Speed 400
Cloudster Project
The Cloudster's fuselage width is a constant
2-9/16" from the front cabin post back to the inclined upright just behind
the wing's trailing edge. Four 3/16" square cross members of equal length
were cut and glued with aliphatic glue to the inside face of the right side
at the proper joints as shown below. The glue was allowed to only tack dry
for only about 1 minutes. It was still pliable enough to square up the
cross members both longitudinally as well as vertical with a square. Once
squared, these were allowed to dry for about an hour.
Next, aliphatic glue was applied to the ends of
the four cross members and the left side was put down onto the ends of the
four cross members. Here it gets a little tricky. Working pretty fast, the
ends of the cross members were carefully aligned to left side joints and the
excess glue wiped off with a wet Q-Tip. With the aliphatic glue just tacked,
the two sides were squared up using a combination of squares and steel block
squares. Two 1 X 2 boards were laid across the left side over the four
cross members and a steel block square was placed on each to act as a press
on the left side, which is also shown below. This jig set up was allowed to
thoroughly dry for a little over three hours.
I want to call your attention to the little
squeeze bottle seen in the picture above with yellow aliphatic glue in it. A
modeler sent me two of these and asked me to try them. The bottle has a long
slender spout on it and when the bottle squeezed, the glue come out in a
small 1/6" stream or a 1/6" spherical blob. It makes controlling the glue
application so easy and the white screw on cap that you see keeps the spout
from clogging up. However, at the moment, I can not remember who sent them
to me.
After the squares and steel block squares were
removed, the remaining other four 3/16" square cross members of equal length
were glued in place as shown below.
Once every thing was dry, the sides of the
fuselage were pulled together at the rear and the tail post were temporarily
clamped using hard balsa wedges on either side. Then two sets of 1/8" X
3/16" cross members were glued in place as shown below.
Once these are good and dry, the insides of the
3/16" tail posts will be beveled (trimmed and sanded) down to 3/32" so that
when they are glued together their combined width will be 3/16". However,
this will have to wait until tomorrow because I am stopping for today. I
have to clean up and get ready to take my wife out to dinner this evening.
:O) ............................Tandy