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5 8 | H I G H - P E R F O R M A N C E C O M P O S I T E S FEATURE / PLANT TOUR CNC-machining masters Plastic tooling board masters are cut from CAD file data by VX Aerospace's DMS 3-axis machining center. Tooling quality with economy Void-free, high-gloss tools, like these produced for the Falcon wing roots, have tooling surfaces formed with standard carbon fiber plain- weave fabric (below, left) with low-cost recycled carbon fiber mat behind them as bulking plies (below, right), which are then infused with 350°F/180°C epoxy tooling resin, postcured and surface-coated. Masters prepped for tooling layup VX Aerospace's quality tooling begins with the master patterns. Surfaces of male patterns are putty-filled, sanded and sealed then polished and recoated with sealer again in preparation for the tooling laminates. The master for the Falcon fuselage's right-side tooling is on the right side of the photo. place and much less equipment-intensive than automated tape placement. Currently, two composite aircraft projects occupy the com- pany's 17,000-ft 2 (1,579m 2 ) production space. Both will make extensive use of C-PLY. The frst is the Falcon, a sleek, low-wing, high-performance sport aircraft esteemed by some as "the Fer- rari of light aircraft." Originally built in Hungary, a handful of the planes made it to the U.S. before the manufacturer, Corvus, went bankrupt. A groundswell of demand spurred an effort to put the plane into production in the U.S. Via a memorandum of understanding with Renegade Light Sport Aircraft (Deland, Fla.), VX has assumed responsibility for design, engineering, tooling and manufacture of the Falcon airframe, while Renegade controls sales, marketing and FAA certifcation. The other aircraft is a 1:4 scale version of the VX Aerospace- designed VX-1 KittyHawk. Its unique blended wing/fuselage is designed to exploit aerodynamics and potential alternative fuels to cut fight cost per mile by a factor of three while offer- ing more internal volume and payload. Like its Wright Brothers namesake, the KittyHawk is poised to score a frst of its own: It will be the frst aircraft to fy with C-PLY laminates. Skillen believes that the new material combined with OOA processing can enable small composite airframers the opportu- nity to produce structures with the same precision and perfor- mance as those fabricated by big aerospace OEMs and primes, but at a fraction of the latter's delivery time and cost. Designed for manufacturability The single-engine Falcon is 21 ft/6.4m long, with a 31.5-ft/9.6m wingspan. It can cruise at 140 mph (225 kph), burning less than 5 gal/18.9 liters of fuel per hour. For the North American market, VX Aero is maintaining the plane's look and basic dimensions but also taking steps to improve its structural design. Because the plane's defunct creator's design data were un- available, development began with white-light 3-D digital scanning of the entire aircraft (using a structured-light scan- ner rather than a laser scanner) from which it developed CAD surface models. Then came the critique: "Original production was most likely using hand-built masters and tooling," says Skillen. The fuselage had a signifcant amount of asymmetry. There were butt-jointed cored panels without any means for Source: VX Aerospace Source: VX Aerospace Source: VX Aerospace 0514HPC IM PlantTour-OK.indd 58 4/22/2014 3:57:59 PM