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Monday, April 16, 2012

Air-100h fuselage cut

I knew looking at the large sized blocks of EPP foam on this project I would be faced with a lot of shaving and sanding. I really enjoy sanding wood but not foam. It just doesn’t deliver a natural flow of progress and it doesn’t smell as good as hand worked wood. Kind of “lifeless”. So I spent some time making up a pair of templates to be able to hot-wire cut the shape.  You will notice by the glue lines I combined 1.3 and 1.9 weight EPP foam in order to attempt saving weight on the tail boom. The frontal area is heavier 2” thick 1.9 material laminated from the wing root forward. Gorilla glue was used to combine them. GOOP cement was used to attach the tail boom foam to the frontal foam pieces.

Attached the templates with 3” long drywall screws being careful not to over tighten and strip. A concern was what would happen when the wire reaches the GOOP glue line. I angled the wire slightly to attain a knifing action in this region but low and behold the wire sliced through the goop as if it wasn’t there. It has been over 20 years since I last cut foam so I was pleasantly happy with the results. Next task is to cut the side profile.



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