I’ve probably seen three different types. One an extruded section of aluminium bent to the required outline; another cast as a single component; or that here assembled from stock lengths of tubing joined by connectors. Don’t worry too if your fellow passengers take exception at you taking pictures ~ tell them as I did that you’re a foot-fetishist.
You might be aware that the series of drones I produced and flew ~ or got someone to do so ~ generally comprised a space-frame made from such tubes and connectors, with the intervening spaces filled with foam sheet to prevent shear. And which other frames were filled out like this, children? Correct... wattle-and-daub timber-framed buildings in the Middle Ages!
Nonetheless I abandoned alloys when it came to the boats because (a) they involved a long drives to collect and (b) the war in Ukraine upped prices considerably because the bulk of it is sourced in Russia... the effect of tariffs and sanctions generally being global economic whack-a-mole.
So that’s one sign of the times, and another is that foam-and-ply aircraft appear to be the go-to method of raining destruction in both Ukraine and the Persian Gulf as of late.
And so I use wood not only because it's cheap, readily available and ecologically-friendly but also because there is a deal of satisfaction in doing so. Riva’s wooden speedboats that plied the Italian lakes were probably the pinnacle of boat-building, and likewise the Mosquito that De Havilland produced in WW2 was unique in being built almost entirely in wood (for the reason back then, as now, metal was scarcer with steel going into bombs and alloys into aircraft carrying them).
Ironically at secondary school I much preferred working in metal, which neither warped nor split. I still have the cannon I made at school under the tutelage of Mr Powell. What I did with this was scrape the phosphate of any number of matches and pack it into the barrel before inserting red-hot wire into the vent: with spectacular results. This we did in the workshop, whereas nowadays I suspect there is no woodwork, no metalwork and no teachers allowing cannons to be fired off in class.
Which is why at the possible dawn of WW3 we are ~ as in two previous ~ up shit creek.
You had to walk through the wood shop to access the metalwork, and the smell of fragrant hardwoods on the rack was divine ~ sorry about that, orang-utans.
