Gondola Gluing III – Gluing the Spider Gondola

The Spider gondola is composed of 35 CFRP tubes. Gluing of all the tubes required 5 days. All I can say -and I think Natalie shares my opinion- it is a tricky and long process. Here are some more pictures of the gluing, particularly of the trickier inserts, such as the spreader bar and the […]

Gondola Gluing II – Gluing the Spider Gondola

We stared the gluing process with the less demanding joints: the scoop and the tubes that will be under compression. As we got better we moved into the more demanding tubes.

We used a jig to fix the clocking of the inserts, we cured the tubes vertically in the jig for 24 hours and then […]

Gondola Gluing I – Test tube gluing

We prepared a new non-grooved test tube as the fishing lines spacer approach behaved poorly in the pull test. And the results were excellent: the tubes where pulled up to 45700 lbf before the glue joint failed.

Here are some pictures of the gluing procedure.