Today I sanded the sides of FU-ST-9, the balsa block at the very back, seen in the image below, to run smooth along the outer edges of the pieces it is glued between. I also glued some balsa pieces under FUH and to the back of former 10 (F10) to provide some additional support to the joint where FUH buts up against the former. Medium CA glue was used for this task.
FU-ST-9 Sanded & FUH Supported
I then moved on to prepping the side of the fuselage for the first balsa sheeting by making sure there were no glue gobs present and sanding down any bumps. We then lined up the FU-SH-2 piece of balsa, which is 51 inches in length of 3⁄32” x 4″ balsa to see how it’d fit with the sheet flush to the back of the fuselage. This sheet wasn’t quite long enough to reach to the front.
For this task we used carpenter glue. I:
- Brushed it on every surface the sheeting would touch
- Since sheet is short at the front I marked a line with a pencil so I knew how far I’d have to go forward with glue
- Includes putting glue along the outter edge of each former
- Pinned the balsa sheet to the balsa stringer to help keep things in place while lining it all up
- Clamped it all over, using pieces on top of the balsa to distrubte the load
Once that was in place, measured and cut another piece of 3⁄32” x 4″ balsa to fill the gap at the front, which involved:
- Wax papering the side of F1 so it didn’t accidentally get glued in place
- Applying glue to the rest of the side
- Applying glue to the edge of the balsa sheeting already applied
- Placing the additional piece on at the front, butting up to the first piece of sheeting
- Clamping it in place with a scrap piece of balsa laid on top to distrubute the load and not damage the sheeting
1st FU-SH-2 Glued
At this point we were hooped again and you can see how we left things all clamped in the featured image at the top along with the image directly above. This puts us squarely on Step 6, which is likely to take 2 more sessions to compelete.