Sig Cub 1/5 Scale Build

[Tony]

Fuselage stringers completed. Final sanding and hinging the side door and window comes next. Then covering - my favourite part.

[Tony]

Main components given final sanding and trial fitted for the first time. The wings are just push fitted and not bolted on - hence the slight droop of the wings.







Now on to soldering the U/C and the wing and jury struts etc.

[Tony]

Mounting the hinges for the ailerons was a royal pain. They are top hinged and the 8 hinge slots had to be cut precisely into 3/32 thick balsa. Not much margin for error. Get the angle wrong and the cutting blade will exit the 3/32 balsa before the full depth of the hinge slot can be cut.

[Tony]

This week has been a slow week. Have been away so only made up the parts for the struts and mounted them.

[NUDGE]

Looking Nice

Looking nice tony... See you this week at the meetup..

[Tony]

Looking nice tony... See you this week at the meetup..

Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend the meeting because I will be away - drats!

[NUDGE]

me too

haha the irony...
i had to do a last minute conference...so imissed it too

[buckman]

Tony, I must say your photography skills are a hard battle with your building skills! Every shot you have there is so well lit, and very well composed. The pictures illustrate more than words can say. I especially like the last one with the metal struts sitting on the plan with your drill on the side!

Nice build, will be looking forward to the covering!

[Tony]

Gee thanks for the compliments. Besides aeromodelling, my other obsession is photography. Nowadays, a good camera and intelligent flash system does most of the work. The photographer just has to squeeze the trigger. Hmmmmm......maybe I should make a career change and switch to product photography ha ha. Sure beats being a cook.

[Sunstorm]

You can think about producing manuals for RC aircraft or going into publishing
Nice cub, nearly wanted to order one from SG Hobby supplies.

[Tony]

Sunstorm, I would highly recommend this kit for a relaxing build. So far, parts fit has been exemplary. I like SIG kits.......except for the some of their earlier models which I built many years back and I hope they have updated by now. The 1/4 scale Cub was very much an old school kit. It had many parts which you had to cut out of balsa ie no die cutting - they just printed the part on the balsa, you cut them out yourself. And there were lots of it. Some parts were really really thick too. The Smith Miniplane was a challenging build too. But a couple of years back I built a 4 Star 120 and it was a joy to build. Good wood selection, parts fit, and boy did it fly well. I have their 1/4 scale Spacewalker kit and I couldn't help taking a peek inside the box and it looks to be just like the 4 Star 120 - almost. Looking forward to sinking my teeth into that kit. It'll probably be the next one after I finish this kit.

So go ahead, get the kit and build it. You won't regret it. Cheers.

[Tony]

Making the tubing for the jury strut is a bit fiddly but manageable. The bolt provided for mounting to the jury strut (2-56 x 3/8) to the main strut is way too short. I swopped it for a slightly thicker bolt.



About 20 mins of bending, drilling, adjustments and more adjustments and some swearing saw the jury strut eventually fixed up. I'm going to solder the parts together although the instructions says to epoxy because I don't think epoxy is going to hold up well over the long run. I would hate to drop a piece into the grass at my flying field while fixing up the plane and not being able to find it.

I am running way behind time on this build because I've been away a lot lately so have very little time for building.

[tboltsg]

Hi T,

Great build report. Enjoy reading this thread, the plane is coming togther very nicely. Also very enjoyable is to see so many building tools, mini vises, clamps etc etc, some of which i m still trying to figure out how it works, you have the coolest collection of clamps, i have seen.

Have fun building.

TB

[Tony]

Cheers Tboltsg. My wife never lets me inside a hardware shop if she can help it because she know that I am a gadget freak. I like to buy little bits and bobs. Over the years, I've collected a bunch of small tools which have proven most useful for building model planes. That means that I've dumped a whole lot more of stuff that were useless. One of my most useful tool is also one of the smallest and cheapest. Its a small plastic round disk with a hole in the middle to allow a T-pin to be pushed through. Made by a company called Rocket City, I bought a couple of packets of the stuff from Sheldon's Hobbies when I was in the States and they have been put to use in every model I have built since. What it does is to provide more traction for the T-pin so it holds down the balsawood better. Simple but very effective. Am kicking myself for not buying more because I understand that Rocket City is no more. If you look back at most of my builds, you'll see at some stage a whole bunch of T-pins used to hold down balsawood with little black disks on them while waiting for the aliphatic glue to dry overnight. I suppose one could make the disks out of bits of plastic but these ones never seem to lose their grip on the T-pin even after more than 10 years of use.

If any of you see these being sold at a hobby/hardware shop in your travels, please buy a dozen packets for me. I was told that Rocket City is now sold under another brand name but don't know what it is.

[Tony]

Access to the rc gear and tank is via a scale hatch. Drats! more cutting of slots into 3/16 balsa again. End result is worth it though. But I think that the door latch is not to0 secure. I will have to think of way to make sure that I have a more secure latch.