Form Follows Function
Or does it?
This short article first appeared in №93–2 of Dodgson Designs’ Second Wind newsletter. — Ed.
I was pretty pleased with myself in 1993 upon the development of the new MonoSeam Sprite fuselage. It is strong, lightweight, beautifully pre-molded and it lends itself to practical manufacturing techniques. This fuselage system, however, does not lend itself to including a pre-formed fin on the fuselage. Therefore, the Sprite builder must construct and install the vertical fin onto the fuselage. This is not a hard job and it provides for a very lightweight fin assembly — so it works out great.
From the beginning, however, I realized that the finless MonoSeam fuselage would be an ideal fuselage to use for a V-tail glider — since a vertical fin is not used at all. It was natural then, that when building the first prototype for the V-gilante, that I try a V-tail on it. This I did. The tail is held on with two bolts and is therefore easily removed for transport.
My fears that the handling of the V-gilante would be adversely affected by the use of the V-tail were allayed at the first test flights. It handled exactly like a larger version of the Sprite with no strange V-tail induced characteristics.
Overjoyed that I had stumbled on the ideal configuration to best optimize my MonoSeam fuselage technique, I was pontificating to my visiting nephew, Tom Dodgson, on how beautifully integrated the design concepts were on the new plane. Being familiar with one of my oft-spouted truisms Form Follows Function Tom, computer engineer at Boeing, wryly commented “well Robert, as with most of your design breakthroughs, this looks to me like another case of Form Follows F — k Up.”
This humorous quip caught me off guard but I realized that it was right on target. Most of my best design innovations have been found while trying to do a workaround to a problem, a mistake or bug that popped up to block my path to design perfection. I had to admit that while I had always paid lip service to the phrase Form Follows Function, my own personal design style is more closely akin to the words of my insightful nephew, Tom.
©1993 Bob Dodgson
Resources
- The Dodgson Anthology — The complete works of Bob Dodgson as featured in the New RC Soaring Digest.
Are you a fan of the retro Dodgson Designs logo? Is so, you might want one of these for your flying field attire. Otherwise, now read the next article in this issue, return to the previous article in this issue or go to the table of contents. A PDF version of this article, or the entire issue, is available upon request.
