Hello I have been looking for a Shoestring kit for a while, with no success. I have found some plans online, and one I had printed locally but the actual size of the plan is different than the size the Airplane is suppossed to be. I have never scratch built a plane, I have built several kits but was hoping to find something to read or get some input on some techniques to use if I am going to attempt this build. Any information is welcome, thank you.

A place to start would be; which set of plans are you working from? When printing plans, especially PDFs they can usually be scaled to whatever size you want. I have found that the people who work at KinFedOffPro or what ever your local chain shipping and office supply don't know much about printing once you get past loading paper into the machine. I have a local blueprint shop that I use. They know what they are doing and they are cheaper to boot. Step one would be to make sure that your plans are actually getting printed at 100% size. You can also print PDFs on your home computer at 100% sized using tile print. It is a bit of a hassle taping all the pages together but it is an easy way to figure out what scale you want to print the plans at. Tile print will also have alignment marks so you can even just put together a useable set of plans that way. Building from Kit plans can be problematic as they often don't have all of the ribs and may not show all of the formers in the needed detail. They just exist to show where to put the parts. You are lucky with regard to the Shoestring as there are several sets of complete plans out there.

Yes I have found a couple sets online and had the one set printed, that is not the right size, and it was about 60 dollars to print. I just need to figure out once I get a set of plans where to start and using what methods. I know the guy that taught me how to fly had a system of how he built planes from scratch. He would stack all of the sheets of balso together on a couple rods and make the wing spars together so the ones that were thesame size were all identical. But are there tracing methods that work well, or methods of getting fuselage sides and bottom cut out acurately? I just want to try to get a few methods in mind before I actually start building.

Tile printing takes an hour or so for trimming and taping but it is a lot cheaper than 60 bucks, even with the cost of printer ink. There are a couple of ways to get wing ribs. If the plans show individual ribs you can copy the rib drawing and past it onto the wing rib with Uhu glue stick or a dab of rubber cement. and then peel off the paper once the rib is done. Stack sawing/sanding ribs as your mentor did is an old school way of making ribs. You will need to cut a thin plywood rib to the tip and the root ribs with holes to bolt them together. You stack the required number of ribs for a wing section between them and then carve and sand the to profile between the plywood ribs. Just a note, they may not line up with the rib spacing on the plan. You have to place them where they fit between the leading and trailing edges. It will be close but not exact. Then, you mark the locations of the spars and cut out the spar notches. It's tedious but it will get you there. Fuselage sides can be built on top of one another. I save the backing off of iron on covering as something to go between the sides since CA wont stick to it. Use your ruler. Measure early, measure often. I have found formers that don't always match the width of the fuselage. It is less frustrating to trim a piece than to cut a new one. To that end I also draw all over my parts. Notes as to where they go, how they fit and all the fuselage parts get a centerline. It is imp[ortant to know there is a learning curve. You will probably mess up some parts. Make prototype parts on scrap wood and allow for the fact that you may have to make some parts more than once. The reward is it will be the airplane you want and you wont see another at the field.

I would also recommend that you go to rclibrary.co.uk as they have free down loads of books on scratchbuilding. Lots of books.

Thanks so much, this is exactly what I was looking for, I will definitely check out that website. I want to build a plane called Shoestring and there aren't kits made of it anymore, so I am going to try to build it. How do I do the tile printing if I want to try to do that at home? I have the files of the p,ans bt am not sure how to tile print them, and also how to get them the correct size when tile printing. Thanks again for the info so far.

If you are working from a PDF from Outerzone then if the plan is printed using the "full size" option when using Adobe Acrobat Reader then it will print very close to the proper size. For the prints I've done any errors were either minor or were some distortion in only one axis due to the printer not pulling the paper through the rollers at the proper speed or something like that.

If you want to resize a design then again using Adobe Acrobat Reader there is an option to print to some percentage of the original size. You can go from a small 10% size up to over 200%. It probably permits bigger but I've never tried it. Fair warning though.... If you try to scale a design by more than about 20% smaller or bigger you start to run into the possibility that you should alter the structure. Things like adjusting the number of wing ribs so the covering is suitably supported if making the model bigger is one of those. And if you shift by more than 20% either way then wood sizes start to require changing to the next thickness up or down. So try to pick a design that starts out close to what you want for size.

Open your PDF in Adobe Reader. It should be the default application for opening PDFs on our computer Unless you are running Linux or have changed settings. Go to the print menu. Under page sizing and handling, choose "poster". Set the Tile Scale for 100%. This will tell the computer to print the plans at full size. You can also set for things like cut marks and overlap that help you to assemble the image from all the separate pages. The preview will show an image of the plans with dotted lines that how the individual pages line up. Be sure to set the printer preferences for black ink only so you don't blow through all of your color ink. If you don't the printer will try to recreate the actual color of the paper from the original scan. You will go through 25 pages or more of printer paper for each sheet but it is still cheaper than the office supply place. Be sure to double check the printed dimensions against the described dimensions of the model. Errors show up even in commercially produced kits.