Nick Rees

I’ve not been able to do much on my Scooter build in the last week because I’ve been waiting for my order from Balsa Cabin with the 4” x ¼” sheet. Even today the order has yet to materialise and in the end Friday I drove the 40 minutes to Western Valley Models and bought a sheet of ¼”. That cost me more than just the sheet balsa as I walked out with a PA Addiction 3D plane! With the weather being so good the last few days I’ve been banging the packs thru my existing 3D plane, an E-flight Extra 330SC BP, and also maidening my Pilatus B4 that I recently finished. So workshop time has been limited. However tonight I managed to get on with the build and make some progress. I’ve made up the front bottom, cutting oversize as Phil suggested in his build and pretty much following the suggested method of build. Hopefully I can get back on track and get some serious hours in the workshop this coming week. Maybe my balsa order will show up as well!

Shame thou, bit to far to go to collect.

Not much done last night as I don’t have the ¼” balsa for the front fuselage. Rather than do nothing I worked out if there were any bits I could prep ready for later along the build. So I cut out the ½” soft balsa for the nose. I cut out a pair using my usual S&M scalpel but they were a bit rough so I though why not use my Proxxon jigsaw. Proper job! I also cut out the intake parts and formers ready. I spent the rest of the time tiding up my workshop, it’s amazing how tools seem to spread themselves out everywhere.

I have to confess although I'm an IT consultant I did mechanical & electrical engineering thru college before focusing on electronics during Uni. So I guess some of it stuck with me over the years. I also have a fetish for tools especially buying them and with Axminsters Tools 15 minutes down the road my wallet has taken a hammering lately! I guess the best place to buy the cellophane cheap would be a floral warehouse. I found some 100m x 80cm online for £7.79 which is much better value. But I did find that because my board and worktop are 60cm deep the roll I bought was perfect only needing cutting along one edge. I used Stix 2 Anything Very Small Craft Dots again from Hobbycraft (again their 15 minutes away) to hold it down over the plan. Oh and your right Peter I do have one of those Slec jigs. Although mine has inset screws and hex bolts rather than the ones offered by Slec. I just bought the grid and brackets sourcing the other stuff on eBay. I have to say the brackets are not super great and I’m already thinking of making a modified version on my 3D printer, when I get round to buying the printer. :-D

I've split this post out from my usual ramblings as it's worth highlighting. Phil emailed me earlier today pointing out that I hadn’t inserted the captive nut into F6. Now I was aware that it needed doing but reckoned on it being done later down the line. I am so glad Phil emailed and said to do it now before I went any further. It wasn’t the easiest job to sort out as the hole is 6.8mm and my captive nut was 7.5mm. Ordinarily with a block of softwood I might pull the captive nut into the wood but I thought that was likely to cause damage to F6 with the hole about 1mm too small. So carefully I opened up the hole with a 7.7mm bit and also made four small 3mm holes to ‘pilot’ the prongs from the nut. The later might be over-kill but I wasn’t convinced that the prongs might not damage F6 when it was pulled home. I also added a dollop of super glue to the nut when I was happy to make sure it wouldn’t go AWOL on me. My advice, get the captive nut sat in F6 before you add it to the first fuselage side. It’s gotta be much easier than what I did.

Another evening in the workshop working on the Scooter. I did get rolling eyes of my misses before I left but she knows what I’m like. Once I get going on a new project she won’t see much of me in the evenings. Having left the battery box half done I started by setting the other half so that it would be workable a bit later and complete the whole box. The theory of doing two halves was that if they were both square then the whole assembly would be square. Like Hannibal from the ‘A-Team’ says “I love it when a plan comes together” In between the battery box part drying I proceeded to put the two fuselage sides together. Now for some reason F6 and F7 didn’t want to sit right, being 1mm higher. This would mean that the whole thing would be out of shape if I left it like that. Now I measured every thing from the distance from the datum to the wing seat doubler where F6 sits to even putting the fuselages sides back to back and it was all the same. There was nothing wrong with any of the formers and it should have all gone together nicely, but it was having none of it. In the end I made an executive decision to remove 1mm of the wing doubler where F6 sits. Once that was done it all lined up bang on. With the fuselage setting against as many engineers squares I have (maybe I might get a few more :D) I moved back to the battery box and following the magazine I dry fitted F2 & F3. I dug out my ¼” to do the bottom for these to sit on and disaster! I’ve only gone and bought 3” sheet instead of 4” I pondered my options; did I have anything in my stock pile, No; could I get away with 3”, maybe but I’ll get stuck further down the fuselage; what about biscuiting two 3” to make six and then cutting down to size, but that’s just desperation; In the end the final and winning option was to call it a day and go home for some chilled beer out of the fridge. I’ll order replacements Monday but maybe to make the postage worthwhile I’ll get the material for my next project, Andy Conway’s L39 Albatross.

Last nights session although productive was a bit of a rocky road. I made a few errors that needed to be resolved but shouldn’t make a difference in the long run. I’m concluding that this is all down to my inexperience at scratch building and having more of a follow instructions step by step mentality. The good thing, it’s all knowledge to dump in the memory bank. Having cut out all the triangular section I glued these down. As it turns out I misinterpreted the plan and cut the section over the wing too short and not following thru to the front of F4. Also despite pictures in the magazine I also cut short the section that intersects with F3. It’s not the end of the world and some fillets will fill those gaps. Now I didn’t notice the F4 issue until I got to the gluing it in F4 and so a little MacGyver was required. It was also at this point I discovered that my ½” triangular section is 9/16th on one side so I’m going to have to watch my joints and any affect it has on the interface of with fuselage formers. With formers F4 thru F7 glued I moved onto the mini puzzle that is the battery box. It seems Traplet made the centre tab ‘off-centre’ so you’ll have to shuffle things until it all lines up. With time getting late and a beer in the fridge waiting for me I set one half of the battery box and called it a day.