Gotta love the joys of a job that lets you work from home 80% of the time. It means MORE BUILDING TIME!

Today saw the beginning of the work to finish framing up the fuse. F2, F4, F5, and F6 were cut, shaped and sanded. F3-A (the instrument panel) was also cut, with a slight change from the original plans to the overall shape of the former, to present enough space for a scale instrument layout. More on that in a minute.

The next task was to start warping the fuse into shape. This is the first place where the experience of having already built the small one REALLy paid off, as I had the necessary resources right at hand, and already had a pretty good plan in place for how I wanted to do this.

The Bulldog (well, the S2S in general) has something of an odd shape. It flares out (fatter) from the firewall back to about the front of the canopy, and then starts tapering to a point at the back. While doing this, it's also changing shape in "the roll axis" if you will, in that, at the front, it's considerably fatter up top than on the bottom, but toward the rear it's the same width top and bottom. All of this results in, as you might imagine, some pretty interesting curves to the fuse sides...curves that, in such a short distance from one former to the next, the balsa is reluctant (at best) to make. So, clearly, some soaking with the liquid of your choice (I use bleach-water myself...works like a charm, and I HATE the smell of ammonia) is in order.

So...the process was basically to soak the fuse, insert various formers as far as they'd comfortably go and then keep the fuse wet (and I mean WET) while waiting a few minutes....after a few minutes, work various formers a bit farther in....shove/wedge/repeat. You have no idea how many different tricks I tried (and fuse sides I went through, and creative curses I came up with) trying to figure out this method on the little one. Thank goodness I had, though, as this one was even TOUGHER to do. Eventually, however, I got all the formers roughly in their assigned positions, and clamped things together to hold the fuse in something resembling its final shape until the wood dried.

Here;'s everything clamped up, waiting to dry:



Once things had dried (well..ok..I admit...a bit BEFORE they had...a mistake I SHAN'T make again as I spent a bit of time repairing some failures due to stressing wet joints/wood) it was time to begin installing formers.

F2 went in first, as it's the "keystone" former ime. If it's square and correctly placed, then the fuse almost can't help but be straight...it "sets the tone", if you will, for the rest of the curves to follow.

Once F2 had dried sufficiently to get unclamped, then F4 went in...and then came back out, because it dawned on me that I can't have F4 there if I want an open, full-body cockpit. F4's sole purpose is to hold the "platform" for a normal bust pilot, and it does not provide any structural integrity to the airframe....which is a shame, really, since the installation of it was pretty clean, even if I do say so myself. Thankfully, I realized my mistake mere minutes after gluing, so it came out easily.

Moving on, I then went ahead and installed F5 and F6 at the rear of the plane. They're clamped up and drying as I type this, as can be seen here:



Those keeping score at home may realize that F3 is not installed yet. Again, experience from the .40 size build dictates my decision here. F3 is the most difficult former to fit into the fuse, so I chose to bring the fuse as close as possible to its final shape with the OTHER formers before installing it. F3 has been "dry fit" a couple times during the process and it looks like this method is going to work well. it'll still be a tight, careful fit, to be sure...but that just means more goodd wood-wood contact. F3 MIGHT go in later this evening...depends on how comfortable I feel unclamping F5 and F6 before bed tonight.

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I mentioned above I had more on the instrument panel. Has anyone reading this done a custom instrument panel before? In other words, bought individual "instruments" and placed them on a panel. Can you reccomend a good source for them? Any tips/tricks you can share?