Finally got something accomplished in the shop today

Man, it's hard to get shop time around here. For months, all I've had time to do is maintenance to keep what I fly running and ready. In my newly emptied race car parts room, I made a place to store my modeling wood and wires and tubes. That liberated my big belt/disk sander so I can finish putting it together. It's been a wood table for 2 years now.

And I finally got to make some balsa dust. I cut out doublers for the Yak-9 and used my wing LE to wrap sandpaper around so I could use it as a sanding block to shape the mating surfaces of them. I should have saved a leftover piece of the LE stick for that. I also traced the Yak fuse on that laminated sheet I made last week. It's straight as an arrow now, and looks good. I used the newly shaped doublers to trace the LE curve on it and now the wing should fit right. The old fuse weighed 4.3 ounces. The new one weighs 3,3 ounces. I'm cool with that, already saving weight. I'm on a roll now.

I sanded the curves and round edges into the warped Skyray fuse in case that helps to relieve or expose any tendencies to warp any more, soaked it again and have it counter bowing now. I hope I don't have to make a new one.

I finished calculating the wing size for my P-51 speed plane so it's as scale as I can get. After I eat my ribeye and tater, I'm going to re-claim the dining room table and draw it up. I have a sheet ready to cut the fuse out. I haven't decided whether to use the same 1/4" sheet and sand an airfoil into it, or buy some 1/8" sheet to make the wing. If I get my belt sander running it might make shaping the wing easy... or easy to botch. We'll see.

Anyway it was nice to get back to accomplishing something for a change. It was a cold rainy day here, but I had the shop nice and toasty with a space heater. If I can drag my butt out there in the evenings, maybe I can continue making some progress. There's the Tach Race engine that needs attention too. I'll use the one i'm going to put on the speedster.

Rusty