Makin' Macon, or How I Built A 20 Foot Airship With No Help From My Cat

[Fletch]

The great zeppelins of the 1920s and 30s were fragile giants, vulnerable to weather, explosions, and in the case of Jack Clemens' model of USS Macon, house pets. Its nearly complete balsawood frame was smashed when his cat jumped off a high shelf in the garage and landed on it.

2 attempts later, Clemens had a flying model with Mylar skin, 8 tiny R/C plane engines, and real helium-filled gas cells. The thing is incredible.

Macon model in Popular Science

Macon model visits Hangar 1 at Moffett Field, HQ of the real thing
Here they were met by a tv crew from the Discovery Channel - but not for US broadcast, of course! Only in Canada. Hmph! Oh, and on YouTube. Check it out.
[video=youtube;Kd_SxiVyI2s]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kd_SxiVyI2s[/video]

 

[MPicciotto]

WOW!!!! WOW!!!!! WOW!!!!! That is incredible. When I was a kid I thought it would be neat to do that. But man so incredibly fragile. I'll be sure to watch the videos later, after work hours so I don't incur the wrath of the bandwidth monitors in the IT department.

Matt

 

[Metatron]

Fantastic! What the guy says about the engineers being 'out of their depth' in building these huge airships, but making them anyway, provides an interesting insight.

 

[Fletch]

When you read up on aviation in the years around 1930, the weird thing is that almost everyone was working out of their depth. I personally think a lot of it was because serious R&D had to stop during the depression, and they were stuck trying to make existing technology better. Result: almost all of it turned out expensive, obsolete, and/or dangerous.

 

[Stanley Doble]

They were pushing the envelope of available technology. To make the aluminum tubing for the R100's frame they had to cut strips of aluminum, wind it around a form spiral fashion and rivet it together. Thousands and thousands of feet of tubing were made in this way. The aluminum they used was nothing like what we have today. They had 2 grades, soft and softer. A metallurgist who analysed the cylinder head of a German racing car from 1937 remarked "this is the kind of stuff we make lawn furniture and lamp posts out of". This was ten years more advanced than what they had to build the R100 out of.

The gas bags were lined with goldbeater's skin which is made from the intestines of an ox. This was the only thing they had that the hydrogen would not penetrate.

Wherever possible they used standard, well proven components. Like aircraft engines from a reputable manufacturer and wooden gas valves from the Zeppelin company.

Full details in Shute's book. Fascinating reading.

 

[Fletch]

I would enjoy that.

The Dornier Do X (late 20s) is a great example of a plane too far ahead of the technology. She was made of duralumin where it could be used (skin, bulkheads, etc), but the main components of the airframe were steel tubing. Her wing was too big for anything but a linen skin with aluminum dope. She was still heavy enough to be seriously damaged by rough waters while at her moorings, and on another occasion, that doped wing caught fire and the aluminum parts warped or melted.

Don't get me started on the engines. She needed 12 to fly, and had to fly low and slow to fly at all.

 

[Story]

Needs some micro-SparrowHawks
http://www.helipal.com/biplane-micro-rc-aeroplane-orange.html?gclid=CM_ukf2jm7cCFcud4AodEG8ATw

 

[Story]

John K. “Jack” Clemens, creator of the 1/40th-scale flying model of the USS Macon featured in Popular Science and other news stories in June 2011, passed away Nov. 20, 2012.

His radio-controlled 20-ft. model of the dirigible Macon was the realization of a 10-year project. The model is now displayed at the Moffett Field Historical Society Museum.

http://www.blimpinfo.com/uncategorized/nasa-mhs-macon-model/

http://www.mercurynews.com/mike-cassidy/ci_22274890/cassidy-ibm-ramac-engineer-jack-clemens-is-among