Historic Aerospace Restoration with RhinoCAM

AirMotive Specialties, Inc. (Salinas, CA) is well known in aviation circles worldwide for its quality restorations of vintage WWII-era aircraft such as the P51 Mustang Fighter aircraft shown here. This effort in many cases requires reverse engineering the original aircraft components.

AirMotive relies on RhinoCAM and their ShopSabre CNC router to manufacture many of these components including the form-press dies they use to manufacture the aerodynamic skin panels of the aircraft. An example of one of these dies in shown below.

Main Image: Bolt Cover Skin Panel from the P51 Mustang Fighter Bomber modeled in Rhino with the RhinoCAM plugin loaded. 3 Axis Roughing and Finishing operations are displayed in the Machining Job tree.

Inset Left: The Bolt Cover positive die is being machined from the RhinoCAM toolpaths on AirMotive’s ShopSabre CNC.

Inset Right: The resulting Bolt Cover Skin Panel is shown mounted on an actual P51 Mustang.

Don LaCourse

Don LaCourse is an Application Engineer with MecSoft Corporation. Don brings over 20 years of experience in CAD/CAM operations in both automotive and mold design applications. Don also has extensive experience in documenting CAD/CAM products and is actively involved with writing the on-line help as well as creating training tutorials for MecSoft's products.