Your balsa wood planer is awesome. I have one myself and its the best.

Evan

holy **** you did an awesome job

Yeah, I forgot to mention that. I have a "hobby plane" like that, and it is one of the most useful tools I have.

Thanks once again for all the replies guy's!

Well after an evening of feeling really bogged down with this cold/flu thing it finally seems to be letting up a little so I had most of the day in the workshop yesterday to get the wings finished off. I had a couple of hours out here and there doing family stuff, oh and a trip to our LHS to source some gold covering , the results can be seen for yourselves, again, I really enjoyed this little task, after a short layoff it was good to get the grey cells churning again

So, first up was to final fill and sand the repairs. I then mixed up some surface primer (I actually used aliphatic as my pva had gone off [sm=red_smile.gif], well I did say it had been a while, LOL) with a little water to a just thicker than milk consistancy. Then I took a piece of the foam I mentioned previously (always use a new piece, the dust gets picked up during use and eventually clogs up the foam, this can get left on the surface if your not careful!) and applied it to the wing surface following the grain of the wood, start at one end and smear it on in one stroke, repeat over the surface until covered. When it's covered use your heat gun to air dry the surface, keep the tip of the gun around 24" away from the wing surface to prevent blistering. Once it's air dried your ready to cover!

some pics of the sealing of the surface:

Next up was to fill out a hole in the aieleron. This area has a red graphic stuck on top of the white base covering so I decided to remove the red graphic and fill out the surface below then add a new graphic when completed. Now, this sounds easy but if you've ever tried to get a sticky back piece of "solartrim" off a surface you'll be familiar with the problems that brings, namely the clear parting company with the base colour and also tearing at the edges making removing all the little pieces a real b*tch of a job to get off [:@] well not anymore. Take your covering iron set to a med/low heat and rub it over the area you want to remove, then gently peel up an edge with a scalpal blade, just enough to grab a hold of it and then re-apply the iron behind where your pulling and gently move the iron back as you pull the trim off, it comes off like a wet water slide! Heres some pics on the process:

So, now we have the damged area ready to repair, cosmetic for this one as the damage was just a little hole. I took some masking tape and masked around the hole, then I filled the hole with some micro balloons and finally dripped some foamsafe CA in to the balloons. Give this a light misting of kicker and then sand it back. This is just to harden up the area ready for some fine surface filler. I then filled this out and sanded back then topped it off with a little P38 just to get a really hard but polished surface for the decal trim to stick to.

more:

With this done I then made a couple of stensils for the gold and red patterns for the top of the wing surface. I used some trace that I had laying around from when I used to do some own design at home, you could always use some wax paper (cooking sheets) for small stencils though.

I then took to getting the covering applied, I didn't shoot too many pics of this process as it's pretty straight forward and I'm sure we all know how it's done [8D]

Heres a few pics anyway:

and finally a few pics of the finished project. Once again thanks for all the kind words and interest here and I'm glad it has helped some of you guy's for the future, happy flying!

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