ORIGINAL: KeithB

Thanks to Bob Noll’s videos and the help of Lance Van Nostrand I’ve learned some pretty good techniques for aligning stabs and wings to make sure everything is perfectly straight.

However, the one thing that always drives me crazy is getting the fuse perfectly perpendicular to the stab/wing. What makes this so hard for me is that normally the rudder post (or rudder if already mounted) has a taper. This means when I set my triangle behind the rudder to see if it’s straight it ends up close at the top and far away at the bottom (or visa versa). To try and make sure it’s square I step back and try to eyeball it but this ends up driving me bonkers, one eye open, two eyes open move to the left move to the right, all of this changes the way it looks. OK, now you know how anal I am .

Anyways, the other day I saw a picture of the rear of a plane here on RCU (Mike East’s to be exact), and a lightbulb went on! If you have a picture from exactly behind the plane you can use photo editing software to display a grid and tell very precisely if the wing and/or stab are perpendicular to the rudder. For that matter, the table doesn’t even have to be level.

Obviously this isn’t a replacement for a triangle and eyeballs, but I think it’s a useful tool.

Here’s an example of the Brio I’m building: