Attaching the Fin

After a break to prepare a Cyril for the F3B season it's back to the Phase 5.
Next job is to glue to the fin to the fuselage.

When the fin is glued on it has to be jigged up with anything to hand to keep it all straight and true.

The fuselage and fin are both held firmly in position.

Building the Fin

The fin is a hollow structure. The bottom section is made of ply and holds the bellcrank. The rest is balsa.




Ply sides with spacers of 3 x 1/32" ply to centre the bellcrank







The 1/8" x 3/8" balsa internals and bellcrank in place.







The fin being assembled.

Tailplanes & Bellcrank

The next step is to build the fin.
Before I do this I like to install the wires in the tailplanes to ensure that they line up correctly with the bellcrank. The easiest way to do this is glue the wires in place using the bellcrank as a jig.

More Fuselage

Although not required yet, I could not resist attacking the fuselage with the razor plane to do a bit of initial shaping.






The plan shows a plastic bellcrank but as I don't have one, I have made a glass version.

Top Sheeting, Nose and Hatch

Once the bottom sheeting has dried it's time to start on the top.


Before putting on the top sheeting I like to glue in cross grain gusset to held prevent the fuselage sides from pulling apart in an 'arrival'.







The nose and hatch in place. Starting to look 'Fossy'








Tailplanes being glued.

Sheeting the Bottom of the Fuselage

The next step is to sheet the bottom of the fuselage.




The rear is sheeted with 3/16" balsa.

The next two sections are 1/2" balsa.

Joining the Fuselage Sides

The next step is to join the fuselage sides.


The fuselage is joined inverted on the bench. The rear is supported off the bench to allow room for F2 and clamped at the front.




F2 is held in place by the pressure from the clamp at the front. A datum line is drawn drawn on the board to ensure the fuselage doesn't resemble a banana.

Fuselage Continued

Once the sides have dried the longerons are trimmed and then the formers are made. F1 is balsa, F2 is ply and F3 is ply/balsa.





Next stage is to join the rear of of the fuselage on the 1/2" balsa top decking






The sides are clamped around F3 and at the rear and the whole lot is weighted down on to the top decking.

Starting the Fuselage

The fuselage starts with the sides which are made of 3/16" balsa. As the sides are longer than 36" an extra length has to be spliced on the front. The balsa I bought wasn't quite wide enough to cover the depth of the front end of the fuselage so I had to splice an extra section on to increase the width.
The top of the fuselage has 3/8" x 1/8" spruce longerons and the bottom has 3/8" triangular section balsa longerons. Being a traditional build there is a lot of tapering of spruce and balsa to be done before it is all glued together.




The sides and the longerons ready to be glued.







Gluing it all together. The spruce is pinned and weighted.

Progress Report

Sorry, no updates recently. The first wing was finished just before the VRQ and getting ready for that sidetracked me, then Christmas activities intervened and finally I had a bout of flu so nothing much happened for a few weeks.

I am now back on the case and the second wing has now been built. To build the opposite panel I traced the wing layout through to the other side of the plan by taping it to a window on a sunny day so the details showed through. The instructions now move on to joining the wing panels and fabricating ailerons and tips but I am going to start on the fuselage next and come back to the wings later.


The basic panels. Each one takes less than a week to complete, an hour or two per evening. Good old PVA wood glue slows up proceedings.





Root section is based on E374, I believe.








Tip section is symmetrical.