Sling 4 Ninja

After long boring work prepping the metal, I finally started assembling everything yesterday! All went quite smoothly!

Test fitted some of the parts to be attached to the main spar: As it turns out however, the tube guides should not be assembled yet. You will find that the vesconite bushing mentioned in the plans is already mounted to the control tube, and therefore cannot be installed at this stage. I will instead mount the tube guides around the bushing on the control tube, and the whole thing will get attached to the main spar later ... this is how others did it as well it appears. Look for a future blog entry where i will likely show this later! I've also been prepping the numerous other parts for that section of the fuselage. I decided for the first time to remove a strip of protective film, instead of the hole thing all at once. You do this by using a soldering iron to melt a line in the film, allowing to cut it without damaging the underlying skin: Very easy to do and works nicely! Here is the gear mounting box with some connecting parts I am testing for fit and makin...

TAF supplies Gesipa multi-grip rivets. This means these rivets can be used on varying thicknesses of material, and therefore "grip" various total thicknesses, hence the name. The rivets have two lines where the material folds over, a lower and and a top one. When the thickness line sup with these lines, rivets look one way, whereas if the material thickness is somewhere in between, they look another. This image illustrates this well: Note how the right and left most rivets look, with the widest part of the bulge flush with the material, versus the two middle ones, where the bulge is a little removed from the material, looking more like a mushroom. I came across a situation where I had two rivets of the same diameter, but different lengths, and used what I later realized was probably not the length the factory had intended (the plans were silent on this). I ended up with rivets looking like this: Now  had never seen this before, because normally you use rivets...

The rear part of the center fuselage is now largely complete: Some holes are missing however, will have to drill those out: