Slow but steady wins the race...thought I'd post a little detail on the process I'm learning to use to cut curved shapes with film covering. I've been following the build threads of a couple of large IMAC airplane on FlyingGiants that outline the complete process for defining, cutting, and applying complex Monokote graphics. The two most informative were written by Tom Wheeler and Mark B. As I am planning to build something similar soon so decided to use this airplane to try to apply some of these methods.
Pics 1 and 2: Rudder and vertical stab covering is complete. I'm not too happy about the alignment of the gray trim but overall I think it looks pretty good. I cut these pieces using french curves and aligning them more or less by eye. Overall the color combos look great but I really needed to be a little more careful about alignment. Each piece is aligned very well from side to side (left vs. right I mean) the separation between them wasn't as consistent as I would have liked. Regardless it came out pretty good so I'm not going to remove it all and start over, lesson learned.
You can see in pic 1 that I removed the covering under the black trim piece and I did the same for the red tip. I did not however do this for the gray trim. On one side I used a woodpecker to perforate the covering and on the other I used a lower heat setting, each method of course was to try to prevent bubbles from occurring. The woodpecker method worked out much better but not as well as removing the underlying covering.
Pic 3 and 4:
For the tail graphics, which are going to be similar, I am utilizing tracing paper, french curves, and carbon paper to lay out the templates and mark the outlines on the stab.
You start by taping a piece of tracing paper tautly to the surface. Using french curves and my calibrated Mark 1 eyeballs, I arrive at the outlines I want for the three trim pieces. In order to make sure both sides are the same, I also added the elevator outline as an alignment aid.
Pics 5 and 6:
Once the borders are laid out, I place a piece of carbon paper under the outlines and traced over the lines to transfer them to the surface. Next time I might be more careful about this but as these are intended only as rough guides for installation I did this free-hand which is why the transferred lines aren't very uniform.
Pic 7:
Repeat the process for the other side by flipping the tracing paper over, add the carbon paper, align, and transfer. Now I have guide lines on both sides.
The next step is to use the tracing paper and carbon paper to transfer the lines to posterboard to make the templates for cutting the Monokote to size. On the stabs I'm going to cut 6 pieces for each side, one large inner white piece, two white stripes, and the three trim colors. The white pieces, since they overlap the colors, will go down first, then I'll apply the trim colors.
