Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Making Circular Formers on a Drill Press

My flying has been a disaster the last few times at the field.

The Anaconda crashed, my camera plane flipped on takeoff, breaking a propeller, my Grey Ghost has an engine that won't start and today I crashed my Mosquito on takeoff. Not exactly a great track record at the old aerodrome.

On the positive side of the ledger my model building efforts have come along well. Anaconda 3, will be coming off the assembly line next week and I am keeping my fingers crossed that it will turn out to be a good flyer.

Anaconda 4 is coming along nicely. It looks like a V-1 Rocket from the Second World War. The ducted fan engine I ordered arrived and the fuselage is nearing completion. The wing is from a crashed model which is undergoing repairs. All it will take to get it up and running is building the tail fins, control surfaces, installing the ancillary gear, and covering it.

Anaconda 5 is a fuselage with a wing I have from an RC fire sale I went to last year. The original model is a fiberglass bomber and its swept back wing.

The construction technique I use is pretty cool. I got the idea from a wing jig that was used to align the ribs of an airfoil. Holes were drilled through the ribs and aligned on steel rods to keep them perfectly aligned. Once the leading edge, spars, and trailing edge were glued in place the rods were removed. Me thinks, "Why not substitute the steel rods for dowels and leave them in when the construction was finished and use this approach not only for the wings but the fuselage as well?" Made sense to me and I've been experimenting with the process for the last two months. The challenge is to keep the weight down.

Rather than cutting the formers for the fuselage on a jigsaw I use a drill press and circle saw blades. Then taking thin plywood from Michaels, I cut out out discs to the required diameter. From these I next cut out the middle, getting a donut shaped final product. These become the formers for the fuselage. Once the formers are ready I drill four holes in each ring at the cardinal points and insert long dowels. In no time I have a fuselage that is perfectly aligned. What used to take hours now takes minutes with a precision I never thought possible. This cigar shaped structure opens the door to an endless variety of model airplane designs.