 | Bob and Marianne LeDoux's New Special Shape Project! |
 It flys!First flight was Wednesday, July 25th. Second one is pictured here, July 28th at Albany, Oregon, piloted by Bob. It flys and handles just like any regular balloon. We are very pleased with it. Cables are longer than would be on a normal balloon in order for the mouth to stay open. This does not appear to be a problem. Name continues to be debated. At this time we are calling it "Sew Pointee." Building Thoughts Here are some thoughts (and lessons learned) on the new hot air balloon that Bob and I are building (today is February 12th, 2007). It is a tetrahedron, which is a triangular pyramid. The colors are blackberry, tangerine and lemon yellow. It is silicone-coated lightweight fabric. (See the clip art.) We started sewing right after the holidays, hoping to be done by mid-February ready for test inflation. Looks like we are a month behind schedule, being about 3/4 done. We are keeping a log of the building process along with pictures. To keep the cost down for this experiment, we bought discounted fabric. While we inspected all the fabric and it is all airworthy, some pieces had marks, wrinkles, silicone-coating variations which we elected to use or not use as needed. Bob believes most people won't notice these imperfections.  One of the problems we have run into during the sewing is what Bob refers to as fabric creep. This means that one side of the seam grows longer as we sew the seam. The lightweight fabric we are using does not lend itself to gathering so it is difficult to adjust the longer side. This is very frustrating at time because our pattern is meant to have horizontal seams that match. Well, that just didn't happen. We have tried to adjust for the creep by sewing from the center out. At this point we don't know how it will look in the end. The lesson we learned is not to have a pattern that has horizontal seams that must match. After we ran into the fabric creep problem we THEN remembered this was true in all our other balloons. However, the pattern matching for them was not that critical. You will notice on ISewBar and Sewlite that pattern is staggered and for SewEZ there is a long white panel that separates the horizontal lines. There is also a gore tape on each vertical seam. Not all our vertical seams will have a gore tape as they are not all loan-bearing. For looks, we probably could have put loan tapes on all the verticals. We also have more horizontal seams than necessary. Each panel is rectangle, whereas we could have just cut to the pattern. It would have saved some sewing. Well, as of April 25th, we are getting closer. All the sewing is done (for now) and we are in the process of installing cables (in this case, temporary ropes). Weather permitting we should at least be able to lay it out to see what it looks like this weekend.     Bob cutting; sewn panels in bags; Marianne sewing The next day we did another inflation after adjusting the rope lengths and had better results. More adjustments are needed, however. The balloon and basket rotated 90 degrees during the hot inflation. We are discussing different inflation methods. We did discover that milking this fabric is difficult and by milking the corners in and then tying them off helped the process.    May 11th (first) inflation 
 May 12th inflation We are in the process of finishing up the paperwork and applying for an airworthiness inspection. By the time that is scheduled we will have the final cables attached and all lines adjusted. We are still trying to come up with a good name. |
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