No, I didn't forget about the floats part
Stupid late, I know. Weird as the little Eaglet is logging tons of flight time lately - it's the only plane I have that will consistently fit in my car and still allow other planes in with it. I haven't been doing hardly any float flying though. I wanted to put floats on my Kadet but the lake I have access to is far too small to allow it. I considered a few different approaches to the floats - first idea was sections of insulation foam hotwired out and sanded to shape, but that seemed too easy and didn't fit the rest of the build
Now that I've got all the power tools set up in my workspace I can do some real work with balsa.
First order of business - making the "frame", I guess that's what you'd call it. My original idea was to have the front underside longeron run all the way up to the very tip of the float but then the sheeting would have to make a weird compound curve there not to mention the ridiculous number of relief cuts the longeron itself would need, so I just went with a nose block. I built this out of hard balsa.
And of course, one float by itself is pretty much useless, so I built a second one
I also got to attaching the templates to two sandwiched sheets of 1/16 balsa, all with a light coat of 3M Super 77. The formers are in halves because I'm going to build one half of the float lying down and the other attached standing up. Now, astute readers will notice a particular screwup here - I only cut enough formers to make one float! Argh, and the scroll saw turned my templates into dust so I need to draw more.
They look a little rough here - this is before I went in and sanded all the edges down to size.
And, here's the massive, in retrospect, screw up that caused large amounts of language that I cannot put on a public forum to be unleashed from my mouth after I noticed it. The formers - the fit is terrible! I thought it might be a bad idea to try and cut out the 1/8x1/16 gaps with the scroll saw, and it turned out it ruined the fit so badly that of all the formers I cut out these are only the ones that fit semi-nicely!
I didn't even bother gluing them in, since I'm going to make a set of completely new ones. I needed new templates anyway so I guess now I'll cut the little gaps to fit on the frame with an x-acto and hopefully get a much better fit...
