Art says it was always the wings that scared him off the Rees plans. But he got over it! Here’s the Sparrowhawkwing (above left) going together. Start out by slicing or, better yet, molding up your rib tops and laminate your wing tips. Then lay out the bottom rib strips and the trailing edge. Next, Art glues the main spars
knows what that is. Here’s an online link to where you can get some for yourself:
www.aircraftspruce.com. Type “Baffle Seal” in the search window and it’ll get you where you need to be. Art notes you may well be able to pick up something similar from your local Home Depot. He prefers the 1⁄8-inch thick variety.
Cut into appropriately sized and shaped pieces, this stuff will allow you to hold your structure down without having to actually run the pin through the balsa, and will exert just the right amount of downward pressure without crushing anything. Scoop up all the bits at the end of the build and use them over and over again. Avoid placing them next to your container of Bacon Bits, however!
...Before you sleep
If you are intrigued by all this talk of “Reesian” structures, you owe it to yourself to
into position (above right), followed by the diagonal trusses. Note the relative thinness of the material used here. The leading edge can now be glued up to the ends of the rib bottoms. The resulting wing frame is rigid and extremely light weight.
join the Hippocket Aeronautics web site:
http://www.hippocketaeronautics.com. There are two main forums maintained on this ex- cellent site: the “Builder’s Forum”, and the “Builder’s Plan Gallery”. Note that in order to sign up for the “Builder’s Plan Gallery”, you must first have signed up for the “Builder’s Forum”. It is free, and well worth that cost! In the Plan Gallery, you can down- load hundreds if not thousands of free plans; there is also an exceptionally reasonable plans printing service available. One of the Builder’s Forum categories is titled “Designers and Collectors”. Within that, you will find most of the plans that Dave Rees ever drafted, made available courtesy of the Rees family (those designs that are owned by plans services such as Carstens are not available on this site). I en- courage you to give them the once over twice.
While you’re at it, download plans from some of the other notable designers, and compare! I find it’s especially fruitful to com- pare different plans of the same aircraft. As Michael Heinrich once commented, “plans are how we modelers communicate with one another”. It’s not about which one is better or worse; it’s about arriving at sensible solu- tions to common problems. Which is where we started out in this column, isn’t it? As someone who is naturally inclined to work out everything in advance, I have a lot to learn from a builder like Art Holtzman. Clive Gamble, in his excellent plan for the Miles Sparrowhawk, has clearly learned a lot from Dave Rees, and has carried that knowledge forward in a plan so compelling that Art just had to buckle down and give it a go. Substitute your name for any one of the three here, and you begin to understand the calculus of model aviation.
Art cuts the front ends of the rib caps at right angles to the work piece (at left) rather than try to angle them to match the back face of the leading edge. He then notches the leading edge at an approximate/appropriate angle (remember your notch cutting tools from the last column?) and glues the end of the rib in place. Art writes: “One wing done (above). Considering that it’s 17 inches long and only weighs about 6 grams, it’s tremendously strong in torsion. Just those five dinky little soft 1⁄20 diagonals that take 8 or 10 minutes to cut and place do all that. Amazing.”
FLYING MODELS 25
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