Tag Archives: composite

Molds for an Unlikely Airframe

I was up at Arlington airport to see some vintage planes one weekend and was a short distance away from the hangars that Eviation operates from.  This is where they built their Alice prototype.  A composite airframe, the Alice was molded on site by the look of things.  All I read suggests any production aircraft will be significantly different from the prototype so the molds are probably surplus at this point.

Whether that is the case or not, at least some of them appear to now be stored outside.  I took a few images of them because the shaping is quite interesting and the construction of the molds themselves is something I like to see.  Tooling for an airframe is not as elegant as the airframe it will produce and it needs to be rigid to allow it to produce what is needed.  Now it is no longer needed, I wonder what its future will be.

Stealing A Composite Idea

Quite a while back, I saw a shot that someone had composited of a Typhoon display over an airfield where they had the jet throughout its routine to show its route through the sky.  I liked the idea and, while it was totally different, it got me thinking when I was up at Heritage Flight Museum.  They had the Skyraider on the ramp but not flying.  It was ready to go but hadn’t yet been signed off.

However, they did do an engine run for the visitors and unfolded and folded the wings a few times.  Having got some basic shots, the idea of the Typhoon display popped in to my head so I shot a sequence of shots of the wings as they folded and unfolded.  I took way more than actually was a good idea.  I imported them all in to Photoshop as layers and then hid all of them except one and then progressively added some back to get the wings in different positions.  If I had used them all it would have just been a blur of wings.

With the ones I wanted selected, I changed the blend mode for all but the base layer to Darken and that meant the dark wing elements overlaid anything brighter behind them.  The result was a composite with multiple wing positions all showing at once.  I think it came out quite well.  I thought I might have issues with hiding things I didn’t want to or having to much movement between shots but that wasn’t a problem in the end.