Getting Ready to Build

Hi,

it is the last day of September and I want to follow suit to what I had announced earlier: The first glue joints for the 4 m 1-23 are done! After quite some other activities during the past two months - and fine flying weather over along period of time - fall weather is starting now, temperatures are falling and the building season starts.

I like to start with the wings as I find wing building boring and at the same time I want to have them ready for checking purposes when the fuselage build is on.

I use to build the wing on its lower sheeting which is quite practical in this case where the  2meter wing half is taking all the space available in my comfortable but very small workshop. I marked all basic measures (spar and rib positions) on the wood as the paper print of the plan is much too big to handle in my shop.

Building is straightforward (and boring, as I said ;-)) ) with one exception which kept me tinkering about for a long time. Tom Martin`s plan positions the airbrake servo into a rib which is a neat idea. But I am a great fan of easy servicing in case of trouble and without further measures, any servo problem would lead to massive surgery on the wing. In addition I decided to build the dive brake version (spoilers on the upper and lower surface of the wing) as on the 1:5 1-23, the "normal" airbrakes work well but not strong enough to pull the plane out of a strong thermal without down elevator and elevated airspeed. Thus, I shall hinge the lower spoiler with a removable piano wire axis and an additional adjacent opening will allow to install and remove the servo easily.

As I am writing this, the lower spar and most of the ribs are in place and the servo mount is ready. Next items will be the aileron spar plus ribs, the wing rod tubing followed by the upper spar and the ply webbings. The first pictures are made but i don`t know yet if and how I could implement them here in the blog. I shall improve over time, I guess?!

Herbert

Hi,

it is the last day of September and I want to follow suit to what I had announced earlier: The first glue joints for the 4 m 1-23 are done! After quite some other activities during the past two months - and fine flying weather over along period of time - fall weather is starting now, temperatures are falling and the building season starts.

I like to start with the wings as I find wing building boring and at the same time I want to have them ready for checking purposes when the fuselage build is on.

I use to build the wing on its lower sheeting which is quite practical in this case where the  2meter wing half is taking all the space available in my comfortable but very small workshop. I marked all basic measures (spar and rib positions) on the wood as the paper print of the plan is much too big to handle in my shop.

Building is straightforward (and boring, as I said ;-)) ) with one exception which kept me tinkering about for a long time. Tom Martin`s plan positions the airbrake servo into a rib which is a neat idea. But I am a great fan of easy servicing in case of trouble and without further measures, any servo problem would lead to massive surgery on the wing. In addition I decided to build the dive brake version (spoilers on the upper and lower surface of the wing) as on the 1:5 1-23, the "normal" airbrakes work well but not strong enough to pull the plane out of a strong thermal without down elevator and elevated airspeed. Thus, I shall hinge the lower spoiler with a removable piano wire axis and an additional adjacent opening will allow to install and remove the servo easily.

As I am writing this, the lower spar and most of the ribs are in place and the servo mount is ready. Next items will be the aileron spar plus ribs, the wing rod tubing followed by the upper spar and the ply webbings. The first pictures are made but i don`t know yet if and how I could implement them here in the blog. I shall improve over time, I guess?!

Herbert