April 2001

Having now found some suitable balsa wood, I decided to finish the tailplane. I filled the trailing edges in line with the top skin and left it to cure. I cut the balsa to shape - not as straight-forward as you might think - and fixed them to the tailplane with epoxy. They then had to be sanded smooth the the ends profiled to remove the vulnerable corners. And that was the tailplane complete! At last!

I then went on to complete the top skin of the flap, which went pretty smoothly. I then started on the port flap by laying the cores out on the bench and found that they did not match where they were supposed to join - one core was about 30mm shorter in chord than the other. This was obviously a problem for the factory, so I decided to do the ailerons instead.

I set up both aileron cores, one on each side of the bench and prepared them as per usual. The only problem with the bottom skin lay-up was where I did not cut it to shape properly and it would not line up. I ended up trimming the cloth along the line of the fibres and adding in a larger triangular piece at the end of the core. Once the bottom skins were cured, I tidied the edges and moved on to the top skins which went without a hitch.

The mis-matched flap cores Aileron - top skin

March 2001        May 2001