Landracing Forum
Bonneville Salt Flats Discussion => Build Diaries => Topic started by: sailingadventure on October 22, 2018, 05:01:49 AM
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Click on the link above for all if the pictures
The last flight of the N4A
What do you do with a body buck after you finished build your car? Well we hung it from a beam in our shop to get it out of the way.
After I made the body on the English Wheel, I realized that I didn`t have the skill to weld it together, it was aluminum, so I put the pieces in top of the paint booth. I eventually found a real drop tank and made the car out of that but that`s another story.
For the last 24 years the one I built has been hanging from a steel beam in our shop.
People are always asking what is that thing that’s hanging from the beam. Well we got tired of answering the same question over and over so I decided to make something out of it.
Building the buck in `94 took me about two weeks working on it part time so I thought it would a quick project to turn it into the Goodyear Blimp. Boy was I wrong!
Well, I started work on it in October and just finished it this week. Here are the pictures of how I did it.
I covered it with ceconite, a fabric used to cover aircraft. I got it at Aircraft Spruce, they sell just about everything for aircraft.https://www.aircraftspruce.com
In the first video you can see how to tighten the fabric by using a heat gun. I`m building something for decoration so I used wood glue to bond the fabric to the wood.
The motors and pods were built from scraps of wood we already had at the shop. I did have to go to Lowes and Home Depot a few times for more wood and Rustoleum paint.
Most of the decals were made by a friend of mine, Jeff, he`s the one in the blue shirt but I made some of the small ones on my computer.
As you can see in the last pictures, it hasn`t made it all the way to its final destination. It is very heavy and the pulley needs to be relocated to get it up higher and out of the way. That will happen next week.
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One more use for a belly tank
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When mine is eventually done :roll: :roll: :roll: it will go to car shows
instead of dragging the real thing around. Some dummy tires, nice paint
and all the decals should do the trick. :cheers: