Curved Wings

It Happened Today*

Unfortunately, this isn't news of a collaboration between Paul McCartney and Sonja Kristina (with involvement by Francis Monkman now looking rather doubtful). No, just another tedious setback in my ongoing project to make a small thing that calls to mind a rather larger thing from some time ago.

There's a bit of a snag with my new wings. That's what this post is really about. They're all slightly curved from one end to the other. So before I can make any more progress I've got to work out some way of straightening them. Here you can see the latest idea: clamping them straight. I could try putting them in some steam from a kettle, but when I tried it with a piece of scrap it made the curve worse, and it seemed rather a dubious proposition* in the first place. So I'm just going to leave them for a few days.

Once I've got them straight, I'm going to do the rib tape effect. For this, I've decided that the masking and painting method is the way to go. I've already experimented a bit. The effect needs to be quite subtle, and so two thinnish coats is enough. I will inevitably get ridges because of the masking tape, so the trick then is to sand it all down with 1200 wet and dry. The other difficulty is getting the ribs a constant width. So I'm planning to stretch 0.75mm plastic strip across the wings as a guide for the masking tape. Alternatively, I could cut 0.75mm strips of masking tape and brush masking fluid between them.

I just need to get the wings straight first... But, like heaven, that never seemed so far away*. However, hmm, (consults Wikipedia), I'm not going to get hot and bothered*.

* Songs by Curved Air handily marked

** Can't be bothered to think of any songs by Wings.