Ever had problem of a kit having all the ribs different sizes?
03-05-2008 | 06:45 PM
#1
Thread Starter
Senior Member
Ever had problem of a kit having all the ribs different sizes?
I don't have this problem now but I remember as a youngster (12 or 13 yrs) buying a Sterling Flying Fool biplane and I planned on starting the upper wing first. Since I had not built many kits (but what I did build I flew Many flights on) I was still learning about different constructions. By this time I had built four or five Scientific hollow logs and a few profiles including a Fokker D7 ( I think it was a Top Flite) plus a Kombat Kat.
What drove me nuts though was that when I carefully cut out the ribs and wing tip pieces by first sanding the back sides of the die cut sheets and using an X-Acto knife to get them all out in one piece.
After stacking all the ribs (constant chord wing all outside dimensions of the ribs should have been the same) I noticed that from TE to LE that most were of a different length! My intent was to sandwhich them all together and sand the tops and bottoms smooth from their die cutting truama.
I could not for the life of me figure out whether stack them all with the LE flush or with the TE flush. Seems there was no right way to do it. It seems some were a little short on one end or the other.
I learned most of my tips and tricks from reading Model magazines and had no one to help me with such anomolies. And since I had bought the kit I had supposed you were use the parts in the kit without buying any extra wood for it.
These days I would just make another set of ribs. No big deal nowadays but what I want to know is how others dealt with this problem as I feel that others were faced with this problem.
Robert
What drove me nuts though was that when I carefully cut out the ribs and wing tip pieces by first sanding the back sides of the die cut sheets and using an X-Acto knife to get them all out in one piece.
After stacking all the ribs (constant chord wing all outside dimensions of the ribs should have been the same) I noticed that from TE to LE that most were of a different length! My intent was to sandwhich them all together and sand the tops and bottoms smooth from their die cutting truama.
I could not for the life of me figure out whether stack them all with the LE flush or with the TE flush. Seems there was no right way to do it. It seems some were a little short on one end or the other.
I learned most of my tips and tricks from reading Model magazines and had no one to help me with such anomolies. And since I had bought the kit I had supposed you were use the parts in the kit without buying any extra wood for it.
These days I would just make another set of ribs. No big deal nowadays but what I want to know is how others dealt with this problem as I feel that others were faced with this problem.
Robert
