cltom, I sent you a PM.

HO-229, laser cutting is much more affordable than it used to be. Unparalleled accuracy and the time saved justifies the money spent. For this design I plan on having the following laser cut: lite ply fuselage formers, engine box parts, wing tube / locator pin fuse side doublers (for wing and horz stab), hatch ends, root ribs (for wing and horz stab), rudder plate, tailgear plate, outer wing tube supports, AND the balsa fuselage sides since they have slots for the tabs on the formers. There will be a large amount of sheeted foam in the plane (wings, tail, hatch, rear turtledeck, belly pan) for super fast building and strength. I don't like built-up wings and ALWAYS prefer sheeted foam provided that the airframe is kept comparably light (there ARE ways)! The belly pan idea came from the Carden and Aerotech planes. The belly pans give the fuselage a MUCH better shape at the bottom than the faceted appearance that sticks yield (like the AeroWorks and Columbo Anderson planes). I can't believe that I haven't broken the sticks on the bottom of my 31% CA Extra...darned near splintered them when I was shrinking the covering...but that's about the only thing I don't like about that plane...phenominal flyer!

Transitioning to a different design platform can be a pain. I did it several times! I evaluated several high-end CAD packages and found Microstation to be the best suited for our needs. The solids modeling functions seemed much more intuitive and 'faster' than AutoCad (I think I was looking at 11 or 12...the demo seemed buggy, not laid out well, and rather difficult to use). I decided upon Microstation but the company owners kept telling me 'everyone else in the free world uses AutoCad'. True, but after the Corps of Engineers required that files on one particular job be submitted in Microstation .dgn format, I was overjoyed! In a short time I was kicking out some very 'real' 3D models of our piping projects. Saved mucho dinero on installations due to greater prefabrication and 'interference checking'. The guys in the field loved my work...saved them hours of head-scratching! Granted the MicroStation vs. AutoCad thing is all personal preference...and the opinions I give come from a dyed-in-the-wool non-conformist. ...even though I'm designing a 'me-too' Edge 540.

-Tom