Quote:
Originally Posted by lunarhighway
untill the beginning of WW2 many fighter planes like the british hawaker hurricane where at least partly constructed with fabric covered frames.
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Even by the end of the war, a lot of aircraft had fabric-covered control surfaces. They were very light and quite well-understood, because "sticks and rags" had been the construction method of choice for aircraft since they had been invented.
The fabric on all but the earliest aircraft was "doped", painted with a very tough paint/glue that set up very stiff. And the fabric still required relatively closely spaced reinforcements (wood or metal ribs that the fabric was stitched to) to keep flapping to a minimum. Anyway, the doped fabric can be viewed as a very early form of composite material, where a woven substrate was supplemented by a stiff additive. Instead of fiberglass mat and epoxy, you had cotton cloth and dope.
It's a whole lot easier to work with coro-plast.
-soD