Tour the Demoiselle
Wing Structure
One of the things that the early designers were trying to come up
with were ways to make an airframe strong but make it light. One of
the woods they experimented with was bamboo. Santos-Dumont used it
quite liberally in his designs of his Demoiselles. This
example, as you can see, is all held together with bamboo. You
didn't use glue or screws because the bamboo was very frail around
the areas where it needed to join to another piece. You'd lash it
together. Sometimes I felt like Robinson Crusoe building this
airplane. You can see the liberal use of brass wire, which was used
originally to clamp all the pieces together. Then the fabric is just
basically laid over the top, stitched in between the ribs. And then
it was laced to the front with that little baseball stitch style
that you see.