President Luis Munoz
Member AMA
flycubs@comcast.net
Scratch Built What’s - It
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As the end of the 2007 flying season began to draw to an end, I finally decided that I needed to build something this winter that I really
built. The last several planes I have put together have been ARF’s. Nothing against ARF’s, but I just wanted to feel raw balsa wood and get
glue on my fingers for a change. Something had been missing in my flying experience, so I decided it was time to scratch build something,
now I just had to decide what. I knew I wanted it to be a fun-fly type and it had to be light as I wanted it to be electric. It did not have
to have 100% 3D capabilities, but as close as I could to 3D would be nice. I also knew that I did not want it to be as big as a 40 type of
plane; I was thinking more in the 20 to 30 size. After talking with a fellow flyer at the air field about my growing
urge to scratch build something fun-fly’ish, he said that he may have something of interest at home. It turned out that he had the plans to a
Jim Weaver What’s-It which is a 32 to 46 size fun-fly. He was ableto shrink the plans down to about a 25 size and printed them off for me.
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| Now that I had some plans, it was time to start the building process. It has been a long time since I scratch built anything, so I spent some time picturing the build process in my head. I had plenty of time to do this as I had to wait for my balsa order to come in. During the time I was waiting for the wood, I decided to make a template of the wing rib out of acrylic. One could use most anything to make a template, but acrylic is what I had. Once the template was made, and the wood arrived I could start building. I used the rib template to outline the ribs on the sheet and also to cut out the ribs. Photo “Acrylic rib template and cutting out ribs” goes here |
“Marking notches in ribs Once the ribs were cut out I sandwiched them in between the two templates for sanding and to mark and cut out the notches. |
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| Marking notches in ribs |
“Cutting out notches in ribs using template
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Sanding |
Wa-la |
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On to the wing |
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I used cardboard to make templates to hollow out the center of all but two of the ribs and used the dremal to sand everything down. |
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