More longeron bending - 3 hours

One of the benefits of working in an engineering office is that I can draft the longeron bending templates to perfect full scale and also mirror them to fit both the Left and Right sides. I scanned in my F-721B aft deck pieces and then drew out the correct bend in autoCAD to 1:1 scale.

And of course the continuous roll plotter comes in extra handy.I managed to print out a 72" long paper template.

I managed to make short work of the second longeron. It goes way more quick than the first one as you now have a feel for the correct pressure needed on the bending dies, and you are not so afraid of over bending. I managed to bend the send one to near correct in about an hour or so. Then came the not so fun tweaking. The bend of the two pieces is virtually perfect on the horizontal, but not on the vertical. this shows up when you clamp the two pieces together.
Looking great here....



But not so good here....

This is where things can get a little frustrating. Trying to flatten that unwanted separation between the longerons results in changing the bend that you want to have match the template. So lots of back and forth futzing. I spent an hour on it but was making little progress, but at least I was in the ball park.