Starting on the Wing

Starting on the Wing

Moving on with the wing, I found many more "laser woes." The ribs were not as good as I thought they were, with some errors in the plans and some in the cutting. I worked them over the best I could to make them work and got cracking.
You start out by building the center section of the wing, pinning the ribs over the front and rear dihedral braces, add leading & trailing edges, and the wing tongue. After all is aligned and glued, you sheet the topside with 3/32" balsa.

Next you prop up the right end of the center section so that the front spar and rear tab are each 4.5" up from the building board. This is to set up your dihedral angle for the left side of the wing. Double-check your alignment to the plans, distance from the table, etc., and begin building the left wing section.

One of the trickier parts of this phase was trying to bend the last few inches of your leading edge balsa stick to begin the curve into the wingtip. I did this by cutting many small saw kerfs into the stick to allow the balsa to compress while bending. Next I wet the stick down a little with Windex, which makes it bend easier and dries quickly.

Once you get it bent into shape (broke quite a few trying), glue it into place with CA. Once the glue and stick are good and dry, I saturated it a little with CA to harden the wood, and fingerpainted some alyphatic resin over it to fill in the saw kerfs. When the glue dried, I sanded it to a smooth, strong surface. Next, I moved on to sheet the left wing with 3/32" balsa as well.

With the left wing done, you repeat the process for the right wing. Prop up the left side at the wing joint with the center section and begin building and sheeting the right side of the wing.

By the way, the plans tell you to install all your pushrods, bellcranks, etc. prior to sheeting the top side, but I didn't like that approach and sheeted first.

Phase 1 Complete!

This is how I get so much done... there are two of me! Sometimes I wish there were! This pic shows completion of what I'll call "phase 1" of building the wing. This includes framing up the wing and sheeting the top side only.