RoyBro: I should point out here that I have very mixed feelings about laser cutters and 3D printers. On the one hand, the geek in me find them to be extremely cool. On the other, the old-skool modeler in me thinks they only serve to dumb-down modeling. The reality, of course, is that everything is a shade of gray, and these tools are only as good as the ways in which they are used.
kingbee (and everyone else):
Thus far, all of my scratch builds have been of the Experimental Airlines style, where there are no plans, only techniques and ideas. This has suited me quite well, but I can understand that it is not for everyone.
As chance may have it, I started my first build-from-plans, as well as my first Flite-Test build (a Simple Soarer) just yesterday so I can make some comments here.
For starters, I do most of my work on a Mac. As a general rule, I would rather slam my reproductive organs in a door than touch Windows, which is in an odd way somewhat ironic that I come from a Unix background. But here I digress....
I used to be a fan of the dead trees, but these days, I do very little printing. My Mac is not set up to print. the only printer I currently have access to is connected to a Windows machine. Although there are Mac drivers for this printer, the Windows drivers, are so, [ expletive deleted ] bad -- even by Windows standards -- that I don't even want to take the chance of installing the drivers on my Mac. Here I go digressing again, but the point is, I am here now forced to confront a situation that will effect some 85 off percent of the people out there: printing PDFs without clipping them or messing with the scale.
Needless to say, I could not get them to print properly from either IE or Chrome. Having dealt with this before, I knew enough enough to just download Foxit Reader, which was able to print the PDFs properly.
The first thing I noticed was that about a half-dozen of the pages did not have a full dashed border. That was a minor annoyance, but one that one that really shouldn't be there.
Then, when I had everything trimmed up, I must admit several minutes of pure WTF. Assembling the pages was like a jigsaw puzzle. It wasn't a hard puzzle, but making your plans just shouldn't be a jigsaw puzzle. And why, why Flite Test people, why, did you put both wings together in one long page? And then, I made a brain fart and swapped pages 21 and 22 which I only discovered after taping everything together -- with a nice full OCD tape job down the full edge on both sides of the paper.
Yeah, that required cutting out the bad section, printing out 4 new pages and putting things back together. Ugh. And then there was another WTF moment when I had to figure out that the wing spar was laid out right next to the wing. And I was one of those kids they classified as "gifted" back in school...
Anyways... Yeah... I can really understand why mere mortals (;-) have such a difficult time just printing and assembling the templates. In another thread there is some discussion about the quality of articles on the front page. One thing that *really* needs to make it to the front page is a video on how to print and assemble the cutting templates. And oh, FT peeps -- it would also help if you could clean up your plans a bit so that nobody has any WTF moments before they even begin assembling the plane. I *know* you are not doing this to sell more speed-build kits!
BTW, I'll be documenting the build of my Simple Soarer in another thread. I'll be building two actually. One as per the plans, and then another using a modified technique which I believe will drop some serious weight while at the same time increasing strength and rigidity. Stay tuned for details...