You eventually make a whole bunch of these things (left) in varying sized and curves. Once you have them done you take 6 of them and lay them out and fasten them to the table to act as jigs for the upper longeron. All of this is pretty straight forward and as long as you maintain reasonable tolerances (mine is .1 in) everything turns out great. (at least as of this writting)



LONGERONS
Once I got that done I used the Wicks supplied lumber, epoxy and a bunch of clamps to begin making the upper longerons. (see below)-

Explination - The longerons are basically stiffeners and support that run along the entire upper edge of the sides of the aircraft.

Now up to this point thigs went really well. Bit of woodworking, epoxy a spot of wood together clamp them down. The one thing that would have made things a bit easier would have been to find a better way to keep the clamps from slipping on the curves. I put a piece of duct tape on the face of each one to keep them from permanently becoming part of the longerons, BUT this made them a bit slippery and they had a tendancy to slip down the curvature, reducing their effecivenes holding them in place. If I had ti to do again Id just place a screw along the sides to keep the clamp from slipping. Constant watching during the cure process yielded me 2 very nice longerons however. My method does require quite a lot of clamps however, but you will definately use them. I really like these Irwin clamps. Very easy to find at a Lowes or Home Depot.

Once my longerons cured, I cut up a bit of masonite (they don't call it that at Lowes or Home Depot) for the fuselage side forms and joined a couple pieces of foam together with 5 min epoxy per plans. (see inline links for pictures) Then using a bit of Bondo from Advanced Auto (see right) I started setting up the jigs for the fuselage sides. After a bit of breathing what I am sure are MASSIVELY BRAIN KILLING FUMES from the bondo I ended up with a couple of forms that looked like this.

Then with a bit more 5 min epoxy I glued the blue foam to the newly formed jigs. See that here.

The Spacers
Up to this point you are saying to yourself, "Man this is great! Look at all of this! Woodchips, foam, jigs... other stuff ! Look at my progress! " You bring the wife out and she make encouraging sounds and nods appropriately and you feel GREAT ! Then things get a bit more delicate. You have to work on the spacers. Now I didn't really have too many problems here but I see where you could if you don't read carefully and pay attention. But with a good evening or two worth of work you end up with something that looks about like the picture to the left.
Or this picture.
Right is a picture of me applying MICRO to the blue foam so that I can attach the spacers.

Now once I got those spacers I had to do a bit of sanding to make the fues site guages. Also with clever use of my rotary tool and router handle I netted a couple of Class A "Stick Relief" depressions. I then began the UNI laups on the inside of the fuselage sides. I don't know if Nat (designer) had alot more help than I or (more likely) is just extremely better at all of this than I, but, the 3 hours that he states in the plans that this will take is..... well..... Not even close.

NOTE:It is also possible that I am a massively anal-retentive ( should that have 2 hyphens?) fool that must have it all perfect and that cost me time,

This layup will probably take you closer to 6 hours. UNI is a pain to use after you get used to laying up with BID and it doesn't like to stay in those meticulously created stick and fuel depressions. Before you start this layup, eat a large lump of meat of something that will stick with you for a while and make sure that you have plenty of lemonade on hand to drink as the hours dwindle away.

Once that all cured, I tacked on the finished longerons per plans, waited for that to also cure, did a spot of sanding and took this picture. (right)

NEW LIGHTING
Well, after being told by another builder that I work in the dark and realizing that 2 75Watt bulbs just doesn't cut it in the work area I broke down and installed some new flourescent lighting. WooHoo!

Update: January 10, 2005

Stringer Area - Aft Fuselage
This is a picture of the stringer area. This is the layup at the aft fuselage that makes up the sides of the landing-gear enclosure. This part isn't too bad. The cuts are pretty easy. You just have to play with a piece of sandpaper and the diagonal stringer to make it have all of the right angles so that it is perpendicular to the spar-channel cutout later. You can see the electrical channel that was put in underneath it (dark green).

In the picture to the left you can see where that spar-channel cutout was made. This too was pretty easy work. Once all of this is done then you get to do the thing you have been dreaming about since the beginning of this chapter... Take these things out of the forms and clean up the table. Since I bondo'd my jigs to the table I just took a mallet and tapped them off so that I didn't destroy the jigs. Then you get your table back and can clean up the mess.