GANGCUTTINGRIBSFROMTEMPLATE.docVIP

GANG CUTTING RIBS FROM TEMPLATE JIM TAYLOR Photo’s by Doc Ferguson In preparing the balsa it is important that the length and width are close as possible while leaving a little space around the edges for final trimming. Use a sturdy straight pin to insert into our ten pieces of balsa in order to keep them together during cutting. The pin is driven through all ten pieces of balsa flush with the surface of the top sheet. A side cutter makes short work of trimming the pins as close as possible to the wood. Any excess causes difficulty when swing the stack. Be sure not to place pins where the saw blade must make a cut. 3M has a wonderful product Super 77. Almost any mounting adhesive will work. I like the Super 77 as it dries quickly and tacks well to the paper template that we will affix to our balsa. The back of the template, a photo copy of the wing section, has been sprayed and now it needs to be aligned to our balsa. The base of the balsa has been sanded even. We position the template to the base of our balsa and begin smoothing down. I use a square with my band saw to cut the front of the rib to 90 degrees or what ever is required. The band saw cut straight unlike a scroll saw. Use a metal cutting blade, or a fine tooth blade, as it has more teeth and a smother cut is made in the soft balsa. This is where you want to take your time. A steady hand and feed the work slowly cutting as close to the black line as possible. You can see, I think, that this method works only for wings that are constant chord. Otherwise, each rib must be cut separately since each successive rib may be smaller than the previous one. Again I cannot emphasis to really take your time. No sense in ruining ten pieces of balsa and have to start over. We are trying to save time. So take time. Cut the outline just a little bigger than the template and finish to final size with a sandpaper block. For our spars I make careful multiple cuts to make a clean channel for our spars Cut the