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Jester 2M RES build thread - good 2nd plane... perhaps - 3/1/2005 3:39 AM   
fprintf



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From: Cheshire, CT, USA
Status: offline 		I have been given the opportunity to build my 2nd plane from a kit, a Laser Arts 2M RES Jester (http://www.laserartco.com/jester.htm). I am going to build it up according to the directions to try and flush out what improvements, if any, should be made to the very sparse directions. The kit is billed as for an intermediate builder and I can tell you that with the directions that come with the kit that you definitely need to have built something previously. My own experience is a build of a 3M MMGlidertech Marauder last winter that I documented on another soaring forum.

< Message edited by fprintf -- 3/2/2005 9:00 PM >

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RE: Jester 2M RES build thread - good 2nd plane... perhaps - 3/1/2005 3:43 AM   
fprintf



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Status: offline 		I was notified by Brian at Laser Arts on Tuesday that I was the lucky winner to get to build this plane. Brian asked for volunteers to build the plane and document it via pictures - I am sharing it with all of you here. My first draft, plus some extra unused pictures, is at http://fprintf.rchomepage.com/jester/jester.html. So the other day, Thursday, when I get home from work there is a package waiting for me. After a hurried dinner I opened the box to find a very well packed bunch of sticks and a rolled tube of paper. After dumping out the peanuts I was left with:



First impressions always count and the first thing I noticed was how nice the wood was. Sure there are lots of burn marks on the laser cut pieces, but we have all come to expect that from laser cut kits nowadays. But the quality of the wood is really quite good. The sheets were light, some of them in the 6# range according to my scale. Very nice.

According to Brian this is just an average kit pulled off the shelf for an honest review. So if this is average we are off to a good start!

In the next picture you can see that I have rolled the plans out onto my building board and am about to pull some of the fuselage pieces out of the laser cut plywood. At this point I still have not yet read the build instructions so I am just poking around looking at the pieces.


The plans are very nicely drawn and easy to read, with plenty of extra instructions in the whitespace. One of the neat features of laser cutting is that it doesn't cost much to cut extra pieces, unlike die cutting. So included in the kit are dihedral/polyhedral angle guages and my favorite - a leading edge template (apologies for the fuzziness, just getting use to close up shots with this digi camera):


So, as we are all supposed to do I am going to take a break for a bit and read the instructions a couple of times over before diving in. Stay tuned for the next installment!

p.s. I will also pose questions here, so if you feel like helping a fella out or have build a Jester before please chime in!

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RE: Jester 2M RES build thread - good 2nd plane... perhaps - 3/1/2005 3:48 AM   
fprintf



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Status: offline 		So I checked my building board with a 48" straightedge to be sure it was flat, which it was. It is a 2" thick piece of pink foam and works great for sticking pins into. I cut everything on a 24" cutting mat I bought from JoAnn Fabrics on sale.

I rolled out the plans onto my building board, covered them with wax paper, and laid out my tools to get started. It was after I taped the plans down that I remembered it would be nice to have a copy without pinholes but I am too eager to get started to bother going to Kinkos.


The first step is to pull the basswood spars out of the box o' sticks and cut them to length. The basswood stands out from the similarly sized balsa because it is heavier and feels sturdier. Be sure to check you are using the basswood! I like to measure the spars directly over the plans using a sheet metal right angle guage and my mechanical pencil.


I then take the marked spar(s) over to my mitre box, which is clamped into a vise, and then cut so the kerf of the blade just cuts through the pencil line. In this case I got an exact length spar. If I was concerned about cutting the piece too short I would have left the pencil line and then sanded the piece to fit. Because of the tilt of the #3 ribs the upper spar will be slightly too long, so it will need to be sanded at a later time.


As you can see in the pics above I placed the lower spar on top of the plans and pinned them into place on top of 1/16" balsa. This is to give room for the bottom sheeting when it is eventually put into place. The kit assumes you have built before and have a habit of keeping scrap balsa. Fortunately someone had told me to save all bits of balsa rather than throwing them away and I happened to have quite a few 1/16" pieces I could cut up. If not, I eventually found out that there are three or four extra center section shear webs you could use (or you could cut pieces off the shear web carrier).

One of the beauties of a laser cut kit is the conformity of the ribs once they pop out of the carrier. On my first kit build I was assured that my die cut kit was cut using sharp, new dies. Let me tell ya, there is nothing like building from a laser cut kit. These babies just popped right out and required just a smidge of sanding, whereas my die cut kit required all sorts of cutting and careful manipulation to get them off the carrier. The instructions say some people recommend that you can lightly sand the ribs to remove the charring for better adhesion, but I did not bother.


On my last build the instructions specifically said to build the spar and set the ribs one shear web/rib pair at a time. With laser cut shear webs I think this becomes less of an issue, so the instructions said to just ensure that they were right on the plan and are perpendicular. Taking your time here will pay dividends when inserting the shear webs, as I discovered later.


So at the end of the first day, only about an hour into the build here is what the center section of the wing looks like. I did not take a picture of adding the trailing edge, but it was done before gluing the ribs to the spar and was as easy as cutting it to length and then pinning it over the plans.


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RE: Jester 2M RES build thread - good 2nd plane... perhaps - 3/1/2005 3:54 AM   
fprintf



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Status: offline 		One of the things us builders often do is make specific tools for accomplishing repetitive or difficult tasks. On my last build I had a challenge of cutting each shear web and then sanding it down so there were no gaps. I can't tell you how many ribs I knocked the top off of and then had to CA back into place. So in advance of that adventure I took one of the cut offs from the spar, took a couple of swipes on each side with some sandpaper (to make it just slightly smaller than the spar notches in the ribs) and then stuck on some 120 grit paper. Another fuzzy picture, but the idea is to use this little tool to shape the spar notches if necessary or to sand down any protruding shear webs.



After the ribs are added, the instructions call for adding the leading edge. Now there are quite a few square looking balsa sticks so I had to pull all of them out and measure carefully to choose the right one. It may be coincidence or may be by design, but the balsa was a hard balsa stick which is just perfect for a ding-prone leading edge. Here is where I had my first challenge with the build. Getting the stick to sit into the ribs perfectly without any gaps was close to impossible without seriously applying pressure, the kind of pressure that can warp a wing. So I did the best I could to ensure there was a pretty good fit. I looked after the wing had dried and saw just some tiny gaps (thousandths wide), but they will probably need to be filled with balsa dust and CA. I will see how strong this is with one side of the sheeting before deciding whether to fix it or not.


Ok, no pictures of the shear webs. When I said earlier that you must position the ribs exactly over the plan, well the shear webs are designed to fit *exactly* in one size space. I would highly recommend building this wing one shear web and rib at a time because I had to make three shear webs out of extra 1/16" stock because I had the ribs just slightly (.021") too far apart. I cannot stand for a flimsy, gappy or weak wood-wood joint in the spar, so I made sure to replace shear webs rather than chance any gaps. This also meant that I had to do a few swipes of sandpaper on a few other ribs since they were then a little oversized, which is not a big deal. In one of the shear webs I made I did end up with a little gap at the top between the shear web and the upper spar. When I added the upper spar I put on a bunch of weights and let it dry and then I took the wing off the building board and clamped that particular section. No more air gaps.


So here is the completed spar. When I lifted this off the building board I could not believe how light it was. I think this may be a reaction to the "heft" of my Marauder center section, which is fully covered and assembled. So I think it is all in my mind at this point.


One reminder for anyone building this plane. There are quite a few shear webs left over in the carrier, presumably in case you make a mistake. Do not think you have to glue them next to Rib#3 at the end of the center section. These you leave blank, at least for now. The kit comes with some dacron to wrap this "joiner box", although I think I will use some kevlar thread I have.


Finally today I added the built up trailing edge. I took out my hated razor plane (what a waste of $7). I adjusted it as best I could to take off some paper thin curls of balsa, but the thing is such a piece of junk it would only either skip over the wood or dig into it. Must be user error somehow. So I took out my real block plane, an antique from my wife's grandfather, and trimmed the upper trailing edge. After gluing it I discovered that I could have taken some more off since there were some little gaps. This is my first time building up a trailing edge since all the stuff I have build so far had triangular TE pieces. I learned an awful lot in the few minutes it took to put this together and will be sure to plane down the wingtip pieces sufficiently. At least this way I have a slightly thicker TE right at the root for the rubber band hold downs.


So far so good. After two days, and probably 4 hours total of work the wing is substantially together. Tomorrow I will have some pics of the spoiler box doublers and the subspar installation.

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RE: Jester 2M RES build thread - good 2nd plane... per... - 3/2/2005 6:11 AM   
fprintf



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Status: offline 		Ok, so as promised here are some pics of how the subspar looks on the wing so far. Adding these was really easy, just cut to size and they plop right into the precut notches.


The next part of the build suggests adding the spoiler box doublers. The directions don't say if they go in one way or another, and I tend to think they do not. All it took was a little glue and some clothes pins to get these into place. I did have to remove the wing from the building board, being careful not to twist it in any way.



So then the instructions suggest wrapping the joiner boxes in dacron thread. I have some extra kevlar thread so I decided to use that. Please excuse the somewhat fuzzy picture again. I wanted to practice winding this stuff on... it is not easy to get the spacing even or to ensure that the threads are vertical between the upper and lower spars. I had it unravel quite a few times, but I blame that on me not wanting to use CA since I do not yet have a method for applying it gently (my tips are all clogged up and the stuff tends to come out rather fast)


Ok, so on to the bottom sheeting. I have always found this part difficult so really took my time getting set up. I measured about 6 times, cut once and then dry fit the piece a couple of times.

Well I really messed up on the sheeting. The glue dried too fast, I didn't do it in the right order and I had to wick in a ton of CA to get the sheeting to stick to the ribs.

I asked for a ton of advice on the forums and the Balsasailplanes Yahoo group and got a whole bunch. From the following images it doesn't look too bad. Despite some gaps, when viewed from the bottom you can't even tell there is any extra glue in the wing.

And for once I got a really nice joint on the leading edge, something I have always found challenging.


So after following some of the advice and spending some time looking at how the allegro-lite is done, I went out this evening and bought 25 pounds of lead shot ($18!) from the local gun store. I double wrapped it in baggies and probably have 8 pounds in the big bags and close to 5 lbs in the small bags. That ought to keep the sheeting in place quite nicely.


I now have the courage to attempt the top sheeting with a pretty good feeling that it will work for me. I plan to thin down the yellow glue to give myself some extra working time, and then to prebend the balsa sheets ala the allegro-lite. I am not sure if I will end up using CA as that was an alternative suggested several times also.

< Message edited by fprintf -- 3/2/2005 6:15 AM >

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RE: Jester 2M RES build thread - good 2nd plane... per... - 3/3/2005 8:18 AM   
kestrel53065



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Status: offline 		Just a note here. You may or may not have done this but just a suggestion. In regard to fitting the square leading edge. First be sure that if you have to trim the notch in the ribs to fit the spar, be sure to do it on the rear side. This may or may not have to be done.This maintains the distance from the spar forward to the leading edge notch. Also, when fitting the square leading edge to the notch in the front of the ribs. Rotate it to check the fit on all four sides to see which one fits the notches the best. It always seemed to me that one of the sides fit better in all of the ribs than the others.

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RE: Jester 2M RES build thread - good 2nd plane... perhaps - 3/7/2005 7:05 AM   
fprintf



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Status: offline 		Ok, so as I usually do when I get stuck or need motivation to move past my past errors I procrastinate the next step. So I took a few days off this week but resumed in earnest this weekend. After filling my shot bags I put them to use. I ended up using the technique bfretless on rcgroups recommended to sheet the wing - plenty of yellow glue along the ribs and spar and dribble thin CA along the leading edge.


So I had rushed a little bit and thought I could squeeze a few very tiny gaps that were on the leading edge once I got to the dribbling CA part. It turned out that the leading edge stick had a bow to it that I had not previously noticed. This is why I had a poor fit on some of the ribs originally. So I had to shave the LE stick some and sand the sheet some more and getting a precise fit was not so easy. It is like fixing a wobbly chair by sawing the long leg... you take off too much and then have to saw all 3 other legs to stop a new wobble. This happened to me. All was not lost, however, as I did have pretty good joints right around the ribs in most cases. I mixed up some balsa dust and yellow glue as a gap filler, ran a finger full of it along the LE, let it dry and then sanded it down. All in all it came out looking quite nice, and I learned a *ton* about dry fitting. Allegro-Lite here we come!


So here is the first 4" piece of sheeting applied to the upper part of the center of the wing. It looks pretty darn good!


The instructions are very sparse at this point and there is no direction given where to make the joint for the sheeting that runs from the spar to the subspar. So I asked around, made some assumptions and jumped right in. I made a joint right at the 4" mark, so the actual joint is unsupported except by the ribs every few centimeters. The other option was to cut the 4" sheet right over the spar and make the joint there, but it was already glued down and I did not want to pry it up.



I am quite proud of the radiused corners I made on the center sheeting. It turned out that the radius on the plans is *exactly* the radius of a Titebond bottle. So I used that as a template.

Unfortunately I made an error at the TE, which I think will be very minor. There is no radiused corners here although the plans call for it. I am sure I could retrofit some small pieces if necessary, but I think it is overkill at this point. I am getting much better at sanding and fitting and the last 15mm x 170 mm piece just dropped right in from some earlier 1/16 scrap sheeting that was cut off the lower sheeting with just a little sanding.

After sanding the upper surfaces look fantastic. From below, however, you can see how ugly things look with a few glue drips. Not a big deal, but not perfection either.

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RE: Jester 2M RES build thread - good 2nd plane... perhaps - 3/7/2005 7:06 AM   
fprintf



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So I cannot finish up the center wing section until I buy some servo extensions. So I put it aside and decided to put the fuse together. The pieces come out of the lite-ply carriers very nicely. But the fuse parts that need to come out of the heavier ply take a wicked beating if you try and flex them out. So I did my best to cut the ply, but this is tough and *heavy* stuff and each piece needed to be sanded because there were lots of little nubs once the piece popped out. I got a little over eager with the sanding and forgot that even pieces being made out of ply can be fragile. Here is a busted tail joiner pice. The piece is very thin, so I needed to be more careful. A little CA will fix this right up.

So doing a dry fit is very important with this planes fuse. Yes, the pieces are laser cut but they do not go together nicely at all. I needed to sand every plywood piece so that it would fit inside whatever keyhole it mated with. I read on the Scepter thread that Christian had the same problem, so fortunately I was prepared to do the sanding. Still, it is a pain and is sometimes difficult to hold these smaller pieces against the sandpaper without also taking off some skin. Fortunately my skin is pretty covered with CA, so really all I am doing is sanding CA.

The first step is to join the two fuselage front and rear ends together. They are keyed and labeled left and right. This was a no brainer step. I did choose to use yellow glue even though the instructions call for epoxy. I just do not see that the fuse needs any extra weight or the marginal strength of epoxy for most of these well supported joints. Heaven knows that this fuse is very sturdy with all the plywood, and my research on various woodworking sites suggests that a good yellow glue joint is equally as strong as a good epoxy joint, especially when there is no gap filling required. All the joints on the fuse are extremely tight and I'd bet the ply would break before the joints do.

The fuse doublers are another easy install. You just spread some glue on one side of the doubler, double and triple checking *beforehand* that you are clamping the correct side of the fuse. It is easy to get messed up here and glue the piece to the same side of both sides. The trick I used was to ensure that the lettering denoting right and left, found at the back of the fuse, is face down. Each fuse side should be the opposite of the other. I used clothes pins to keep the doublers in place. I missed the part in the instructions where it said to use former 5 as a guide when putting the doublers in place, but just by lining them up with the upper fuse edge I got it right on anyway. I checked the spacing/alignment afterward and I was fine.

So I put the servo tray together. This required a bit of sanding to make sure my HS-81 servos will fit in snugly, and again I had to do quite a bit of sanding to get the pieces to fit together. Once together, though, this thing is strong!


So all in all I believe I have made some tremendous personal progress here. If you have not noticed, I tend to be very self critical especially when my modelmaking skills do not approach the level of perfection I think a thread like this deserves. But as with anything practice makes perfect. As for the plane itself, I think it is a very nice kit. I am surprised at the heftiness of the fuselage, with all the plywood but I suspect that it has much to do with the sturdiness desired in an RES plane designed for dorking in at contests versus a lightweight floater like the gentle lady. This think is going to be strong. I have a new winch and this baby is going to fly on it.

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RE: Jester 2M RES build thread - good 2nd plane... per... - 3/15/2005 5:53 AM   
fprintf



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Status: offline 		Back from the hobby shop with my pushrods. This place is a HobbyTown USA and I am much less impressed with their selection than the hobby shop the next town in the other direction. I ended up with some Gold 'n rod pushrods, which I am less impressed with than simple music wire rods. Nevertheless they are reasonably light and I am not so concerned with thermal expansion on a 2M RES plane than I might be on a 3M full house.

So after waiting for the servo tray to dry I dry fit everything on the fuse and then clamped it together. The instructions warn about making sure the fuse goes together square, but I couldn't figure out how to get the pieces to squeeze together and remain square at the same time. So I relied upon the tabbed plywood to keep everything mostly aligned and took my chances. The plywood is relatively stiff but the shape of the fuse tapers toward the front and rear from the sides and on the bottom from the midpoint of the fuse to the nose. It was not easy getting everything squeezed in all together. Near a few of the tabs I did not get the best joints due to the fuse trying to spread itself apart. Oh well, nothing a little fillet of glue can't fix!


So after taking the clamps off things looked pretty well aligned. I added in the pushrods making sure they cross over per the plans. I did have to do some filing of the holes to get the outer pushrod casings through but otherwise that part was easy.


I did depart from the plans in one area. The plans called for simple cross grain sheeting. I decided to do opposing 45 degree grain on the fuselage. According to what I have read, and build work I have done previously this adds some rigidity and breaking strength to the rear of the fuse. It doesn't add too much time and reduces the number (if not the length of) of wood joints. In the picture below you can see that I very roughly fit the sheeting. It is very easy with a razor plane or coarse sandpaper to get off whatever sheeting overhangs the fuse. Unfortunately I did not take heed of the advice in the instructions and everything I know about building and I initially built a twist into the fuselage after weighting it overnight. Fortunately I was able to build the twist out when sheeting the bottom of the fuse. All is straight now! Another lesson learned - be patient, check the squareness of the fuse many times before leaving the weights on.

Once the fuse was straightened I did end up sanding the corners of the fuse a little. Hopefully this will not reduce the strength too much. It was just too ugly looking with these 90 degree draggy looking edges. This is why building the rear of the fuse with balsa and square or triangular longerons makes sense over building with ply. It is much lighter in the tail and lets you round the rear of the fuse pretty significantly while still retaining a lot of strength.

Once place I did have some difficulty came in opening up the holes for the rubber band dowel. The plywood holes (3mm birch ply x 2 formers) were way too tight for the dowel. So I had to spend quite a bit of time sanding the dowel, test fitting, and filing the holes. You can see it here installed in the picture below. I didn't want to be hassling with the towhook assembly under the dowel later on so I installed it at this point. It adds some difficulty because the fuse no longer sits flat. I can deal.

So at this point I am fitting the canopy. It is white out of the box. I think I will paint it black or some color. Probably just plain paint rather than tinting it. It depends how motivated I get when I get around to covering the plane. The instructions say to test fit the canopy without really explaining how it should fit. I probably cut a little too much off despite the warnings to take it slow. It still looks pretty good:


The noseblock is 6 laser cut balsa pieces laminated onto a ply former. It was easy to do this. Shaping the noseblock comes after finalizing installation of the canopy. Here I am also clamping the canopy tray system - simply a small piece of ply that hooks under the noseblock. Quite honestly I am really impressed with the canopy arrangement here!


So that's it for now. Now that the fuse is sheeted all that remains is to shape the noseblock and final fit the canopy. So while I get motivated to do that I am going to build the tail surfaces. That looks pretty darn straight forward. Something I am sure a quicker builder could do in an hour. It is late tonight so I'll likely do it after American Idol tomorrow.

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RE: Jester 2M RES build thread - good 2nd plane... per... - 3/15/2005 5:56 AM   
fprintf



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Status: offline 		I hope to make some more progress later this week. Let me know if you like what you see so far. One area of note on this plane. Pay attention to the plans! The instructions do not tell you step by step how to glue this to that and so forth. I ended up assembling the fuse and did not notice there were screw blocks I needed to add to allow the servos to be screwed in. Dangit! So I will probably monkey something up that will let me simply goop the servos into the servo wells as I cannot take the fuse apart at this point to add the rails in.

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