The Tiger Moth project
EAA hangar, Camarillo airport

We started out building wing ribs. First, I built one jig (like a template) and one rib which we used as a master rib and jig. The students built 3 more jigs. The students cut the upper and lower rib caps, fit them into the jig, then cut and dry fitted the interior rib pieces. If all the pieces fit right, they were epoxy'd into place with a 2 part epoxy called T-88.

We needed to build 52 ribs plus a bunch of "false ribs", so this phase took a while. We ended up calling all the pieces popsicle sticks. We're working on a 14' long work table that was contributed to us by Mike Goodman, who built another Fisher aircraft called a Dakota Hawk on that table.

We had numerous students over the course of a couple of years build ribs. A concept we taught was peer review.







Students would check out each others ribs prior to epoxy, then I would carefully check the final product.

A second concept was personal ownership and responsibility for your work. Constant emphasis was made that someday, someone's life would be entrusted to their workmanship (maybe theirs!) at 5,000 feet.

Once a rib passed quality control, the student signed their name and date to that rib. Today, dozens of names are scribed, ultimately to be hidden, yet there nonetheless - and the students remember that.

We're slowly starting to get a collection of completed ribs.

Next up - building the spars.