Well, the boat is really a little dingy, it's a 15' boston whaler type boat, have it flipped under the canopy and sanding it down and fixing the 10 years of abuse it's seen. My boats are a 20' cuddy cabin and a 26' pearson sailboat, but the sailboat is a money pit, every few years it's rigging, and sails every 2-3 years, blocks and lines are regular maintainence. I figured it this way, the power boat costs me about 2-3 grand a year, registration, gas, repairs and so forth. The sailboat cost me about 6 grand every other year, and who said sailing is cheap! I found out first hand it's a rich man's toy, and I'm far from rich. But on to the extra, I'm going to keep it simple stupid, basically by plans except where they fail which is small points, the pic's are easy to take and post, so that's no problem. As far as covering, I use monocote and ultracote, there is not bias tward either, you just have to understand either ones application temps. I might do a koverall finish, it will be 10x more durable than iron on plastic, but not nearly as fast. In gereral, the extra is a fast and straight forward build, not much left to the imagination, but they do tend to skip pictures when building it. It's like having a well written and imaged instruction book with sections missing. But having those extra pic's are a real time saver for most people, I think that the money they save on not printing images of every step is a big negative for kit building in general. Goldberg tends to go through every little step for building, just the way it should be.

Now, as far as the work thing, I know what you mean, so far this week, I have in about 53 hours, so my time is limited, but I make the most of it, I assume that I'll end up with about 60+ by monday. But that's the name of the game when your a service tech. Well, off to do a little epoxy/glassing work on the bottom of the boat, but then I'm back the the extra build and painting out my jungmiester bipe as well.

Ten years ago I had been pestering a buddy of mine to teach me to sail. I had done a bit of wind surfing and hang gliding and wanted to try sailing. So we purchased a 1973 International 505 racing dinghy from a guy down in Santa Cruz. We paid $1300 - he had taken the boat apart with the intention of renovating it. We spent a couple of fun months, working evenings and weekends, getting all the many many systems working. Probably close to $2000 spent at West Marine. We sailed it for a couple of years on a local lake and had a blast. With three sails up and me out on the trapeze that boat really flew - until one of screwed up and we capsized. We capsized on a regular basis but had a lot of fun. I will never forget the look on the guys face who was driving his Mastercraft ski boat and we blew by him at over 20 knots (at least it seemed like it)! We sold the boat with the intention of buying a newer one and going down to San Francisco to start racing. However, life got in the way.

Ever since we sold the boat I had been looking for a hobby to get into and then start with RC cars for bit and then got hooked on this at the beginning of last year. This hobby works well because I get to build and fly and can sneak it in around other stuff.

I have the horiz stab put together and will post a couple of pictures soon. My building environment is considerable more cramped, and more rudimentary than yours.

What I learned from your pictures which really helped was to use the scrap balsa from the LE doubler to clamp it.

Here are pics of work to date. I may work on the elevators later today. I like not having CA on my fingers!

Very good my friend, looks excellent. I wouldn't have done it any better. As far as the sailing thing, try this, look up marina sailing, CA. It's a chain where owners enrole thier boats into the "time share" of ownership, basically, back in 2000 I lived in Ojai cali, I work in oxnard at marina sailing, they had 22 chains up and down the coastline, from san fran to san diego, you join and book a weekend on a vessel of your choice. I was the mechanic for all the boats in oxnard, so everything form a 22' cat boat to a 36' columbia, my favorite was a 28 catalina with a y-keel. Very fast boat for a rag bagger might I say, about 7-9 knots if trimmed and set right. But the two I own now are in the east coast where I live, the renken 20' I've owned since 16 years old, I'm 33 now. Back then, I worked in a marina, did I mention that I'm a water rat and grew up on boat jargin? Any who, I worked in the marina, bought a small 14' glasscraft off the owner and restored it and used it to zip around, (drink beer illegally at 16) and have a grand old time just me and my buddy. Well at the end of the season, the owner asked me if I'd like to trade my little 14' for the 20' renkin because it needed a repower, I took the boat and repowered it about 2 years later and the rest is history. The pearson is an abandoned boat in a local yard, I bought it for like 500 and redid it from top to bottom, but right now, it sit's out of water, no cash no splash, ya know. I need to put it on a trailer and convert the mast to a stepable plate, I couldn't find a way to get to my house with a mast top 45' up in the air!

Well, the vertical stab and rudder are built, next is the wing, I'm not doing the hinges till later, If you follow the instructions, beveling the leading edge of the rudder before adding the top is reccomended, but I'm probabily using either robart hinge points or goldberg hinges I have laying around. So I didn't bevel the LE for a reason. You'll see something yellow sitting in the pic's near the top of the rudder, it's a piece of plans protector keeping the top of the rudder from being glued to the stab, just a small piece between the two is all that is needed to keep it seperate. The whole assembly is left to dry and later once off the board, it will get trimmed to shape and final sanded, always better to have more wood to remove than not enough, plus, I'm letting my rudder go to the absoloute bottom of the fuse and not using the wire imbedded in the rudder. Yes,.... the inspector stopped by to verify the work was correct and all the glue joints were tight and wiped clean of excess. Maybe I should just use him as a weight to keep the parts in place.

I forgot to add these pic's, it's an easy way to keep your rudder counter ballance nice and solid incase one day you knock it by accident, it only takes about 1 minute to do, and you can use a little carbon fiber rod like I did or steel rod or 1/8" dowel. The dowel and carbon fiber rod are lighter than the steel dowel by far. Just line the two up, make the mark on bolth pieces and draw the centerline of the counterbalance and rudder. Bore the holes and insert the two rods, check the fit and pull it apart and resume building as normal, gluing it in place with the dowels or rods in place. I remember breaking my old counterbalance off one time when I landed in mud on the runway and it flipped over on it's back. That was the easiest and quickest way to make it strong. It's little things like this that go a long way down the road, it turns a great plane into a durable great plane.

You certainly know boats! Like many things I just dabbled for little while. I could see how it could become a way of life. I really only learned to crew the 505 - weight hang on the end of wire! I can helm just well enough to rent Hobie 14s when we have gone to Mexico and Hawaii. I will keep the Marina Sailing in mind. We current live between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe but our plan is to move north of San Francisco - probably ten years from now. By then I will be 55 and hope to be in a position where I don't have to work as much. At that point sailing would become more viable; however I am not sure if I will be up to sailing the fast dinghies. I used to by Wooden Boat and just be in awe of some of the boats in that magazine. I remember a Flying Dutchmen which looked kind of like a bigger 505. I can picture myself working on a wooden boat. The buddy of mine who I co-owned the 505 actually built a Clancy which is a little 12 ft dingy that was on that Woodworking show on PBS (New Yankee workshop?) - he did a great job but I don't think he ever put it in the water.

Looking at your rudder/fin your joints look tighter than mine. When you fit the 1/8 x 1/4 do you cut and sand or are you proficient enough to just cut the accurately with a razor blade? I seemed to spend a lot of time sanding. How much glue do you use. On the elevators I overglued the 1/8 x 1/4 and kinda created a fillet of glue.

Just checked the weather - looks like it will be flyable in the morning; so it will probably be later in the week before I get time to keep building.

I love that counter balance mod. I will definitely do that. You hit the nail on the head regarding what I am looking for - a durable plane. I realize that sometimes it is better to have a weak link that will break; like the nylon bolt that hold the wing on - I have broken this on my scratch built at least half a dozen times and the wing has survived great.

The funny thing about nylon bolts is the fact that on smaller .40 models, 2 1/4-20 nylon bolts will not shear, my pulse xt bent the aluminum wing tube, ripped out the wood bolt plate and even sheared the 4-40 bolts holding the landing ger in place when I clipped the right wing on final approach into a soccer goal post. The trick to double wingbolts that are nylon is to lightly score the shank under the heads, this gives a weak point to fail, just what it was ment to do. I didn't do it on the pulse because I forgot to mod the bolts, some say it's an accident waiting to happen if you do it, but lets think about it for a second, the tension of tightening the bolt is far more than the flying loads on the wing, so if you partly invoke a weak point in the bolt( perferably at the bolt plate), then it will do it's job. I will remember to do that on every plane I own from now on, it would have costed me a wing only on the pulse, but now I have to fix a fuse as well now, but that prompted the extra build and you were guided to buy one by me and a few others, so I guess it was just ironic fate this happened to play out like this. As far as the boats go, I know enough to be dangerous, in aruba I tried to rent a boat but they were the price of a small village, just for a hour or two, so I passed up on it and got my scube cert instead, it only took me about 1 1/2 days, but before I could think of it, I was diving the antillia, a wwII german frieghter. But if you do decide to sail, and move to san fran, I'll give you the number of my brother, he lives at the base of diablo mountain, overlooking the bay. He's a closet sailer, when he lived in boston, we took a 28 catilina from boston to glouster and back in a daytrip, he belonged to boston sailing club. He really had almost no clue what he was doing and I let him do his own thing until after about 1 hour of him tacking back and forth I realized that we were going nowhere at all, I had to suggest that we alter the angle and drive longer before tacking.We finally got home and I swore to never let him pilot a vessel again. Well, keep at it, soon the fuse will be done and your going to find yourself saying, "really,...it's done?,... That was too soon?!"

Wings,.... Obviously pop all the parts out for the wing, the jig tabs go down and there are only 3 ribs that have long tabs, those face up and are used for support when flipped over. When setting the spars down, look down them before pinnin them down, they most likely will have a crown to them, make sure you put the bows opposite each other, in other words, place bolth so the bow faces in the wing on bolth sides or away from the wing on bolth sides. I set mine so the crown faces away from the wing on bolth sides. Like this ( ) or you can do them like this ) (, but it will promote lifting at the tips, never set them in so they face like this ((/ )), your wing will set like a bananna. You can use CA to glue the ribs, I still use wood glue, so I have time to line everything up, if a rib feels like it's too tight, don't froce it, sand the spar groove till it fits snug but not splitting the rib. If you are going to use wood glue and not CA, you'll have to think around the issue of holding the spars tight, I use masking tape slipped under the spar and pulled snug around the top it's a cheap clamp to tension the spars into the ribs. Finally, make sure they are all square, lined up and all jig tabs are touching the plans tightly. Now when it's all set in place you can chack to see how flat the wing is by putting a straight edge down the trailing and leading edge matching the wings sweep to see if any ribs are too low or high. When happy, walk away and let it setup. Applying the wood glue takes the most time but has the advantage of letting you adjust parts before it's too late. So all in all it took me about 45 minutes to get it all set and lined up, now I have time to sit back for about 1/2 hour and relax, answer some posts and then go to the next step, or I can look ahead and set up the wing sheeting so when I need it, it'll be done, preassembly is the key when using slow cureing adheasives. Keep looking ahead to see what can be done while the glue is drying so you don't find yourself waiting for that to dry down the road before you can put it on the plane.

Thanks for the tips. I am going to continue to use wood glue because I want to learn how to work with it (as opposed to working against it). It actually works well for my schedule - I can glue a few pieces, clamp, and leave.

Having your pictures and notes is really helpful - it is like I had already built a couple of these.

I like the masking tape idea. I use the blue masking tape for a lot of things.

It is taking me longer because I am dry assembling and figuring out how I am going to clamp things before I use the glue. I have read through the assembly manual several times and will continue to do so until it make sense - after I have read it, looked at your pictures, and thought a bit more, then things go better.

I need to get some pins like yours, and those aluminum straight edges look very neat. I feel a trip to the hobby store and hardware store coming on! A man has to have tools!

One of the best tools I have is one I built - a sanding board that allows me to easily sand wood square. For example, I put the stabs and elevators on it and can easily sand the ends square. It is just a few pieces of board glued together - the design for it was in book that I read before I started scratch building. I expect you have something like this.

The forecast was totally wrong (typical); it has continued - I drove 30 minutes to the field and was the only fool there - I hung out for a couple of hours and did get a couple of flights in. It was actually fun because there was 10 mph cross wind which made the landings interesting

I've had those days, get everything packed up and set aside so I can go flying, head out and when I arrive it's absoloutely crap out, I remember that one time it was cloudy, but I started to setup and I just got the plane in the air and it started to rain, I just flew anyway, hunched over the TX so it wouldn't get soaked. I do use the edge of one 3/4" mdf board as a sanding edge, just line the part up on the edge and sand until the sanding bar hits the edge square. As far as glue, I tend to setup a "wet joint", liberally coated with glue and wipe away the excess and use a small paint brush to get the reminant, but I still leave a small fillet of glue. Just don't leave the fillet on the ribs where the sheer webs will sit, otherwise you'll be sanding a bevel in the webs to get them to fit tightly. I think the straight edges I bought at home cheapo, it's a adjustable T square that has a lockdown knob, I just unscrewed the knob and use them independantly, they're made of 1/4" aluminum and fairly heavy. As far as the pins, I stumbled apon those about 1 week ago in the hobby shop, I have no idea who the manufacture is, but in packs of 50 for for something like 3 bucks, and they are thin shaft pins too, I was sold. Bout 100 and it makes returning them to the container easy. I definatly want a power sanding unit, the kind with the vertical disc and belt and a adjustable table with fence to get correct angles and keep them square. Most of the 1/8 x 1/4 balsa was cut using just a single edge razor blade, just lined up the stick on top of the tail feathers, lined up the edge of the LE or TE and made a little push to get it started, then take it over to the cutting surface with the blade still stuck in it and continue to cut all the way through, looking at the side as you go to keep it going straight down. Sometimes I screw it up and have to knock it down with the sanding bar so it's square, not a biggie though.
Well, I got side-tracked and forgot to join those sheets and now I'm ready for the LE on the wing and the sheer webs too, so I'm going to get those done right now. I'm glad the pic's help.

"don't leave the fillet on the ribs where the sheer webs will sit" - thanks - I would have learned that one the hard way

I guess now would be the time to tell you to chuck away all the GP sheer webs, as I'm building it again, I start to remember all the little things, the ones that GP issues with the kit are short about 1/8" on all spaces, rip a new sheet to the correct width, if not a little wider and fit each on for a nice solid joint between the ribs. I'll post the pic's in a little bit, but now I gotta rip a sheet to about 3 & 1/8" wide to get them all done. I'm just going to use my balsa stripper and remove 7/8" from the edge of a 4" sheet to make it go easier.

Well, here's the leading edge glued in place and the sheer webs installed, and a pic of trimming them. As far as the leading edge goes, take a straight edge and make sure all ribs are flush with the straight edge, if not sand till they are, I had an issue with R-9, it was long, so I sanded it till it was flush with the rest, plus, this puts a angle bevel on the noses of each rib to make a better glue joint. I tacked the end ribs with a small dab of ca and used wood glue to do the others, went back and put wood glue on the outter ribs just for fun. The sheer webs are straight forward, just don't shove the sheet to the building table, the main spar isn't touching the building table, remember? So take a peek and look at the sides near the ribs, keep them about 1/16" shy from touching the edge of the ribs and make your line across the top spar, cut just on the line and you should have a nice 1/32" space away from top and bottom. Sand it to make a good tight fit on either side and lay it in the hole at an angle and apply wood glue to bottom and top. Flip it into position, press tightly and add a fillet along the ribs front and back. Done! Let it all dry and go watch tv, make diner or play with the kids or pet and come back to it in about 1 hour, I already did the sheet joining back when I set the ribs on the spar so IU can go ahead and get ready to put the top skin in place.

Trailing edge, about 35 pins holding it till its done.

That wing looks pretty. It is going to be fun to build a wing that is not constant chord.

I have the stab and elevator finished except for hinge and bevel - why do you not use CA hinges?

I have started on the fin. You said you are going to let your rudder go the absolute bottom of the fuse - that is about another 1/8" right?

How are you going to set up your tail wheel?

Here are a couple of pics

looking good Ray il be expecting a flight report in 2 weeks as ul have it built by middle of next week. iv run into a major dilema, my hardrive went down through a faulty power supply, took out all the comps componants and guess what, i lost the plans for the ultimate and everything i had on the builds, all the photos of the builds i mean the lot. so now i have to start and collect well and truely over a years amount of research on the mustang spitfire and so on, o could go on and on, but aint going to bore ya haha, i cant believe you still have some of that radioactive cyno left geeze every plane in ur hanger must have had that on it, good work anyway keep it up

Brent, you kill me,...radio active CYAI do have some of those plans you sent me a while ago, including the ultimate, do ya want them? But I thought you had disc's of all the plans?

I don't like CA hinges for no apparent reason, go figure, as long as you install them correctly by drilling a small hole down the center of the hinge slot they are fool proof and last,...well, forever. But I think that I find them a little stiff and not as smooth as a jointed hinge. Usually, when I build a plane, I go with scale hinging and use robart hinge points, but I really haven't decided on the final hinges I'm going to use. I did get the top skin on the wing and pinned it down last night, but as I went to take a picture, camera said "battery exhausted" and shut down. Apparently I left it on for about 2 hours when I had it hooked to the computer, so it never went into auto shutdown. I'll take pick tonight, and now I'm ready for the other panel. See I started the wing 1/2 yesterday and by the time I called it quits, I have to go back and build the other one and then join the two. Just keep plugging away at it and before you know, you'll be done, some guy's build till they get sick of it and it seem that there is no light at the end of the tunnel. But I find that when using slower setting glues, it breaks up the assembly into smaller sections that can be done in one sitting. For me at least, it's better that way, I have a jungmiester bipe that was repaired, recovered(4 times), painted twice and now it's on track, but I got burned out doing it, so I started something else, I'll get it done soon, but I just needed a break from working on a plane that needed so much work.

Take a picture of your biplane - I would like to see it. How come you had to recover it 4 times?

I am not going to go too fast on this build - the primary point of this kit was to give me something to do, and to help me improve my building skills. I already have two planes that I have hardly flown and one plane that I have not flown at all; so I certainly am in no need of a plane.

I am enjoying using wood glue. I just bought 4 new clamps and the aluminum dry wall square from Home Depot. Also thinking about a building board, but I am cramped for space. Wish we had a basement, but those pretty much don't exist out here.

Yup, in cali there are mo basements due to earthquakes, it will crack them, unless you pay a ton of cash for a heavily reinforced basement. My building board is pretty convient, when I'm done building and I have to use the bench, I pick it up and move it to the side. The bipe is under crash and rebuild, it's called pica jungmiester rebuild.

jg , is that the cap your building?

Great planes Extra .40 kit. along with me too.