Simon's F-86 Sabre of the Patrullia Ascua.

Had a look through everyone's chosen scheme's and couldn't see this one, so I'll give it a whirl.

It's a bit 'flashy', maybe not in the same league as Martyn K's though!!

Very nice Simon,

Shouldn't be too difficult to mask up for painting!

martin.

My thoughts exactly Martin.

I've not finished an aircraft in paint for a long time, so this is a great opportunity to have another go.

Simon.

Well, finally managed to get round to starting the build.

I like building wings, so decided to make a start on the wing jig. Once the ply parts had been fettled a bit, I dry assembled the structure. At this point I noticed the port side of the jig was a little 'off' compared to the other. Not a problem as I'd decided to use Martin's trick of adding in some triangular fillets to 'lock' the structure in place.

However, at the last minute I remembered a rather solid piece of MDF in the shed, which I could utilise as a base board, sticking the whole jig to it. This has the added benefit of really locking the jig in place, as well as allowing me to move the whole structure if needed. The building room doubles/triples as a 'pain cave' and a music room.

So at time of writing it looks like this:

Next job is to sort out some suitable wood for the skins and then decide what wood to use for the spars. I'm leaning towards hard balsa, as the final finish is hopefully going to be glass/epoxy, which should add a little strength to the structure.

Simon.

'Pain cave'?

No, I am not going to ask!

Wise man .

Well, I did make a start on the wing skins this week and I decided to go with hard balsa spars.

So at present the lower skins look like this, with the hard balsa spars glued up:

Hopefully tomorrow (Sunday) I can crack on with the glueing the ribs on. I've decided to leave off the flaps, I'd already pondered on this and then saw Peter's post in Danny Fenton's build and that was the clincher.

Looks like I will also go with 2 centrally mounted servo's. I always like to try and keep the weight out of the outboard portion of the wings if at all possible. The 2 servo's will still allow me to use the ailerons as spoilers.

Simon.

Sounds like a sensible plan to me Simon I will follow you with balsa spars.

I can see you have a bottle of titebond will you use that for the wing construction? I usually use thin CA but I know that will penetrate through the sheeting and stick the wing skins to the jig So may use an aliphatic or pva.

Cheers

Danny

Hi Danny, good to speak to you.

I used Titebond to glue the spars down, but to be honest I use a mixture of glues. As it's the wings, I tend to steer clear of superglues as I've found the joints to be a little brittle over time. I'll probably use aliphatic on the ribs and then Titebond on the shear webs. I have used super'phatic before and this speeds up construction quite a bit. Regarding the shear webs, I'm using 1/8th hard balsa between the spars to form an I section. I've found this reduces weight (less glue) as well as increasing the strength. Win, win.

Cheers,

Simon.

Managed to get the ribs glued up yesterday. In the end I used Super'Phatic for the most part. I did 'cheat' a little and used Zap-a Gap to bond the front 1/4" of rib R1 to the lower skin, just because I wasn't able to weight the rib down to conform to the jig. Once R1 was in and stable, I was able to weight subsequent ribs and just used Super'Phatic for the remainder of the ribs.

Need to add the false LE next and then it's onto the right wing panel to get it to the same stage. That's probably going to take me the rest of the week!!

Cheers.

Simon.

Hi Simon,

Following your build and learning a lot...

... and I really need that.

Cheers

Chris

Hi Chris, following your build too.

Harry's advice is spot on regarding the top skins, much easier to make all 4 skins up now.

Cheers,

Simon.