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Saturday, August 30, 2008

Slope Aero Commander -PSS Part 2

With exactly 40 day’s to the PSS slope I guess that there are many modelers hard at work
constructing and building their slope power scale planes.
Not being the fastest builder I will have to work faster that I normally do.
Fortunately I have most of the materials so I am of to a good start.
At work we install a lot of new equipment and I collect some of the packing materials that are worth while keeping. I had 3 of these foam blocks and recon that density must be close to 16 DBM. Laying out my side view fuse drawing found that 2 of them nearly cover the length of the fuse. So I had to add about a 75 mm piece to fit it all in. I also had to double the sides to make up the width of the fuse.

I use 5 minute epoxy glue to glue all the pieces of foam together.
Then using a cutting bow mounted on it side and temporary fixed to the work bench at 90 Deg I can cut out the side view and top view of may scale drawings that was marked out on the foam.

My cutting bow is 700mm long and a 12v DC car battery will give the correct voltage and can handle the current that the cutting wire needs. Be careful of the toxic fumes when cutting foam.







Once this is done comes the creative and messy part. You have to round the corners ( to get rid of the box shape looking fuse) taking care as to also make sure that the symmetry of the fuse dose not go out of shape. The fuse of the slope Aero Commander is on big side so after finish shaping it I was happy to find that the fuse a this stage weigh 250 grams.

The next step was to add some carbon tows to strengthen the fuse. Ideally to get a good finish groves are made in the foam and then place in the grove and wetted out.
In my case I just laid them on the outside. I used 163 gram cloth to glass the fuse over and once it is cured and dry I will decide if the fuse needs more strength .
While cutting the foam I also cut the Blanks for the tail and rudder as well as the 2 dummy engine housings. Next step will be to spray paint the fuse and then make the templates for the wings tail and rudder. This I will post Part 3 of the slope Commander.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Piet,
What the %$** are you up to,
The plane in photo no.5 will not fly , you need to sharpen up the tail leading edge...way to much drag sonny on that tail. Last photo looks like a folded umbrella with black spokes, I am going to report you to Uncle Bob Electrolux.
Confused, huh