Red 6 Gives You Wiiiiiiiiings!
(Bad pun from an old Red Bull TV commercial)
I’ve been test-fitting wings this weekend and you can see how happy that has made Jek! I keep telling him to settle down – it’s just a glider at this point, dude! Obligatory can of soda placed in shot for scale reference…
Here are the wings laid up earlier in the weekend to glue the brass bar spars to the plywood cores. I use magnets on a steel sheet to secure everything while the glue sets.
I’ve been using Gorilla Glue for the wood-brass bar joint and it seems to work well enough. Gorilla Glue seems to essentially be expanding foam mixed with an epoxy cement, and areas where the glue has seeped out of the joint as it expands can be easily scraped away with a razor.
Here is the overall structural arrangement of the wings: plywood core with brass bar spars fore and aft. Styrene strips frame the wing circumference and then I will sheet the wings with 0.04” styrene sheet top and bottom. That will give me a good working surface to add detail and then paint, etc.
In the first picture you can see that I’m still working on putting the styrene skins on the wings, but I wanted to do a quick fit-check to see how things were looking. I clipped some brass rods onto the wing tips as representative cannons; I kept bumping them around as I took photos so they’re not likely straight in any of the photos, but they do give some perspective regarding the overall look of the beast once it’s complete. That engine is just sitting on top of the wing in roughly the right position; again for some perspective of the overall final product as it is envisioned.
As I checked alignment with the wings installed I became a bit worried that the angle of the deployed S-foils might be off: is the “X” too large, in other words? I measured from my drawings 17 degrees from the horizontal for each of the upper and lower wings (a total of 34 degrees separating top and bottom). Here you can see a front-view photo compared to my drawing and to a screen grab from ANH. I guess it’s not too far off…
Another comparison from the side…
Overall it seems to be coming together okay. Does saying that “jinx” it now?