rsteffen42

Well, I'm learning as I go along. Cutting the 1/4" ribs wasn't as hard as I thought it was going to be. The trick is that the grain of the wood is going from leading edge to trailing edge on the rib, so your longest cuts are going with the grain, so a knife blade only has to split the grain. I just used a fresh #11 XActo blade, and made the cut larger than my template (I made a rib template out of 1/8" lite-ply and used it to cut out all of the ribs). Then I just sanded the ribs down to match the template.

Looking at the fuselage plan, I see circular holes in the bottom sheet, which is 1/16" balsa. Shouldn't be hard to cut those with a sharp knife. And, in the sides I see rectangular holes with rounded corners in the ply doubler. However, the plan says that doubler is 1/64" ply, which is very thin and seems like it should be an easy cut with a good knife and a straightedge.

My building surface is a Great Planes 36" building board. The plans are pinned to the board, and a layer of Great Planes plan protector is pinned on top of the plans. In retrospect, the plan protector is nice but wax paper or plastic wrap would do the job pretty well, too.

For glue, I'm using Titebond (Aliphatic Resin), which is what is in the syringe. The syringe is a "drywall syringe" from the hardware store. I have no idea what you'd use it for with drywall, but it seems tailor made for this job.

I have used a bit of medium CA on the first wing. Got a little over enthusiastic while sanding the trailing edge spar and cracked two ribs - fixed with medium CA.