[secant0give]

Thanks Gazz

Now for a start on the wings
These are going to be made from a composite of "M grade" or denser EPS foam, glass, epoxy, brown paper and ply wood. I'm going to try something a little different in the way I construct them as well. They will be spared with 3 lengths 1.5mm ply which will be capped with unidirectional glass fibre. Needless to say the fibres will go span wise and to give a nice smooth finish on the outer surface and blend off the slight bulge from the glass uni I'll put brown paper on the out side. The Paper will extend a short distance past the glass this will blend it in nicely to the airfoil profile. The leading edge will just be left, "as wire cut" EPS foam and I will use light glass cloth and brown paper over the whole trailing edge span wise to about an inch forward of the trailing edge. This should give a very thin and strong trailing edge. The ailerons will be formed by cutting them out of the finished layup and there should be enough glass ang brown paper still on the wing to provide a sound structure to hinge them off.

The Idea is to be able to do it with out Vacuum bagging. This method would lend it self well to being vac bagged but I want to avoid the extra complexity because to do so makes things quicker and easier.

After the wing is finished it will be covered in Iron on film to give the bare foam bits a nice surface for the air to flow over and for the over all colour scheme.

The advantages I hope to achieve by doing the wing this way will be. Speed and ease of construction combined with the strength of a fully composite wing, minimum expense and a reasonability accurate reproduction of the intended airfoil profile. By this method it should be easy to make deadly straight wing panels as well. Which always helps if you want a nice flying model. The leading edge being just EPS foam covered with iron on film will act as a crumple zone and do less damage to any thing it hits. Should the unthinkable happen It shouldn't act like the hard edge of a fully molded composite wing.
The templates to cut the foam cores take a little work, but it's a job that only needs to be done once and many cores can be cut using The same templates.

Here's a sketch of the wing construction
   


Here's a shot of the marking out for the templates. The Airfoil profiles have been scaled to the right size then printed out. They will be fixed onto the aluminium sheets using double sided tape. Then I'll cut them out and file them to the finished size. This will form the templates for hot wire cutting the foam wing cores. There are 4 templates to be made, top and bottom for both the root and tip…….more Pics to come 