Aerolite 103 Ultralight - How its Made - Factory Tour - No License Required - Part 103 Legal

we have all seen the no license required headlines for part 103 ultralights by now with aerolite 103 being one of the most popular choices i figured we should do a factory tour and show you exactly how it's made [Music] the aerolite 103 is produced by you flyat lightsport aircraft llc located at the deland municipal airport in deland florida let me introduce you to dennis and have him give us a factory tour okay i'm dennis carley and this is aerolite103 uh what you see on the rack here is all the 6061 t6 it's all clear anodized for corrosion resistance um almost the entire airframe is aluminum 6061 t6 aluminum there are a few parts uh nose gear parts and the main gear axles that are 4130 welded but that is the only steel components of the uh of the airframe and what are some of the typical sizes and thicknesses of metal that you use in the build a lot of it is one inch 035 wall wing spars front and rear both two inch leading edges 0.58 wall and it's 049 on the trailing edge lift struts uh inch and a half 0.35 so a lot of it is 0.35 wall up to 0.58 wall almost all the hardware is standard aircraft great a n a in hardware and uh there is a handful of bolts that are metric which are you know no a n bolts for those those are great eight or great 10 bolts that's usually in the engine installation all right so from the raw material shelf obviously you've got to cut it down to size so walk us through the next steps of cutting or forming the metal yep okay so we take those uh tubes the once we get them back from the anodizer uh we've got a cut book over here for every part of the aircraft we've also got a master part for every part of the aircraft we take that set the saw up here we've got a stop block for the various links that lets us cut all the tubes uh to length whether it be round square rectangular whatever it is that gets cut here then it gets deburred and then after it's deburred uh we drill bend and then fabricate into the end of the jig now is any of this uh cnc car do you have like templates made for even for drilling uh not it's not done by templates and we have some components uh some like lift strut gusset plates those are produced by a cnc company for us we don't do that in-house but all of the tubes on the aircraft that are round or square or rectangular we cut that drill it and bend it here and then you know put it together in the jig for the final final components the we have a stop blocks for length and stopping locations on the drill jig as well so if we know that this tube we're going to cut this tube we can set the stop block on here to the right coordinates put the raw material up there turn the chop saw on and cut as many of them as we want to cut okay so after we cut these brian every every one of these tubes again whether it be square round rectangular whatever it is we have a deburring wheel here so we'll bring it over to the deburring wheel turn that wheel on touch the ends touch the edges just to make that smooth inside and outside and then if the part after the raw piece is uh is d-bird let's say that gets cut to an angle and then gets a rivet hole put into a pilot hole put into it it comes back over here again after it's cut that angle gets deburred a second time for a finished part so if we have a component that has a fairly tight radius bend in it after the tube is uh is cut to length we bring it over here to this bender we have dies for all the diameters that that we use in the aircraft and we have bending coordinates we have a bending sheet for each component so we'll put that in there lock it in place and then we'll pull you know pull the tube around the die to bend it to whatever that particular radius is for for that uh that tube now most metals have a bit of a spring back and i think especially aluminum so you have like a template as you pull it off depending on what day how cold or hot it is your spring back changes so you just have a template to match it up with or uh not a template but we have again we have a master part for everyone so we've got a if we know we're putting a 30 degree bend in this tube we have a master part with that 30 degree bend so if we put this lot of aluminum in here and we bend it usually if we bend it to the coordinates that we have for that particular tube it comes out correctly or within a half a degree or so but each run of aluminum is slightly different so if we have you know if we bend it around to that tube and it's uh comes out of the fender here at a half a degree less than what it needs to be we know we need to make an adjustment so we have small increments on this bender that we can then adjust it to get the right one and then that batch of aluminum all that all the tubes will just compensate for it accordingly and do you typically do kind of batch runs of parts that they're on the shelf ready to pull for production yeah and it's uh it depends on what the part is you know how many of them we use per airplane but a lot of this stuff that is you know if it's a small part and we're making it from the drop of another piece we're cutting if we've got 50 pieces of it we'll just go ahead and make 50 parts out of it and then it you know it's put back on the shelf and we have it when we need it um i mentioned earlier that we have uh you know station there where we cut each of these tubes to length we have a drill press here same bench we have a drilling book that has the coordinates for every hole in every tube on the airplane and we also have a master part that corresponds with that so if we know we're going to make root tubes for instance we'll take those cut root tubes they've already been deburred we'll bring it over here we'll open up the book to the root tube that gives us the coordinates for the first hole we set the drill up for that you know with the stop block in the right place and then we take the master part lay it up here bring the drill press down into it just to verify that we've got it in the right spot and it just sequentially each hole on each side then gets drilled from that point [Music] hey everyone let me take just a moment here to thank our sponsors that make all this possible great companies like airworks air tech coatings clemens insurance agency whelan aerospace technologies so take a moment after this video to say hello to all of them and remember to check out the affiliate links in the description below hey if you like this episode leave a comment below let me know your thoughts on the aerolite 103 so after we have the parts cut we bring those parts into these jigs and build as many control surfaces ailerons flaps elevators rudder horizontal stabilizer and vertical fin are all made in these jigs and we have a wing jig for the wing panels okay so these are put together similar to any tube and fabric like if you're too weld but instead you use gusset and riff it rivets correct yep that's exactly correct yep so we have one wing jig for both left and right wings and what we do with that is um we set the components each each piece into the into the jig and then we we position the rear spar at a certain point to determine if it's going to be left or right and that is basically the lift strut gusset plate holes curve inboard to meet the lift strut so if we pin it one way it's a left wing if we pin it the other way at the right wing we when those tubes are all in the jigs it goes together on the top side with these gusset plates once that's all done and fixed in place it comes out of the jig flips over to the other side goes back in the jig and the gusset plates are put on the opposite side of the frame okay now i've seen different manufacturers decide on different style of rivets some use aluminum to aluminum some use stainless steel to aluminum what do you use to build yours it's a structural rivet it's a steel mandrel and an aluminum rivet it's sealed so it you know it's not an open pop rivet like some of them that allow moisture to get in the inside of it has a i think it's 860 pound shear strength per rivet so it's a pretty robust structural route so how are the control cables or push pull tubes or whatever you use to control your your flight surfaces around through your wings um on the wings it's a push-pull cable for both the flat control and the aileron control the flap cable is fixed in here of the aileron cable runs down through this conduit it's done like that on the airline cable so if you take the wing off the fuselage if you're disassembling it for transport all you have to do is disconnect it at the aileron horn and just pull the cable right out of the conduit and coil it up on the fuselage [Music] the arrow light 103 is a true ultralight and a pilot's license is not required so if this looks like fun to you it's time for you to start flying [Music] all right dennis so moving more away from the wings and control surfaces now we're getting into the the true airframe or fuselage so where do you start on on that aspect of it well un unlike the all the other control surfaces and the wing panels we've looked at there's not a table jig that these are built in there are there are jigging components that go onto these to keep them square you know whether it be vertical or in the mass tube coming off at 90 degrees or whatever but these are pretty much just done on a rolling cart here and we take the you know the gear mass plates and the gear legs go in the mass tube goes in the brace tubes go in like you see the battery mounts on here the that's the shoulder harness attachment point there's a down tube on the back of it here and then from that point the rest of that fuselage just basically gets built around that so this is truly the backbone of the design right here yeah this is the start of putting the fuselage together and then what you see behind us here are that one's complete this one's complete except for the dash panel has to be put in it yet all right we'll walk us through like a sample if i were to receive this at home obviously i'll inventory the kit and if i wanted to start building the fuselage portion obviously we just talked about the backbone where do you go from there and the build well when you get the kit this is how it rolls off the trailer in your driveway this is all put together just like this so everything comes as a quick build just exactly we have one kit and that's quick build kit there's there's no lesser assembled version available so this fuselage as you see it here gear brake seat tank fuel control cables all that stuff is in when you get it what do you actually have to do when you get this kit well they're you know we we refer to this as an assembly kit not a construction kit a lot of times you get what a manufacturer calls a kit and it's basically raw materials with some of that cut to length some of the you know pilot holes and stuff drilled but you've got a bend form you know you've got to make your own jigs for this some of this stuff depending on what stage of completion that particular manufacturer's kit is it what we do is we basically do every part of the assembly or or the the fabrication of the assembly up to the final assembly so when it leaves here as a kit you are not really constructing the basic components you are taking those components doing the final assembly you're covering rigging engine goes in you have to put your instruments in instrument panel wire that stuff up but you don't have to bend any tubes you don't have to weld anything you're riveting things together there's a couple hundred rivets in the kit you're putting hinges in for the control surfaces and so on but all that stuff is basically final assembly or final type assembly so to compare this to some people who are new to the ultralight or aviation world this might be like a rolling chassis compared to like a a car all right jenna since you're already sitting there once you described us the controls that are unique to this uh this airplane here okay so you know a lot of uh light aircraft or ultralights use a uh stick this uh this design when it was designed back in the late 90s was originally designed with this same butterfly yolk that you see here currently my understanding was is that when terry designed the airplane he was operating off of some survey that eaa had taken of their members and they asked them what is your preference in a single-seat ultralight aircraft and it was high wing aluminum tube um sail cloth covering and yolk by about 70 which surprised me and i don't know if that's still still the same today or not but we uh we get a request for a stick probably i don't know five or six times a year out of several hundred inquiries so it doesn't seem to be anything that keeps somebody away from this particular plane but the controls um for you saw the control cable for the flaps in the wing teleflex cable we use the same cables on the ailerons and on the elevators the the only control cable that is not a teleflex cable is rudder cables and that is a straight run aircraft stainless aircraft cable with no pulleys so basically all the control surfaces and all the control cables you don't have any slop in them at all the hydraulic brakes are standard on every aircraft for until about two years ago mechanical brakes were used from clear back to the late 90s up to a couple years ago now we use a black max hydraulic brake so the actuators here on the the stick and this is pinned in place so all you do is just squeeze the brakes we use the same braking system on every set of wheels and tires regardless of the size of the wheels and tires so how many different engine options and horsepower options do you have for these well currently we use five primary engines and those range in horsepower from 28 to 63. we use mz and hearth are the two primary engines we also occasionally use kawasaki 340 and 440 engine [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right we've seen the construction and the some of the assembly walk us through if we actually were ready to fly one of these what is the pre-flight and engine start procedure well you know the the pre-flight on a walk around on on our plane and most other planes of this type i i often tell people that you know when you walk around this airplane to do a pre-flight you literally get to see nearly every nut and every bolt and every you know every controls component they call that an annual inspection on big airplanes you know because you have to pull all these inspection plates off to see those things but here we walk around it and we literally look at all the structural bolts that attach the you know the components together on the airplane we start here we start here to lift struts and just work our way around brian and we look at the the bolts that the fasteners the self-locking nuts same thing out here when we get out to the uh to the lift strut gusset plates at the upper end jury struts same thing checking the hardware and the brackets for uh for cracks and we get to the back side of the wing we check the castle nuts and cotter pins and the hinges on all the control surfaces ailerons and flaps we check the connections on the aileron horn and the flap horns check the rear lift struts bolts for the upper and lower tail booms we always check the bolts at the bottom on the axles as well prop bolts to make sure the safety wire is still there and then we come back to the back lift strut tubes on the stabilizers check the fasteners there brackets on the horizontal stabilizer teleflex cables at the elevators same thing on the rudder rudder horn the bottom of the rudder that's the aft end of those cables we were talking about earlier they have aircraft turn buckles on the cable so we check the safety wire on that as well all right a little different camera angle here to capture what we're doing here yeah so when we build these planes uh whether we do it here as a ready to fly or we send it out as a kit all the switch plates are overhead and the the engines that we offer currently all have electric start i'll use a lightweight lithium battery for the starter so we flip the master switch on and switch both mag switches on um depending on which engine it is it will either have a primer or a choke so you engage the primer or operate the uh choke and then it's got a momentary contact switch to uh to engage the starter and that's it so we're very bare bones on instruments here but i see once floating along the fuselage what is what is it the rotation speed what do you climb out at cruise that stall that all that stuff uh well to address your what you're talking about this in this whole airspeed indicator you know this has been around on ultralights since i think they're probably the late 70s mid to late 70s simple principle it's got a little ram airport here at the bottom which that ram air lifts that diaphragm up and there's a graduated scale there for miles per hour so it reads accurately down to 10 miles an hour a lot of the in-panel standard aircraft air speed indicators don't really read accurately below about 40 and so we have a plane like ours that stalls at you know 28 or 30 miles an hour that doesn't do you much good uh hall airspeed indicator we put this on every airplane send it with every kit that works really really well um we generally at about 30 miles an hour we give it a little back pressure if you just lighten up the load on the nose there it'll fly itself right off the ground we generally climb between 40 and 45 miles an hour and a lot of the higher thrust engines that we use you do not need full power to get it off the ground you bring it to 50 60 percent power it's off the ground very quickly and then if you want to maximize that climb rate you can add the rest of that power back in and bring the nose up and climb and you know with high horsepower stuff brian it'll climb dar near 45 degrees it's you're looking at the sky there's nothing else there it's pretty much uh not for the faint of heart cruise depends on the engine if you're using the single cylinder f-33 or mz-34 those will cruise 50-55 miles an hour uh if you're using the higher the 40 horsepower above that'll cruise 60 to 65 miles an hour and we approach if it's calm air and you've got a little time in the airplane 40 miles an hour is fine if it's a little bumpy between 40 and 45 and then it'll touch down 35 32 to 35 somewhere in that range so this as a feature i just realized and noticed that uh a lot of ultralights don't and that you have flaps we do yeah electric flaps that's standard on every airplane and a switch for that's overhead has about 30 degrees of travel and that that change extending those flaps slows the stall speed down about no probably two or three miles an hour uh but it does allow you to if you're coming into a short field or over a uh you know an obstacle you can definitely steepen up that approach by extending the flaps all right dennis well thank you very much for the tour how it's made walk through and if people want to get a hold of you to ask you more questions or to actually buy one of these how can get a hold of you best places through our website it's www.fly103.com scroll down to the bottom of any page there's a telephone number and an email link and lastly uh we're in january 2021 obviously pricing can change at any time throughout the years but at this moment time what is the price point for a kit which obviously is very far along or are ready to fly uh it varies a little bit on the ready to fly depending on what engine you use but the the complete airframe kit is 13 700. no price increases uh anticipated here anytime coming up soon that includes hydraulic brakes um covering in your choice of colors aluminum fuel tank you know all the options that we have on the basic airplane and then the engine packages start at about fourth a little over four thousand run up to about a little under eight thousand depending on what motor okay well again thank you for the tour and uh i'll have to stop in and see how things are progressing through the years all right thanks for watching this week's episode of the experimental aircraft channel i invite you to subscribe like and hit all those notifications i'll see you in the next episode thanks for watching

Channel: Experimental Aircraft Channel

Views: 183,640

Rating: 4.9191551 out of 5

Keywords: aircraft, aviation, experimental aircraft, light sport aircraft, ultralight aircraft, ultralight, affordable, flying, fly, pilot, flight training, flight instruction, stol, trent palmer, mike patey, top, ten, 10, best, greatest, helicopter, homebuilt, cheapest, cheap, part, 103, kit, inexpensive, gyroplane, backyard, anyone, can, small, short, landing, take off, taking off, cost, plans, built, garage, quicksilver, kolb, bensen, paramotor, glider, phantom, hummel, mosquito, experimental aircraft channel

Id: hqUK4jkqlSY

Length: 23min 34sec (1414 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 21 2021