and then used that, traced that onto actual aircraft grade plywood, and then cut those out on my scroll saw. Super old school! Perfect. Going for a real snug fit here. Yeah. Just like that. Now I just gotta fit the rest of them. Director's note, I was really going for that like workshop compilation time lapse like in Big Hero 6 vibe, but without the lighting change, it doesn't really work. I have been procrastinating gluing these gussets on for a while. Man, after the summer, getting back into the confidence and the flow of things has been tough. But I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. And we're gonna do it right now. Also, check out my awesome McMaster plane shirt. It's available in my merch store, uncropped. You have to crop it yourself, in case you're not into crops. You're welcome. Like always, I'm going to start by painting penetrating epoxy on the raw wood, and that'll make sure it gets as deep of a bond as possible. Thin penetrating epoxy is mimicking what like old school builders use resourcenol for, which is that it's very thin, so like resourcenol glue doesn't last as long, and it's not as durable and not as strong as epoxy, but it wraps around the wood fibers, forming only a mechanical bond, whereas epoxy forms both a mechanical and a chemical bond. But this thickened epoxy, which is super, super strong, doesn't seep in as deep, so I paint the penetrating epoxy on first, so that I get that really deep bond, and then go in with the thickened stuff, which is also gap-filling, so it means that any gaps in like imperfect cuts will not make the plane weaker. And then it was just rinse and repeat on the other side, and you'll notice that the tail feathers are very repetitive. And then the last thing to do on the rudder was to glue all of the little spruce strips on, and these are going to help keep the fabric nice and tight and give me something to ribs ditch to later on, but voila! Now we have a completed rudder. Okay, I have this big ol' MDF that was the fuselage side, and I used part of it as the rudder, and I'm going to just cut it so that it's separated. I thought about keeping it in one big piece so that I could like donate it to an EAA chapter or something, but honestly, all it is is a piece of MDF with lines on it. It's not that important. I'd rather just keep reusing it. Next up, it's time to build the elevators, and for this, I want to use more modern fabrication techniques, specifically my brand new laser cutter. I'm going to be using a laser cutter to make quickly repeatable and more accurately cut gussets that I replicated in CAD. And thanks to today's sponsor, Onshape, my CAD modeling process will be as smooth as can be. Onshape is the world's most widely used cloud-native CAD and PDM platform. It runs anywhere, on any device, so unlike traditional systems, Onshape eliminates crashes and never loses your data, tracks every step of your project activity for infinite restore, and features built-in PDM with branching and merging. Onshape provides an easy and seamless workflow by being entirely native to the cloud. Just log in via your browser or the mobile app and start working. Software updates are completely automatic, so everyone is always on the latest version. No wasting time on installing patches or service packs when you want to be working. And thanks to its built-in data management features, it's easy to lock in and focus on your work without distractions. Your project is stored as a single document containing all of your parts, assemblies, drawings, and imported data. No final solid part, files to manage or email, or even files to manually save. If you're an engineer like me who likes their CAD software simple, efficient, and hassle-free, you need to check out Onshape. Use my link in the description to get up to six months of the pro version for free. That's up to six free months of Onshape Professional using my link down below. Thank you so much to Onshape for sponsoring this video. Now let's go build a plane. Okay, so I'm hitting the end of my really convenient process lumber, and I realized that that is really slowing me down mentally and making forward progress on the tail feathers because I want to be able to just grab lumber and start building. I'm just going to process a bunch of lumber. I think I'm not going to glue anything. I'm not going to like thin anything today. I'm just going to process lumber. I did jump ahead at this point and look at all of the pieces I'd need for the horizontal stabilizer, which is the longest of the tail feathers because I wanted to set aside my longest boards for that because it's a lot easier to make wood shorter than it is to make it longer. So this is how I cut all the angles. I have this little angle gauge here and set it to that angle. And what's really nice is that angle is going to be this angle. It's going to be that angle. It's going to be that angle, that angle, and the bottom angle. So really get a lot of mileage out of setting that. And this also means that once I set the miter saw at this angle, I can do them all in the all match. Now I just need to cut 90s on this end. These two will be full length, and then this one gets cut to there. Okay, so I have all of the like rough lumber here, but just like with the rudder, like the trailing edge and the main beam need this rabbet cut out of it. The center beam is already that three quarter by one. And then the sides here will need to get tapered to fit. So do that next. Okay, so I need to mill down more lumber because I've hit the end of what I milled with Steve. And I don't want to touch the rest of it without finding the wing struts because those are the most important pieces. So my friend Sam is here. Hi. This is Sam. And we are going to basically try to tackle as much of the milling as we can today. So we have set up here diagonally across my driveway because we needed like 40 feet of milling area. So let's get cracking. Now the wing spars are critical. They're probably the most structurally critical part of the entire airplane and each wing has a front and rear spar that's an inch by four and three quarter by like 16 feet. All of that. And there's a knot right here. Oh, yeah, we're good. Okay. Once we'd found my best boards, we took one of my slightly less good boards and started ripping it into pieces I can cannibalize for tail feathers. Before I move forward on this elevator, now that I finally have wood milled down, I'm going to duplicate this because I need two of them. And I want to when I cut the rabbits and stuff, I just want to make sure that they're identical. Okay, so I can get the trailing edge and the center beam out of one length of this three quarter inch. So there's a handful of like mysteries in the plans and I've talked to other builders and they're just accepted as like mysteries. One of them is the rudder not lining up with the vertical stabilizer and the tail. But another one is that the rabbits are all different. The plans call for the rabbit on the main beam to be three sixteenths, on the trailing edge to be one sixteenth, and on the leading edge to be an eighth. An eighth makes the most sense because it's inset for eighth inch plywood, although the spruce strips are three sixteenths, but it's a lot easier to taper those in as it comes in towards the edge. So I think I'm going to very slightly modify so that the rabbits are all an eighth and it'll come out a lot neater. I can already hear a bunch of you purists like flaming me in the comments, like, stick to the plans! The plans have been in use for a hundred years! Yes, but you'd be surprised at how few people actually stick to the plans all the way, 100%. And a really great piece of advice I got from a peat and bull builder who like won a Linde at Oshkosh is trust your gut in a lot of cases because Hootman, who made these drawings, was 22 and it was a hundred years ago. So it turns out I'm stupid because I just put the rabbit on the wrong side. It's on the right side if it was the main beam, but it's the trailing edge and it's on the wrong side. And I just had this moment of like, here, I'll show you. See how it's on the outside edge and it should be on the inside edge. But I also realized that this needs to be tapered. Here's a tapering jig that I made for the, like, the taper shape that it needs to be. And it, I just lucked out where it just so happens the bit I took out will have to get taken out anyway. So I don't have to remake these pieces, which is great because I don't have any, like, stock milled to this dimension anymore. I just have to do this on the other side. And now, just like with the rudder, before I glue this up, I need to cut the rabbits in for the gussets on the two side pieces. And then also I'm going to draw in the taper. For any of my fellow sometimes forgetful builders, blacking out with your pencil the areas you need to remove is a good tip. So right here, an observant watcher may notice that the gusset comes in at an angle for the plans. Bandsaw can only do it at a 90. So now I need to cut just that little triangle out both sides so that when this gusset comes in, the rabbit will remain until there. Good morning, Pete and Pole friends! I'm going to pop the first elevator out of the jig today, this morning, and then hopefully glue up the next one. Elevator number one. So it took me a really long time to cut the gussets out by hand on the scroll saw, which was fun. I enjoyed doing it. But also, it's 2025, I'm shooting for efficiency here, and I got this amazing new laser cutter from Laguna, and I'm super excited to try it out on airplane parts for the first time. Let's do this! Before you come after me for cheating, though, I think that there's something really beautiful about digitizing blueprints designed before computers were even conceptualized. Bernard Pete and Pole didn't have our modern CAD softwares and CNC machines and whatnot when he made this plane, and as incredible as it is that he created it entirely by hand, I don't think there's a reason to limit myself only to the same tools he used when there are so many amazing machines at our disposal today. And I don't see it as a way to compensate for lack of skill, because I've learned those skills. But it's just me reaching for a whole other toolbox that I've had the privilege of learning in my era. Good morning! So today I- it's not even morning, it's like late afternoon, whatever. Um, okay, so today I want to get these gussets all glued in, which means I have to, like, sand down the frames, cut the gussets, and then I kind of messed up on these ones where I forgot that it actually needs to get cut back to there, so I'm gonna cut these four or eight gussets down, so I marked a line here where I need to cut it, and also here where I need to cut it, that was really dumb of me, oh well. And then I am also just sanding off all the burnt edges from the laser cutter, super quick and easy. And to clarify for everyone concerned, I'm not using any sandpaper above, like, 120. And at this point I also decided it was time to stop procrastinating making the spruce strips that span the length of all of these tail feathers, and to glue them on at the same time as the gussets, which makes a lot more sense. This is also the point in time that I did it on the rudder, but the beauty of video editing is that I can show you things in whatever order I want. The plans call for an angled spruce strip coming in to this, like, side diagonal trapezoidal piece. I don't even know how to describe anything. It's supposed to meet a rabbit, but, like, I couldn't think of a graceful way to put a rabbit there that I liked, so I didn't, and instead I just chiseled a channel for that piece. So here's one of my elevators. This one's good. This one's ready to be gusseted, everything fits it really nicely. This one is great, ready to go. This slot is cut for that one. Elevator. Good to go. I was looking at this one, and I picked it up and, like, put it down, and something didn't feel quite right. If you come here, you will see that this beam touches in the center and rises on the sides. This was glued up in a jig, which means that it was glued up perfectly straight. So what has happened is that the wood has relaxed into a very warped shape, and if I flip it over, you can truly see how bowed it is. This makes me very displeased, because I think the move is to cut that piece off and start over and make a new one. But hey, at least I could glue up one of them. Okay, so it's the next morning, got a full night of sleep, and had some coffee, and now I'm finally ready to emotionally tackle cutting this piece off and starting over. So let's do it. So kind of annoyingly, this is the only piece that can fit the width in it. I'm just gonna cut a short length. It kind of wastes material, but I did not really plan for a warped piece. Once again, I'm wondering how the heck Bernard Petenpol built any airplanes back before Japanese hand tools were common in the United States, because, man, Japanese tools are just better. But joke's on me, look how much tension's in that board, and that one warped too. Maybe I'll work out this later, but I just went and hacked a giant chunk off of one of my big boards in my lumber pile. Hopefully I can find a piece in this that doesn't fricking bend. Good morning! It's time to take this out of the clamps, and I'll have one elevator. Which is exciting. Man, I should get a hammer to put in my clamps. Elevator! Hi! Are you guys bored yet from watching me do the same thing over and over again? Because I will say, as much as it is perplexing me on how to handle all of this footage in the editing room, I really enjoyed kind of repeating the same process over and over again. It was so meditative and soothing, and yet another reason all of you should build your own peat and poles. Okay, so I'm back on the rudder here, and I need to taper all of these pieces into the trailing edge. So on the rudder, I built this exactly to plans, which means that none of these line up in the most frustrating way. On the elevators, I actually altered it so that these sit more flush, because that made more sense to me. But for this one, I'll just start hand planing. Wow, look at all of those beautiful shavings. It would be such a shame if they ended up in the garbage can. Well, good thing, all year I have saved every single plane from the plane. Plane shaving from the pla- wood shaving plane, hand plaint- plane. Good thing I've been saving my shavings all year, just for Christmas. So this year for Christmas, there is 50 ornaments available. They are made of shavings that used to be glued to my airplane. And every single ornament comes with a card that's signed where I have written exactly where on the plane it came from. So like, left elevator, turtle deck, so you could go back to that video and see me actually shaving the shavings that it came from. Oh wait, one more thing. They all come with a little peat and pole laser cut blueprint drawing that is cut out of scrap that I cut off the airplane to. They're available down below. If you missed it and you want to have early access next time, join my Patreon. Good morning! Uh, it's time to take the clamps off of the elevator number two. And that will make the rudder and both elevators fully glued up, which means that today, hopefully, I can start on the horizontal stabilizer, which is the big one. The horizontal stabilizer is too wide to fit in my laser cutter, so I'm back to old school lofting, hopefully making all of my peat and pole ancestors proud. Peck Tools sent me a bunch of really nice rulers, and it's kind of mind-boggling how much a really nice ruler makes a difference. They put my name on this one. But the ruler has a sharp edge, and it's, ugh, it's so good. Alright, so I got the three main pieces here, the leading edge, the center beam, and the main beam cut, and they're not warped. I've been really battling a board that is warped, and it's been driving me crazy, because I don't like throwing lumber away, but I don't want a warped airplane either. And the cycle begins again, turning my drawing into a fixture by nailing all my little wood blocks in and then cutting all of my pieces to fit, fitting them, etc. Good morning! Alright, today I'm finally gonna get all these braces cut, and also taper the sides, and glue it together! Yeah! Alright, y'all don't need to watch me fit the rest of these, so let's just make them fit. Marked the areas I need to cut off and taper, so I'll just go do that on the bandsaw again. Another day on the task. Let's see if we can get the Gusherton strips glued onto this horizontal stabilizer today. So what I'm doing here is just marking where the sprue strips meet the cross beams, so that I can lay it out. And while that epoxy was curing, I grabbed my hand planes and got to work shaping the trailing edges of all of the tail feathers. If you're wondering where most of the shavings for those Christmas ornaments came from, uh... Alright, this again. You don't need to watch me undo all of the clamps for, like, the fifth time, so... Woo! Alright, this again. You don't need to watch me undo all of the clamps for, like, the fifth time, so... See? I'm just getting faster and faster at building this plane. Just gotta keep... Anyway. I'm so tired. Alright, same strategy. Let's glue these in. Did it. I'm going to bed. Alright, this. One more time. Yay. Actually, I think I bumped the camera, so I'm not sure that was a very good jump cut. But that's okay, because you didn't have to watch me take all the clamps off. And it is finally time for the very last tail feather, the vertical stabilizer. And this is the smallest one, but it's also got a curved top, which makes it just slightly different than the rest of them, which is very exciting, because it is getting a little bit repetitive. So I used the laser cutter again to trace my drawing onto the MDF. And if it looks cluttered and confusing, it's because I am reusing pieces of MDF that already have drawings on them. And then I cut my gussets. You guys know the drill. And then I'm going to take them over to the sander, sand all the charred edges off. And now this here is our break in the pattern. I'm cutting that curved top out of this solid piece of Sitka spruce. And I used the gusset as my template, because I had done it in CAD and laser cut it. But I think what most people probably do is to make the Sitka spruce block first. Okay, so I'm just going to show you, because I don't know how to describe this. This is the only one where a cross brace has to go from the leading edge to a main beam. And so I've drawn a taper on it. So this whole triangle is going to be tapered with this as the narrowest edge and this as the widest edge. And so this piece, you can see, that piece I've drawn the taper on exactly the same way it is on the horizontal stabilizer. And then this piece is kind of the unique one where that whole piece will taper from the half inch to the three quarter at this end. And this rounded piece at the top also needs to taper from that half inch to the three quarter on this side. So I think I'm going to just brute force those on the belt sander. That's going to be the most even way to do it. Perfect. Get these clamps off of here. Let us pull the vertical stabilizer out of the forms and then get it all glued up because right now these are not actually glued in. It's funny how not real it looks without the strips and dust and stuff. And then while that glue is curing, I took a whack at shaping up the horizontal stabilizer. It's Halloween. I just handed out 20 pounds of candy and I'm so stoked about it. But I did really want to get the other side glued up because I'm taking a red eye flight to the Space Gala tonight. That's why my makeup is crazy and I'm wearing cobwebs. From my trip, the Space Gala was awesome. And it's time to get all this out of the clamps. I did realize though that at some point I managed to forget four gussets. I don't know how I did that. But at least I remembered them eventually. Nice. And last one. Hey, I got a question. When am I allowed to start making airplane noises? Because I feel like I've earned a couple. Yarrr.