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.

Top Sheeting

Before the top sheeting is added, cradles have to be made to support the wing. I made these out of 1/2" balsa. Once the glue is dry it's time to start on the next wing panel.

Shear Webs and LE Sheeting

After both spars have glued, the next step is to fit the shearwebs. This is a bit fiddly as each one has to be cut and fitted individually and then they all have to be glued in position and the wing put back in the jig.




Shearweb fitting in progress. Had to take a break to eat before I got into trouble with the Boss.





Finished shearweb. The marks are to remind me which way round to fit each one as they all have a slight taper.






Fitting the underside leading edge sheeting. Again the wing has to weighted down in the jig.

Spar & Sheeting

Next step is fitting the bottom spar and the rear sheeting. The spar is 1/8" x 1/2" spruce which has to be tapered to 3/8" at the tip.

Work Starts On The Wings

Started work on the wings. Really feel like I'm getting somewhere now.

The wings are built inverted on a simple jig arrangement to keep everything straight.




The first few ribs in place








Overview of the wing so far. Spars, sheeting, shearwebs etc still to go.







It all lines up perfectly, things are going better than I expected.