Hi Monroe...

I did hear from Ed Lokken about a month ago. He sent me the address of a web site where he's posted some good construction photos.

I really like the plane. I've been spending more time out of town on business than I have at home lately and the Bird-e-Dog is a good airplane for building on the road... so I have a few fuselages and a couple wings. I haven't really discovered anything earth shattering about the construction, but it does go really quick now.

The hood area reminded me that c-grain wood is great for flat areas but not good at all for curves (I was on the road and only had the c-grain stock I brought for wing ribs and fuselage side pieces... it was unusable for the hood even after soaking, so those hood pieces got recut into wing ribs.)

I also found that if I leave some extra length on the turtledeck stringer material, I can install the flat piece that they but up against first, then slide the material in place and adjust the angle of the end til the butt-joint fits really well. (The first time around I installed all stringers, marked them for the former and cut and sanded the protruding stringer ends -- not nearly as easy to be precise that way... the construction pictures on the web show the stringers going through that former -- porbably stronger where I don't thnk it does any good, but not quite as neat, although that's probably hidden under covering.)

I did make a little change to the fuse side frames... at the bottom of the cheeks (in the very front), I combined the sheet part and the strip part, cutting the overall shape out of one piece of sheet with a notch where the verticle piece joins it. (I didn't see any need to fit two pieces there with the grain running the same way and with the other piece notched in, I think it's a tiny bit stronger.)

Another thing I'm planning to do is add a pair of 1/8" dowels or balsa sticks to simulate the fuselage stiffeners on the full size plane at both the windshield and rear window.

I haven't yet decided on which servos to use (and I don't know what the weight of the airframe(s) is yet. Are you going to use micro servos?