If you break a section of former, it can be easily fixed. Make room for your repair by cutting away a little extra wood in the damaged area.
Use the bar sander to sand the repair in the same manner as you would have sanded the original former. Follow the curvature, and this time, try not to break it!
From a stick or sheet that is the same thickness as the former, cut an oversize piece of balsa and glue it into the gap in the area to be repaired.
I am, I always bump into and break a few sections of former during this rough- shaping process. The process will also reveal several minor gaps between the former/stringer joints. If left uncorrected, broken sections of former will result in flat spots in the covering, and gaps between mating parts will cause the covering to snag and wrinkle as it tries in vain to bridge the flaws. The photographs demonstrate how I handled these problem areas. One of the pictures shows where a section of the forward secondary hatch former was broken in the sanding process. Instead of leaving
the rough break, I cut away a little more wood to make room for my repair. I cut a piece of scrap balsa the same thickness as the former, and fit it into the broken area. The final step was to sand the scrap with the Easy-Touch bar sander, being careful not to repeat the damage. Minor gaps in the joints
are generally caused when a notch in a former is cut slightly larger than the stringer that will rest inside of it. Fix these small gaps quickly and easily with thin slivers of balsa cut from the same thickness as the former. Just slip the sliver into the
gap between the notch and the stringer, add a drop of
Sand the entire fuselage to eliminate any errors between the stringers and formers. Fill gaps or low spots with scrap wood, and don’t stop until perfection is achieved.
thin CA glue and a shot of CA accelerator, and sand it smooth with the sanding bar. Continue sanding until
the entire fuselage is smooth. Run a fingertip over suspect joints to detect errors. Close your eyes and concentrate. Are there any high spots? Does anything protrude above the joints? How about low spots or small valleys between the joints? Can you feel any gaps between the stringers and formers? Are there any spots where the stringers and formers don’t neatly mate? If you find them, fix them, or your covering job will suffer. I want to remind you
that these articles are not
necessarily about building specific models along with me. My purpose is to pass along the many helpful tips and techniques I have learned from so many talented modelers throughout the many years I’ve spent building airplanes. If you can read a Park
Pilot article and come away with even a single piece of useful information, it might become your own “standard procedure,” and that’s a good thing. In the next installment, I’ll
show you how I completed my Focke-Wulf’s battery hatch. I hope you’ll consider sharing those few minutes with me.
THEPARKPILOT.ORG 41
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