Celstar Finishing

Saturday was time to line up the wing joiner system, which in essence is two tubes in the wing and a tube bonded into the fuselage. The joiner is a smaller diameter ali tube which slides through and can be removed. It gets its strength from 32 x 60k carbon tows which are wet out and pulled through, the smaller tube is about 14mm dia. This system has worked well on gliders up to 4 mtrs and handles even winch launching (this was tested yesterday at BERG with the Diana 2).

As the wings were rebuilt the new end ribs of ply needed to be bonded on and aligned. The wing roots are nowhere near to parallel with the fuselage sides.















The ply end ribs are cut out and a hole made to fit over the joiner tube, then using balsa and foam wedges, the rib is aligned with the fuselage and tacked in place with Cyano glue. A mix of resin, micro balloons and cotton flox is used to fill the gap and as shown the wings now match perfectly.















The root and tip ends get a layer of thin glass/resin for strength and this will also be sprayed white the rest of the wing l be covered with ORA-COVER in this case.















Some finishing touches such as decals and registration numbers and the canopy white is applied. This plane now requires the tailplane and control surfaces set up as well as cockpit detail and its good to fly again.

Almost done.

PS. Kobus thanks for the offer of commercial canopies but for scratch builders half the fun is learning how to make stuff yourself.