Airship project #6

Some more boarding done

I also started to prepare an (experimental) structure for the actual balloon.
It should be Zeppelin-shaped and as light as possible, so I decided to try a technique I recently heard of:

My mother had seen some dude, who made sculptures by rolling tiny, tight tubes of newspaper and then attaching them to each other with thread and glue.
This technique allows lightweight structures that still have strength to support considerable linear stress, and can be constructed in same way as traditional Finnish christmas decoration, straw-made "himmeli" (see photo). Besides, material suits a zero-budget project like this...

I did a few tubes to try it out. These are relatively thick and have many layers in them. Still, each piece required a piece of newspaper that was roughly the final length (a bit shorter actually) and about 7 centimeters wide. Add a couple of drops of paper glue and you can think how light these are compared to their strength:

That's one page of Helsingin Sanomat.

I also drew a sketch to plan on the cross-section for the balloon so I could make a test "slice" of the structure:

This has 16 surfaces for the covering,  I think that's close enough to round.
Haven't tried it yet, stay tuned.

This paper structure - if it seems to work - will take lots of time to complete but I'm quite excited.