Fokker D.VII Build

Ok, first I laid out the bottom front spar, pinning it into place along a straight-edge to make sure it was straight. Then I pin down the trailing edge. After that I start putting the ribs into place, not gluing them yet.

Apparently Balsa USA still hasn’t fixed the problem they have with the W-7 rib, because indeed on my kit the rib is too tall. I’ll worry about that a little later.

First step is to start searching through the box for the parts needed to build the first half of the wing. Upon opening the box, my first thought was “Wow, that’s a lot of wood.” The box is just jam packed with a lot of sheets and a lot of sticks of wood. Kinda hard to believe that this pile is going to turn into an airplane.

It looks pretty bad in the box, but then I keep having to dig because I haven’t found the trailing edge for the wing. And keep digging. Meanwhile, the pile of wood outside the box keeps getting bigger and bigger, and believe me, out of the box it looks worse. Finally find the trailing edge as about the second to last piece in the box.

Spent the rest of the evening trying to identify the ribs I needed. Balsa USA doesn’t seem to punch any identification onto the ribs, so you have to use the pictures in the manual to try to identify them. The sheets with ribs W-6 and W-7 I found particularly difficult to distinguish.

I had picked up this kit back about a year and a half ago at the Toledo show, with the original intention that I’d start working on it last winter. Of course, I hadn’t quite finished the BTE Venture kit at the time, and that dragged out and I didn’t get that project done until early this summer.

Well, the Venture currently resides somewhere out in the middle of the cornfield southeast of the club field. Ever try looking for something in a cornfield? It sucks. That plane took me about 5 years to build (all my own fault, it’s really a great kit, I’d love to get another one down the road). So now it’s time to start working on the Balsa USA Fokker D.VII kit. The plan here is to finish this in a much more reasonable period of time. I’m kinda hoping for getting it finished over the winter, but we’ll see. With two wings, I may still be writing about this 9 years from now :).

So, the first step is I needed a decent building board. The last plane I’d built on the kitchen island, which worked ok (Cathy would argue with that though), but really wouldn’t be adequate for this plane – the top wing when finished on this plane is about 88 inches, the island just isn’t big enough. So I visited the local Habitat ReStore outlet, looking for a hollow core door that was nice and flat. Found one there for five dollars, and then picked up a couple of ceiling tiles at the hardware store. Presto, a nice building surface.

Then I pinned the top wing plans down to the board.

Pictures for this build will be available at the photo section of the website.