Going to be hard to put this aside for a day or two and get that hex built...but the hex has been waiting since before I started this build and I'm really dying to see it go together. But now this is starting to really shape up and I can't wait to see the fuselage come together
The tail gear was a bit of a pain and took a lot of careful sanding and cutting and carving and bending...so for the final glue-up I took my time and took lots of photos. It's just a piece of 3/32" piano wire with a couple of bends sandwiched between two pieces of 1/16" ply with a 3/32" piece of ply as a spacer...but getting it to fit just right was every bit as tricky as it looked like it was going to be. Once everything dry fit correctly I used titebond to attach the spacer to the inner piece of 1/16" ply to keep it in alignment. This is all going to get fairly soaked in epoxy so the titebond was mostly just to hold things in place while I did the real gluing:
I had to carve out a bit of wood from the sides to let the tail wire clear as it exited:
With that done I test fit everything one last time starting with the spacer/inner ply sandwich - you can start to see the channel for the gear wire now:
And with the wire in place. Yeah, I know those 1/4" square strips that the bottom skin is going to glue to could have been done better at the end...I had a heck of a time trying to get things to meet just right back here though and decided to just chop them enough I didn't have to worry about them. Would have been nice to have them meet cleanly - but it would never be visible and wouldn't really add much extra strength so I didn't bother:
Finally the outer piece of 1/16" ply with a little notch to clear the wire. I cut this piece a bit bigger than the plans called for just because it seemed like it would make the gluing a bit easier that way:
Since it all looked good I went ahead and epoxied it. I didn't get any photos but under the brick in this photo is the elevator which got a piece of 3/16" dowel epoxied in to join the two halves. Tomorrow once the epoxy is fully cured I'll cut out the rest of the material in the middle currently holding the two halves together and it will just be the dowel holding it.
Once the 30 minute epoxy had cured for about 2 hours I took the saran wrap off. From the inside it looks pretty good...not a lot of excess glue but plenty to hold that all in there well!
The wire isn't 100% straight...but I can give it a final tweak once this is totally cured. It actually came out better than I expected. The outside bit of 1/16" ply didn't come out quite as nice as I had hoped - I tried to cut it slightly oversized but still wound up slightly undersized somehow. A bit of filler and/or sanding though and under the fiberglass it will never be noticeable:
Deciding that the epoxy was cured enough I could keep working on things I decided to go ahead and start adding the top of the fusealage which is made up out of 3/16" thick 1/2" strips:
The back end finally started to make sense to me...This first set of pieces goes the full length, but the next one ends just past the last bulkhead and the one after that ends just after the next bulkhead - then it all gets a piece of 1/4" balsa across the top.
A lot of this is going to be removed with sanding since these are 1/16" thicker than the rest of the sides so when I sand the final shape I expect to loose quite a bit of this. I'm starting to think the guy on RCGroups really had the right idea building the turtle deck out of pink foam instead, sanding all this down is going to be a big mess and a big block of foam would have been easier to deal with than trying to figure out how these strips are going to terminate. But this will give me some satisfaction when it's done. And even though it's probably horribly overbuilt for electric I'm not too worried about shaving weight on this build (though the back is where I would like to shave some) as one of the reasons I wanted to go balsa was for a bigger heavier model to help deal with the wind I often have to fly in. And I can always go with a bigger motor to shift some weight forward and help make up for the extra weight
Can't wait to get the next 5 strips on here and then sand this thing down!