BVM Super (Balsa) Bandit
Former F5 is used to retain the rear spars. It is a 1/8" carbon fiber part to which we will glue and then bolt a couple of long u-shaped brackets to retain the spars.
Like F4, this former will remain free (unglued to the fuselage) during the early work of mounting the wings, and only glued in place once we have everything perfectly aligned.
Initially I lined the wings up with the fairings on the fuselage as best I could, and tacked the brackets to former F5. I then removed the former and looked at where the brackets had been positioned, and was not 100% happy that both sides were absolutely symmetrical. Although there was not much in it, I wanted to ensure that the method of visually aligning the wing to the wing fairing wasn't going to introduce a slight anomaly that would annoy me for the (hopefully) years to come, so I used debonder to disolve the small tack-glue joints holding the brackets to F5 and opted to take a slightly more time consuming approach for the alignment.
In the following photograph you will see the start of this process. As shown on one of the fuselage plans, a couple of 1/2" balsa blocks are placed under the fuselage to wing-joint to raise the assembly slightly off of the belly. The wings are retained to (the still loose) F4, and the rear spars are not attached to anything yet.
A couple of incidence gauges were checked against each other to ensure that they both zeroed at the same point, and then I placed one on each wing (at the aileron position, which gives more accurate alignment. (If you do this, be sure to use the exact same position on each wing, since the wings do have a small amount of "wash" in them. Then I placed a balsa block under the TE of each wing, and slid them in towards the fus or out towards the tip in order to adjust each wing so that not only did they seem aligned with the fus fairing, but they also both had the exact same incidence.
Finally, a measurement is taken at the centre-line of each tip (that's what the plastic vernier is for, in the photo), and minor corrections will be made at each root rib, and/or at the former's base to ensure that the amount of dihedral in one wing exacty matches that in the other.
At this point I am probably being overly cautious with the alignment, but I'd rather just err on the side of caution here.