Time Spent: 5.5 hours (est.)

Under construction

Nose plate and firewall building.

Time Spent: 1 hour

The landing gear is a subassembly that you can complete in parallel with the rest of the project.

Time Spent: 2 hours (est.)
Total Time: 28.25

The wheel covers are a perfect chance to show off my router table and do some template routing. The whole key is get one piece dead on for shape and use that as a template for routing the others. When you’re done each piece will be exactly the same as the first one. Here’s how I did it. First, I cut one wheel cover pine piece close to the final shape. Then , I sanded this piece into its final shape with the disk sander. I then took this piece and traced it 5 more times onto the pine. I rough-cut these pieces to within about an eighth of an inch of the line. Now here’s the fun part. I took each rough piece, and using multiple loops of duct tape, taped the one “completed” piece on top of it. I then template routed the rough piece with my router table using a ½ inch straight bit and top mounted ½ inch guide bearing. The bearing rides along the edge of the top “finished” piece and the cutting edge cuts the bottom piece even to the top. So long as the two pieces stay secure relative to each other, when you’re finished, you’ll have identical pieces.

Time Spent: 1 hours (est.)
Total Time: 26.25

I cut the nose positioning plate and nose positioning plate adapters to plan and dry-assembled these with clamps. I had expected this assembly to be almost perfectly square, as the pieces themselves were square. However, the dry assembly easily confirmed otherwise. While assembling the nose box pieces separately did create a square unit, the fore fuselage ends, which should have been mirror images of each other in space, proved not to be.

Had I noticed this prior to the previous night’s setback/elevator/rudder/fuse glue-up, I could have done a little racking to the assembly to get it relatively square. Note the key word in that sentence, prior. I was stuck with fuse assembly the way it was, and there was no going back. I contemplated this for some time, realizing that the propshaft was going to be passing through this assembly AFTER the nosebox was inverted within the cowl. The rotation is hard to describe here but if you read the instructions you’ll understand. This means that any misalignment will be doubled in the final product if everything else remains the same. But again, I was committed with how the fuselage sides lined up. So, striking a compromise between a building non-square nose assembly, and racking the fuselage sides a bit, I assembled the box. The end result is certainly not square, a quick visual inspection verifies that, but the deflection is as little as I can make it. Therefore with the grace of God go we.

Time Spent: 3 hours (est.)
Total Time: 25.25

So now the fuselage assembly can begin in earnest. Placing the rudder into the headrest slot I made sure that the fuselage sides would come together at the rudders trailing edge and would meet at the bottom of the rudder. Using a couple of screws they were temporarily attached.

Walking the elevator into position was a real frustration. I don’t know if the plans are wrong or what, but I couldn’t get it into position. Frustrated, I elongated the elevator slots both forward and backward using my Dremmel tool. If you do this, do it a little at a time and do it the same amount on both sides. Now that the elevator could slide into place, I measured to make sure it was centered from to back, and eyeballed to make sure it was square to the length of the aircraft. I marked the position of the elevator by drawing lines on both the inside and the outside of the fuselage.

I placed a fillet of glue along every edge that touched the fuselage and the slot in the headrest. I backed out the temporary screws clamping the elevator rudder, placed glue (a Lot) in the joint and screwed it back together. Try to wipe up the drips when you can, but remember, you can sand away the excess, so an errant drip here or there is nothing to get hung-up about.

Time Spent: 4 hours (est.)
Total Time: 22.25

Looking at the plans it’s tough to see how the fuselage clamp actually clamps the fuselage. I looked at the plans for months (prior to construction) trying to figure it out. In fact, even after building the two pieces I couldn’t see how the actual clamping worked. I understood how the fuse sat in it, but thought the top piece of the clamp rested on top of the fuselage sides. The plans called for a “lag screw” to hold the clamp together. I thought “Lag screw? Where the heck am I going to find a 13 inch lag screw?” So I improvised, got some threaded rod and was going to use that. Then, as I was clamping it all up, it dawned on me. The clamp actually sits inside the two fuselage sides and on top of the internal doublers where the seat is. DUH! I did have to trim the top part of the clamp to achieve this, but once I did the clamp works great.

The assembly of the backrest / headrest base / headrest assembly is not well described in the text. After looking at the beveled cuts on the headrest base I was unsure exactly how the parts were supposed to mate up. After trying it a couple of different ways with the fuse in the clamp, I figured it out. I then glued and clamped the backrest to the headrest base. Once that had dried, I attached the headrest to it and viola! It fit perfectly, and the overlap of the headrest on the fuselage side was almost perfect. I then liberally glued the entire assembly inside the fuselage dados and clamped with a couple of bar clamps.

Time Spent: 2 hours (est.)
Total Time: 18.25

Bending the fuselage was rather straightforward, and even kind of fun. I built two of the bending jigs as shown on the plans out of scrap wood I had in the bin. You could get away with building only one, but I wanted to bend both halves in one night. Do the bending work somewhere outside, like the garage floor or flat sidewalk, where you don’t have to worry about spillage and warping.

I started by getting the requisite weights (coffee cans filled with water) ready. Have an extra couple of containers of water on hand for the soaking process. Don’t be afraid of using a lot of water. Start by wetting the inside of the dado thoroughly. Thoroughly wet a rag, place it in the dado and let it soak for around ten minutes. Then place the piece over the jig, with the wet rag between, making sure that the jig rests squarely against the aft shoulder of the dado. This insures that the bed is square to the dado, which will make the seatback assembly much easier.

Place another soaked rag flat over the top of the joint, and steam the area repeatedly. When the rag starts to dry out or tarnish, immediately re-wet with the extra water you have on hand. At first, you won’t see much bending happening, and you’ll wonder what you’re doing wrong. However, if you keep steaming the joint, and don’t let it dry out, after about 10 minutes you’ll see the piece begin to bend. It’ll happen slowly at first, but the last three inches of bend will only take about a minute. The instructions said to switch to “drying” the joint when it gets close to the ground, but I steamed that puppy the entire time until it touched. I wanted to have a completely smooth bend, and I figured the extra steaming time didn’t hurt anything. Anyway, when you want to dry the bend, simply remove the rags from above and below the joint and pass the iron across the piece on a dry setting. Don’t stop moving the iron, or you’ll scorch the wood. After the joint becomes dry to the touch, move the piece and jig to a place where it can sit overnight. Leave the piece on the jig.

Time Spent: 2 hours (est.)
Total Time: 16.25

Chamfering the wing spots posed a bit of a problem. I spent a night trying to figure out how I was going to do it before I set out. I ended up using a combination of my band saw and table saw. The difficulty in the approach is the fact that both the tablesaw and the band saw can cut bevels in oly one direction. The wood can be fed only one way, and the blade/table can be tilted only one way. Therefore one fuselage side was beveled on the table saw the other on the band saw. The two wing reinforcement assemblies were cut using the same tool combo, but in the opposite order. Looking back on it, I should have hunted for a dovetail bit of the correct degree, but hindsight is 20/20.

I dadoed the various fuselage dados with the router and my flip top router jig. The instructions suggest using the table saw. Frankly, I think that would be much more difficult. First, you need to have a dado blade for your table saw. And I, like most amateur woodworkers didn’t have one. They’re expensive and specialized. Unless you do a lot of dadoing, they really aren’t practical. On top of that, the seat back dadoes are not square to any edge. This means that you’ll need to dado with some sore of miter gauge. I just don’t see how you could get this correct on opposing sides of the fuselage.

The router, however, IS DESIGNED to dado and you can do it with any number of bits. This is the way I went. Using a ¼ straight bit and my straight edge jig all I needed to do is clamp the jig to the dado shoulder, flip the top and route away.

Time Spent: 5 hours (est.)
Total Time: 14.25

I didn’t really keep good notes during this time. I was assembling and working my tail off to the point where writing about it afterward seems a chore. Pity, as I know that I (and maybe others) will want to look at these notes again in the future. I’ll summarize the higher points.

To round the edges of all the plywood parts by hand would take forever. I decided that the best route (no pun intended) would be to use my router table and a 3/16^th roundover bit. This doesn’t completely eliminate hand sanding, but takes it down to a couple of minutes per part to take off the rough spots. I rounded 95% of the parts in this manner and the results were satisfactory.

For the panel cover parts that require a 45-degree edge, I figured the router table was the way to go as well. It was a little bit more difficult than rounding the parts but it worked. To do it I put a 45 degree chamfer bit in the router table and adjusted the fence and so that the original outer edge of the piece is preserved. Then I adjusted the bit’s depth so that all but a very thin top layer is not chamfered out. Be careful here, as the parts you are chamfering are fairly small and the bit doesn’t distinguish between wood and finger.