Russ Green

I'm keeping a record in the blog  Your point about the ali tube made me think about using carbon fibre....its sounds like an extremely critical point.   Edited By Chris Bott - Moderator on 04/07/2012 23:55:29

I got the book several years ago when I intended to get into r/c modelling. Only just got round to it but at least I've started. I have built balsa flying models before (when I was at school) but never powered or r/c so I'm starting from a fairly novice position. One of the first hurdles I've come across has been getting the plans out of the book, blown up by 400% and onto the balsa wood. I'm an architect by day so a fairly dab hand at CAD. The method I chose was to scan the plans, attached scale them up in AutoCAD and trace them so I would have the CAD vectors to re-print as much as I needed. I'm also considering using the CAD data to get the parts laser cut but I'm going to try and do a traditional build first. The method for transfering the plans onto balsa in the book is the iron down method. So I printed my wing ribs on a laser printer and ironed them into my balsa sheeting. That worked but I found it was faint and it also rubbed off quite easily. Instead I've decided to cut 2 template ribs from ply, roughly cut eah wing rib (a little oversized) from balsa sheeting and bolt the ribs between my ply templates for sanding into the finished profiles. transfered the templates onto 2 sheets of ply, cut them roughly and bolted together for finishing used 3M spray mount to stick the wing rib templates onto balsa sheeting I modified the wing rib templates a little before printing them by adding 2 drill locations. I'll use these a as a guide to drill the ribs so that I can bolt all the ribs together between the ply templates for final sanding. The image above shows the ribs transfered to the balsa with 3M spray mount which will allow them to be removed later. Next step will be to get those ply template sanded so they are true and I'll bolt to all the ribs together and sand them down to the templates. If I make a mess of it then the ribs are going to get laser cut!

I'm just begging to build the Micro-T.....any tips?