Scale Drawings

I am honored to have a chance to offer scale drawings of Marian Gibas to scale soaring community. His life long effort to bring us extremely detailed drawings of Polish soaring machines just recently got more real then ever.
Growing as talented engineer Marian had always exhibited extraordinary drawing skills and admiration to aircraft structure and design. After early attempts as a young man to draw glider of the museum sample he ended up with more questions then answers. He then had realized that to do it right besides real glider on hand he needs all possible factory drawings, detailed pictures and bulletins of all changes and repairs, because hardly two of the same gliders look identical . Shortly search for these artifacts became his every day obsession. Endless trips to variety of production facilities or to meet governing official was his life style. 20 years ego access to drawings was almost impossible due its level of secrecy used in national industry. Nobody was brave enough to give Marian access to all archives in PZL. With the time he has become familiar personality and his collection of blueprints was growing fair enough to have drawings of some of the older gliders almost completed. Usually gliders with long production history had sufficient number of factory drawings and documents, but many prototype and short series gliders had their archives confusing or missing. Beginning of 90-ties SZD was going trough dip crisis ending up with closing of the facility in 1996. Nobody knew what was going to happen with the heritage of the SZD. In this circumstances Marian decided to create series of drawings based on material he already had which are not 100% complete, but fair enough to complete any scale project we wish. Idea was to keep drawing and keep collecting additional documents, make updates on existing sheets or issue additional files and annexes. For this reason there is no two monografies looking alike.
Main body of the glider is drawn by Marian in 1:24 scale on his original sheets. This gives a chance to easy change the scaling to popular numbers like 1/48, 1/12, 1/4 or 1/3. Details are drawn in decimal scales like 1/10 or 1/5 which are easier to deal with metric dimensioning of details. There is everything here. Bolts, special nuts, hooks, skid ensemble, wood graining on wing or fuse paneling, rim of the main wheel are the things you find on this drawings. First look at the copy make you feel like no... This is not for me. Then...ask Antonio Quesada winner of 2003 US Nationals. He was able build his 1:2.44 scale SZD-15 Sroka in 10 months. ZM

To speed up the results Antonio used Kinko outlet, dialed the enlargement and printed the whole sheet in many fragments. But here is a catch. Using big enlargements you might end up slightly off intended scale because of difference in spacing between scanner and the printer and lack of fine tuning of the enlarged size. Additionally multiplying this numbers you can end up with really rough measurements. Antonio intended scale was 1: 3. In reality it came at 1:2.466. There is other factor worthy mentioning. Scanners and printers software tend to measure and enlarge differently longwise and differently in perpendicular direction in relatively large rates. Luckily drawings include all necessary measurements throughout entire geometry of the glider and are in relation to each other. It is sometimes better to use one particular tape measure, proper size right angle line to get to the same results with more confidence. ZM