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PaintChip's Blog

Frames and skinning begins...

Since the mock-up went extremely well I decided today to cut the frames out of 1/8" balsa sheets. I was going to use the cardboard mock-ups as the cutting templates but I decided to print off another set of frames and use the spray adhesive to fix the sheets to the balsa directly and cut the frames from there.

Cutting went well and after 30 minutes and a few sore fingers there were frames laying ready to put on the keel. I've had pretty good luck on the Dumas hull using hot glue to do my basic tacking so I decided that hot glue would be my choice again to attach the balsa frames to the keel. Working slowly and making sure that the frames were true to the keel I managed to get them all in place smile.gif

I had debated in my mind how to skin the beast once she was a basic skeleton. The Dumas kit used long strips of balsa that were about 1/2" wide by 1/8" thick to skin the hull. This was fairly tedious and while it worked it was the cause of my ultimate warping. I decided on the Mark II model to use large 1/32" thick sheets of balsa...normally used on aircraft wings. Instead of trying to skin the entire thing at once I worked on getting 3 or 4 frames tied together with cut pieces of the sheets leaving a frame or two between sections. Lots of pins to hold the sheets to the frames and patience and I ended up with the stern skinned, the midship skinned, and knuckle area from the midship point to about the #12 frame skinned. I discovered that a small spray bottle filled with plain water helped immensely as I could spray the sheets as I was pinning them to the frames and that gave even more flexibility to the balsa and helped prevent splitting on the rounded edges. While the large sheets were not as easy to work with as the smaller strips they seem to give smoother curves and make the overall look better at least at this point.

I'll let the whole thing dry overnight and see how it holds before I tack the sheets in place with glue. I figure that once I have the sections stable I can check for any signs of warping and use the unskinned sections to bring the skinned sections back into line. Once the hull is warp-free (or as close as I can get it) I'll skin over the remaining areas and join the sections together with strips on the inside of the hull.


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