The longerons have been laminated previously :
Krick 1/4 scale Grunau Baby IIb
Part 1 - Fuselage
The fuselage is built in the old-fashioned way, stingers over formers, and then the whole thing is planked with plywood and balsa.
For this, a simple jig has to be manufactured, it consists of pieces of square balsa stock, fixed perpendicular to the edge of the building board, spaced as per plan.
To these pices, the formers are fixed temporarily, and then the longerons are installed.
The longerons have been laminated previously :
Once the fuselage is out of the jig, the sheeting can be installed on the lower part. On the forward part of the fuse, the sheeting consists of a ply-balsa sandwich,
on the aft part it is balsa only. The instructions tell you to fabricate this sandwich first and the install it on the fuse. Here I deviated from the instructions, and glued
the plywood sheeting to the fuse, and later the balsa on top of it.
Next is
the installation of servo and receiver tray :
And the installation of the sheeting of the upper fuselage, at this point only one side is installed, the other one id installed once the blind nuts for the wing retaining screws are installed.
Due to the compound curvature of the sheeting in this are it is not easy to get it to form.I had to wet don the balsa quite thoroughly, to make it plyable.
Next was the planking on the nose, installation and shaping of the balsa nose block, and the canopy :
The solid balsa nose block, took a lot of time and sanding..
Here the finished fuselage : After a lot of thinking , head-scratching, and searching for pictures of full size Grunau Babies on the web, I decided to go with the color scheme ( or lack of it ), as it is pictured on the box. For this, after the final sanding, I treated the surface first with wood stain, after that came 2 coats of dope with wood stain mixed in, and finally I sealed the whole thing with polyurethane.
