24-02-10

Pulled the first couple of parts from the Wurzel moulds, they have a nice finish with good seams, but have been struggling with the seam consolidation in the nose area, the one place where I can not see what I am doing. While filming on the bench 5, realized the seam roller was not the right shape to get to that area, guess I was too preoccupied with making sure the roller was the right shape to compact the seams on the slope up from the wing seat. Have made up another roller and will see how that goes on the next fuselage, that means I need 3 different rollers for this mould, begining to get tricky and looks like a good time to try out inflatable bladders. The next mould I will be making will be for the Gimp, just added a page for it and there is a couple of vids there, will be doing a video build thread for this project. Fuselage moulding 5 has been added in the moulding section as well.

 

11-02-10

Finished off the Wurzel moulds, they are now set aside for a week or so to cure and harden up, though I am very tempted to split the mould and take a peek....There is a couple more videos on the mould making page showing the progress of the Wurzel . Have been messing with foam shaping some more and started working on a 30" ds plane which will be called The gimp, and will make a page for it once I have more details, hoping to sell a few as short kits once I get the fuselage moulds done, and think it will be a great reflex trainer for dsing if my 30" foamy chevron is anything to go by. Pulled a Jart fuse from the moulds as well, was thinking of putting a set of rk40 wings on it and see what happens, the ds record for a Jart is very low I reckon, and fancy my chances, also its a easy plane to try different sections on as the fuselage has no cut out so anything will fit.

 

31-01-10

The wurzel mould is comming along nicely, am using it to do some videos on the mould making page, there are two new ones there. Also started making some lost foam fuselages and have done a video of that. Decided to re-do my other building videos to stream then on you tube so they are more accessable, might take me a while though. As well as lots of building this week, also got in three days of back to back dsing, have been missing the thrill so it was about time the wind obliged. Most of Sunday was spent on repairs, the fleet is nearly up together again now and nothing was terminal. After meeting up with Steve H at Whitesheet on Thursday, came back with loads of ideas on carbon spars, and saw his new 2.0m ds fuselage that he has been working on, really nice sexy shape, big stiff tail boom and he`s making me one....fantastic.

25-01-10

Added some more plane pages to the bottom of the list, and will update them as I make progress with the builds, there is a video of a heli I have in the for sale area also. Will begin working on the workshop section over the next few weeks, fill in some links and add a few videos.

After lots of waffling on the video, decided to cut out the top of the Nitro ds nose boat, just didnt seem right having an inverted installation on a ds plane. Am leaving the larger Nitro plug for now as well, felt it would slow me down too much doing 3 moulds at once, 2 seems more comfortable, and am not convinced I will get much use from it. What I want is a much chunkier 2.0.-2.2m fuselage that will be able to handle some stress. Have done lots of random building this last week while waiting for the 2 pack paint on the Wurzel plug to fully cure, its nice and hard now and polishing up nicely.

15-01-10

Seems to be more work getting a T-tail fuselage ready to mould, guess it will pay dividends when I get round to building them. Will hopefully be able to paint in the mould or use some exotic cloth, and apart from some cleaning up the fuselage will be finished when it pops out. The wing and stab are nice and strong, need to pay more attention to detail though, there is lots of overspray on the top surfaces where I tried to paint several mylars at once. Lines on the lower surfaces are not crisp enough either, really must get some decent masking tape soon. Have been quite dedicated to the Wurzel build since pulling the wing and stab from the vac bag though, on the bench vid no2 shows you how far along it has come.

 

10-01-10

The bench is a bit busy, working on so many projects that I ran out of space. Wurzel wing and stab bottom skins are being bagged, so moved on to another project that needed glueing, then another. The vice was free so put a wing in there as well, while the pu glue sets for a epp nose bumper, that will hopefully give my polystyrene Thumper a few more hours flying before stripping out the gear for an epp version which is in the foreground, having a ballast tube glued in.

04-01-10

New year plan is to have more video, really like the look of them embedded in the site and has to be more informative as well. So starting today intend to run a video building blog of the things that pass over my bench, updating every two weeks or maybe longer if nothing interesting is happening, so my challenge for the year is 26 on the bench videos with some varied content that hopefully is not too boring. First up is a new project called Wurzel, a little plane I am building for dsing. A little taster of my Tonka build as well, will give them their own page under my planes sometime soon and post more information on them. Have put all the plane videos on you tube, so they are now embedded and streaming on the Nitro, Jart and Flitter pages. Getting a camera man up the hill to shoot some more is proving challenging but will keep trying.

 

30-12-09

Have done a little update on the Nitro page and added a video, first time I have tried embedding a you tube video and it was rather easy, will do all future video that way, not sure I will go back over the original ones on here though as some of them are too long for you tube and would need some editing, best left alone I think. Was expecting to do lots of building over the holidays, unfortunately a dodgy back has slowed me down, but got back in there today for a few hours and think I am nearly back to normal. Happy new year.

21-12-09

Having a busy time in the workshop, building a new Nitro wing and also a wing and stab for a 45" plane I have been working on. Wing cores are cut and have been spraying up the mylars this evening. Have been teaching myself sequential masking, at least thats what I think I am doing, sprayup an area, pull some masking tape off and spray a bit more ect. The effect I am after is black pinstriping really, on a red and white stripped wing, will let you know how it pans out.

Have built a little chevron as well, mainly to test out the cnc cutters ability to do tapered cores, seemed to work ok, and think I have just enough table movement and bow length to go up to 2.0m span chevrons, which is neat. This little one is 30" span and weighs 5ozs. It flies in almost nothing and managed to ds it on my local hill in about 5mph winds, or less, it was just about managing, but will go a lot better in a little more wind. This is a very small hill and was side arm launching it to gain enough height to dive in, an impressive little plane and lots of fun to fly.

 

12-12-09

My host server has stopped supporting frontpage extensions, so have gone for a complete make over and learnt to use some new software at the same time. Sorry for the delays getting it up and running, but think I am just about there now. Can begin adding new content while doing some final adjustments here and there. A few pages have been added to the workshop section and will be posting some items for sale this week.

Most of my time has been spent building a cnc controlled hot wire bow lately. Its now working, which is a big relief as had some trouble with the control board which had to be soldered up from a kit. Got lots of help on the rcmf forum and have not yet tired of seeing it cut wings, I am in a bit of a foam cutting frenzy, cant help myself as its such a joy to use after years of cutting templates.

As you can see, the workbench has been a little crowded with several projects. Have had a new philosophy to my building this year, its basically to do whatever I feel like doing and has been paying off for me. Find myself very keen to get into the workshop and get busy, if I begin to flag a little, just move on to something else for a while and go back to it when it regains my interest.The only discipline I am keeping to is a maximum of 60 planes and started projects, I am right on the limit at the moment so have to sell or crash something urgently. There is around 15 planes in my arsenal that need a good home and will begin a list on the for sale page this week, and who knows, might be able to get below 50 next year.