Before moving on, let's review the overall capping and sheeting process to better understand what we are trying to accomplish. This technique is done the same for both the wing and the tail, and proves a simple but very strong construction to this kit.
The animation at right shows it much better than I can explain it, but it basically sums up to one round of cap stripping around the perimeter, add your sheeting clear out over the cap strips, then seal it all in with a second round of capping. After sanding and rounding, you have a sold wing/tail that will stand up to a lot of abuse.
One other thing, I forgot to get a picture of the joining of the two wing halves... my hands were quite full at that time!
As soon as you finish sheeting the wing halves, just trim/sand the root ends of the wings and epoxy the two halves together with 45 minute epoxy. When you epoxy them together, just use a bunch of tape strips to pull the two halves together. That will apply the pressure you need to squeeze it all together, freeing your hands up to focus on keeping it aligned. Keep your eyes on the leading and trailing edges. If you keep them lined up, the middle will pretty much take care of itself. I babysit it closely until the glue is fully set.
Final cap stripping
Just like in the first round, glue and tape up your cap stripping to the leading and trailing edges of the wing. Be sure to cap the areas where the left & right halves join with one single piece spanning across the joint.
Again, the rounded tips are done with three strips of 1/16" stripping, wetting them to allow them to bend around the curves.
Sanding & rounding the edges
Sand the cap stripping down flush to the surfaces of the wing, then begin rounding the edges by using a long sanding block to cut 45 degree angles into the top and bottom edges. You can knock the resulting edges down again to 20 degree angles if you like.
The next step is such a great technique that I had to show the animation from the tail building pages again. The "Shoeshine Technique" is by far the best, fastest and easiest way of sanding down to consistent, perfectly round edges...
TECHNIQUE TIP
The "Shoeshine Technique" is quite simple. Just place the piece to be rounded between your knees and use a 6-8 inch long strip of sandpaper held at each end to brush back and forth over the edges. The motion should be just like you were shining shoes and will give you a very smooth and symmetrical round edge.
Note that I chose not to round the thin trailing edges of the wing.
The ailerons
Same steps again here on the ailerons. Sand flush, knock down your 45's, and then shoeshine those puppies. The only difference here is that you'll need to sand a rounded "cove" back into the trailing edge of the wing so the rounded leading edges of the ailerons will seal back up into the wing somewhat.
To do this, I wrap some sandpaper around some cylindrical objects at varying diameters to aid in getting the contour sanded into the TE of the wings. This is the same technique as was shown on the tail section.
Summary and evaluation
That's pretty much it, you're now done with the primary construction, capping and sheeting of the airframe. I still have some sanding to do later, and I'll do some additional construction and beefing up in the area of the flap pockets. Of course, I still have to finish up the flaps themselves but at this point, I've at least blown away that big pile of balsa that comes with the kit!
The only problem/concern I ran into is that when I was doing my capping and sheeting I discovered some inconsistency between the airfoils cut into the two wing halves (foam cores).
I found them to match perfect at the root of the wing, but as you moved out towards the wingtips, one wing actually grew (or shrunk) to have a thickness that was nearly 1/8" different than the other wing. They were basically the same airfoil "shape" but not the same thickness as you moved out towards the tip. This occurred from LE to TE, increasing as you moved from about mid wing out to wing tip. Hopefully this won't cause a huge problem as it's too late to really do anything about it now. However, I can expect to be "ready on the trim controls" for that first flight. This may not be uncommon with foam wings, but I think it's probably not the norm. Hopefully it will surprise me and not hurt the flying characterstics too badly.
