Cap stripping and shear webs bottom center

Not entirely sure what happened, but it seems like I don’t have any pictures of a bunch of stuff between the last post and this one.  In that time, I finished up the wing panel and then did the other top wing panel, then started the center section.  Most of the center section is also done by the time I get to these photos.  If I ever locate them I’ll post them, but for now, onwards.

Here we’re cap stripping the bottom of the center section:

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Then we have the front shear webs in place:

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And this time around I actually remembered to do the rear shear webs at the proper time.

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Trimming cap strips and shaping aileron end

The cap strips need to be trimmed down and then sanded so they match up with the trailing edge.  I’m not absolutely sure this this is how they’re supposed to look at the trailing edge, but I couldn’t really find any good pictures of anyone else’s, so that’s how they’ll be.

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The end of the aileron front edge also gets shaped so that it blends down to the tip.

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Caps strips and aileron work

Several things finished up today.  First off did the cap strips on the top of the ribs.  Since the shear webs get sanded to match the top of the wing, they’re not a problem for this. Also, the top of the aileron spar seemed to be a bit short.  After some research, that seemed fairly common, so I added a cap strip to the top of it to make things work out properly.

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Next the aileron is cut from the wing.

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The end of the aileron is made with a few pieces of laminated balsa, and took notching the end of the forward edge so that it would fit in place.  Then the last rib is put in place on the forward edge of the aileron.

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Cap strips and shear webbing

The bottom of most of the ribs are now cap stripped (except right near the root of the wing panel).

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After that, shear webbing is added to the front spars.

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Now, I screwed up here some.  I was supposed to install shear webs on the rear spars also before cap stripping the upper part of the ribs.  I missed that at this point, so the next few steps you’ll see that it’s missing.  I did figure it out eventually.

Leading edge

After a fair break on progress (I tend to end up with these large breaks in the middle of building things, it’s a flaw of mine), the next step was to add the leading edge to the wing.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the piece of wood that I was supposed to use to do this in the box, so I ended up having to run out to get a couple of pieces (hence the sticker on the end of the leading edge).  Also in this picture you can see the tail of an arf I build during that break (a 3D Hobby Shop 41″ Edge 540).

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Riblets, adjusting the rib, and upper spars

Ok, next step is to install the riblets on what is going to be the aileron:

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Next, that rib that I mentioned is too high needed to be adjusted.  For this I used a sanding bar with sandpaper just in the middle so I could sand the rib without affecting anything else:

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Once the rib is the proper height, the upper spars are put in place.  I was still really trying to use wood glue at this point, so I had to weight the ribs down in place:

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Aileron spar and wings

Yikes, it’s been a long time since I updated the status of the Fokker build, so I’m putting in posts for those.  I’m going to go ahead and date the posts so that they match when the work was actually done, so a bunch of these are going to be real old posts.

First up, the aileron spar is put in place:

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Next the ribs are being glued into place using the fleet of squares:

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A fleet of squares

Ok, I fully admit I stole this idea from looking through some builds of planes. One thing that’s always kinda annoyed me when building wings is that I’ve never been able to find a builder’s square that was small enough to use in the space available that wasn’t too expensive to buy lots of them. I’ve seen the plastic triangle ones, but most of them are a little too big, and often there a couple of bucks each. So what I did was pick up some small angle braces (2 inches on a side). These ran 2 dollars for a pack of 4. Then I took some scrap wood and glued it along the bottom edge so they’ll stand. Kind of makes them look like little sailboats. From what I can tell, they’re pretty close to perfectly 90 degrees, so it makes them perfect for what I need.
I built a fleet of squares
Now I just need some really small canons to mount on them, and I can go invade really tiny countries.