RE: Newbie questions. After you finish laughing, please help!

From: <joshuawfinn_at_gmail.com>
Date: 10 Mar 2014 12:25:09 -0700

Don,
 Hopefully someone will pop up with the link for how to obtain a copy of Ron Williams "Building and Flying Indoor Model Airplanes" which is very comprehensive. Additionally I would suggest visiting indoornewsandviews.com, which is the premier source for indoor technology and techniques including full (free!) access to roughly 50 years of articles and data. Your first stop should be the Hobby Shopper EZB article which can be found in "The Best of INAV" in the downloads section along with several other absolute gems of indoor instruction.

Now on to some suggestions...there is only one way I've found to handle indoor parts, and that is to work your way down starting with a Limited Pennyplane (very easy compared to the parlor mites, which are intended to be fairly high performance models) and moving on to A-6, F1L, ministick, and so on in roughly that order. By the time you've made it to ministick, you'll know how to make your own decisions on what to build next.

Condenser paper is not easy to use in my opinion (some find it easy...everyone is different). There are several ways to attach it. Gluestick can be thinned using water. Rubber cement can be thinned with Bestine thinner and while the film can be peeled loose of it, the cement remains sticky. For plastic films, I haven't found anything that outperforms 3M Super 77, although some fliers prefer other products for a wide variety of reasons.

I use white glue for the flying surfaces and find that it is very light. You do have to use a razor blade to pop the surfaces loose after assembly. I'm not patient, so I set dihedral breaks with cyano, and the same goes for installing prop bearings, rear hooks, and attaching tissue tubes to the flying surfaces (a way to get a quick fasten since the motorstick is often the primary warp control for the wing). If you assemble the flying surfaces by using coins to hold them in place, you can usually avoid any residual stresses. For your completed surfaces, I would suggest weighing them down with coins and spraying with water. If your building board is heat resistant, you can then insert the whole thing into your oven for 20 minutes at 180-200, and when your remove everything, the warps should be long gone.

And now I'll back off and let you digest the thousands of pages of articles you now have access to...

Good flying,
Joshua Finn
Received on Mon Mar 10 2014 - 12:25:09 CET