Gore Construction: Part II

I took airblog's advice , and made a wooden pattern, then used a soldering iron to cut out the gores. Here are some photos of the process:

1. Clamping down the fabric in between the pattern and another piece of wood in order to prevent any slip.



2. Cutting the fabric with the soldering iron. It is REALLY easy, just give the fabric a little tug, and the iron does the rest. It also creates a seal on the fabric to prevent fraying.



3. the eight blue gores for my model of a model. I will make four more gores in some other color, maybe red or yellow.




Thanks a lot airblog, you made my life a lot easier. I can't imagine how long this would have taken doing it MY WAY.

General Basket Outline

I am planning to build the basket completely from scratch, so i have developed a rough plan on where everything will go. This drawing is not to scale, and is merely a sketch to help visualize what i want to build. At the top is a standard burner which i hope to build with copper pipe and some fittings. It is servo controlled. Along the struts to the basket, i want to mount the GPS antenna. In the actual basket, the two propane tanks will be portioned off from all electronics by an aluminum heat shield. The electronics including the micro processor (Parallax BASIC Stamp, GPS receiver, and servo controllers will all be contained in that area. An anemometer will hang from below the basket with a communications antenna. All of the electronics will control the balloon in order to guide it from lift off to touch down.

Gore Construction

Hey,
Today i began work on my model of my model. I built a pattern out of wood with holes at 15 different points along the gore:


I then clamped the rip stop between the board with the holes and another board, and marked all of the spots through the holes, onto the fabric, after connecting the dots, i have the gore printed on the fabric:




Now all i have to do is repeat the process 12 times!! after that, i can began to sew all of the gores together, and cut the hole for the parachute valve.

Progress...Maybe

I have begun work on a model of the model. I am using standard non-treated rip stop nylon, and my home sewing machine. I plan to build the model, then take on the larger task of building a "full size" model. I will also have some pics up by the end of the week.

Inspirations

As I began my quest to gather as much information about model ballooning in general, i surfed several web pages which have information about model balloons, or balloon construction.

Some of the links i have used are off he right under LINKS

Beginnings

This blog is going to cover my project build the first ever automated hot air balloon. I encourage your comments, and look forward to posting.