OK time to get started. Lost a day because I found my heat gun was making a funny noise (reminder to self: do not drop heat gun) fan motor broke lose. Sort of fixed the plastic housing but messed up the fine resistor wire and it burned up when I turned it on
First step is to clean the work bench. A "clean room" would be great.
Everything ready to get started. Cut white and red covering is on the table. I regrouped only the stab pieces to cut out so the larger wing pieces are not taking up space right now.
All of the balsa parts get cleaned with compressed air (outside of the room) and then tack ragged before each piece is applied. The covering also gets a quick wipe with the tack rag. The better your finish the more obvious is a stray piece of crap caught under the covering.
I use 2 irons and the heat gun. The first iron is set to about 200 degrees and does most of the work. The other is at about 250 and is used to seal the corners. I bump it up to about 285 for the wing tips.
I'll tackle the stab first, better to relearn how to do this with small parts than larger ones
Stab root piece and outboard corner where the elevator sits are first.
Pieces come off the sheet nice and easily when properly cut.
The bottom of the stab is first light colors before dark.
The piece is first tacked to all 4 corners then the leading edge, trailing edge, and outboard edge are sealed using the 200 degree iron. The leading edge is wrapped and smoothed past the mid line. The excess is cut away before shrinking the center of the piece. Excess air is pushed out towards the root which was not sealed yet. The center of the piece is shrunk and sealed to the wood with the wad of cotton, moving towards the root while still hot so all the expanded air is pushed out and the covering is adhered to the wood. A slight wood grain appearance is visible after you push the covering down. The smoother the wood the less wood grain that will show. Then the excess material at the root is cut back to about 3/16" and folded over with the hotter iron sealing it to the piece applied to the root earlier. Excess material is cut off with a straight edge right on the stab. as long as the knife is fresh it will cut through without much additional pressure.
Excess cut from this piece. Even more is wasted on the wing and stab tips.
