This is a picture of a mock up section of a helicopter tail boom I did. The design criteria were that it take 1 day of engineering and 1 day of assembly to make it. It's about 5' wide. I didn't meet the design goals.
It boils down to putting thousands of holes in curved flanges and lofted bends. When you do that, they aren't round holes anymore, which means you can't find their centers which means it's really, really hard to locate (thousands of) holes in mating parts.
What I'd like to do is not use holes, but put an array of points on the surface and have them unfold with the sheet metal.
Since I can't do that, can anyone offer any suggestions? Anyone else doing something like this?