And now for an update on my US: pretty much everything is done now save for covering and the flaps (need a servo/pushrod installation, but the torque rods and servo bay are in place already). I expect to finish the wing this week and the fuselage within a week of that. Being the first weekend I'm at home in a month, I'll have plenty of time to work on it, though I turn 21 Saturday and may have my mind on other things. I'm also only working until noon the next few days which will half with the wing. I decided to cut the hinges on the elevator and redo those as well, since I couldn't get enough covering out of the gap. I also replaced the pins in all the hinges with music wire (.047, per the manufacturer's recommendation), which is bent and held in place on the wing by a screw.
I glassed the stabilizer (around 4 inches on each side if I recall correctly) as was recommended in response to my aggressive sanding. Some wood shavings got into the gaps in the wing which required surgery to remove. When I put the cut out sections back in, the right side near the root felt a bit too flexible, so I glassed that as well.
As for the covering itself, I've changed the scheme a bit, so now all the stripes on the underside of the wing end exactly on the outer edge of a rib, and there are 9 stripes instead of 7. The geometry of the stuff on top was hard to nail down exactly, so I altered it slightly to make it easier (superimposing a partially transparent image of the scheme over a photo of the wing made this easier). Does anyone have advice for cutting out the higher layers of covering accurately (e.g. where the red overlaps the white on the top of the wing)? So far, my technique has been to pin it to the wing and put creases along the line where I intend to cut it, then clamping a steel ruler over the covering to the table, and running an X-Acto along it lightly several times.
Landing gear is all but finished, I lost my GoPro so I can't time-lapse the build with it or finalize its position in the cockpit, and I've yet to buy the replacement canopy. I suspect th receiver might be bad, but once I test that and maybe buy a replacement, the (re)build will be done!
Pics:
Some explanation: my roommate's a big Bob Marley fan; took it to my dad's last weekend to airbrush the cockpit black; another adventure from the weekend, I finally pulled the prop off my second-to-favorite airplane, an Fw 190 which burned up after I tried to run the motor with the belly on the ground; there's only one clamp in my house, so I had to improvise; the last picture is the current state of the wing.
It's starting to look like an airplane!