Only one last thing to do for the left wing panel to be finished (for the moment). As I said in my last post, I'm going to hold off setting the W1 rib until I have both wing panels finished and ready to be joined. I glued on the wing tip panel earlier, and now I'm going to finish that part up. I'm including some extra pictures for Tigerdude to see what the wing tip plate looks like. When we finish up this step there will be some semi-ugly holes left in the wing tip. Some my be tempted to fill those holes now while we are here, but I prefer to wait on doing any filling. As you are still building just isn't the time to fill. You may wind up with more to fill later on, you may find out that you don't need to fill after all, or you may damage what you filled as you work later on. In my opinion it's just easier to fill later on when we are working on the finish of the plane. But for now, let's finish up the left wing panel by taking care of the wing tip plate.

Remove the the tape that was holding the wing tip plate in place while the glue was drying. It should look pretty much like picture #1, with the leading edge, trailing edge, and the spars extending past the end of the wing tip plate. The next step is to cut off the extra. Some might thing that it would be better to cut of as close to the wing tip plate as possible. While this might seem easier, it usually will result in extra work. More often than not you will end up cutting too much away, or gouging wood out of the wing tip plate. When you cut these off just make a rough cut that is “close”. Leave extra material. This is just the same principle as I said in an earlier post, it's better to do a little bit at a time because you can always cut a second time, but it's a pain to try and add material back. Pictures #2 & #3 show cutting these sticks off, leaving extra material there. As you can see in pictures #4, #5, and #6 you can see how it was a “rough” cut with extra material left. Use a sanding block to smooth down the rough cuts. Don't worry about getting a “covering ready” finish when you sand, we are just interested in getting it close. We'll worry about getting is smooth when we sand the entire plane in preparation for covering. In pictures #7 & #8 I used 80 grit paper on a small sanding block to “rough it in”. In picture #9 we can see how the top main spar sticks out past the edge of the wing tip, we'll want to sand that down too. Use your sanding block to rough shape it to the same shape as the wing tip. Pictures #10 and #11 show how they looked after being rough shaped. Picture #12 shows the final wing tip plate.

And there you have. We are finished with the left wing panel roughly finished. It wasn't has hard as you thought it would be was it? I'll let you in on a little secret, we just finished half of the hardest part of building an airplane. Yep, that's right. When we finish the right wing panel we will be done with the hard part. And see how easy it was to get here? That's why I am doing this build thread, to some people just how easy it is to actually build a plane.

Pictures
1. Rough ends of spars, leading edge, and trailing edge.
2. Cutting off excess rear spar.
3. Cutting off excess leading edge
4. Rough cut ends
5. Rough cut leading edge
6. Rough cut spars
7. Sanding down rough cuts
8. Sanding down rough cuts
9. Main spar extending past wing tip
10. Sanding main spar to shape of wing tip.
11. Trailing edge sanded to shape.
12. Wing tip finished.

Until next time

Ken