RE: RE: Scale Gee Bee Z question.
Greetings Jacs;
Hang in there - I fiddled with these things for a month before I
finally re-drew them.
I think I ran into the same problem that you're seeing - on my plans,
the three forward WF formers are roughly a trianle; the flat bottom
is easy enough to figure out - it goes against the fillet base, but
then, neither of the curved sides appears to fit the curvature of
the fuselage. Then there's the strange one that's three straight sides;
what on earth do you do with that??!
So, on a piece of drawing paper, I traced the wing rib, and some
pertinant details from the fuselage, viewed from the side, and on top
of this I free-handed what I wanted the new fillet to look like. That
gives you the height of each former.
Then I made three tracings of F2, F3 and F4, but also with the wing's
surface on each one, and just plotted on each one a straight line from
the height of the fillet, out to the width of the base (which goes, I
think, almost to the wing's third rib out, or something like that).
To get the sharp curvature at the very front of the fillet, I made the
whole front former out of 1/4" balsa, and rounded it over, but you
at least have the plastic parts. You're way ahead of the game in
that respect.
Once the fillet shapes were determined, it was easy to make the actual
sheeting. Since I took the concave curvature out of the former tops, I
could use one long piece of balsa sheeting to go over the whole thing,
and I determined the shape it needed to be from my new drawings.
I still have them. Let me see if I can get them scanned and post them
for you tonight or tomorrow.
Dan.