Sopwith Dolphin - Some progress on wings

Wings in various stages of completion

At last, I've made some more progress on the wings. Since I'd already made one of them, the task I faced when I finally got down to work again was simply to repeat the procedure three times (see previous post). Easy! But for some reason I felt daunted enough to take a break for a couple of months before starting this stage of the project.

Anyway, I made a start by cutting out enough blanks from a length of preformed plastic card. But I was a bit careless about this at first, and they all came out different widths. Also tapered. (That's right, The Mascara Snake). And the camber didn't seem quite consistent either. As usual, the answer to this kind of incompetence is just to bin stuff and be a bit more careful next time, until you get it right. So, having finally got three usable preformed blanks, I could start work in earnest.

When making a lot of similar pieces I usually like to keep them in step, and do one phase of manufacture on each in turn; so I do the camber on all of them, then the wing tip shaping etc. This makes it easier to compare them with each other, and reduces the probability that I'll do each one in a subtly different way that will make them come out, well, subtly different. So the stages I'm following are:

1. Sand aerofoil shape
2. Cut wingtips to shape
3. Chamfer wingtips and cut wings to length.
4. Cut out ailerons
5. Add ribs
6. Drill locating holes for struts

As you can see from the picture, I've finished steps 1 and 2. So now I'm on Step 3: chamfering and cutting to length. With the chamfering, the effect I'm aiming at, of course, is the appearance of canvas stretched from the last rib to the wing tips, so there should be a nice clear demarcation along the line of the outermost rib. This effect will be heightened when I work out how to do the wing ribs themselves. As for cutting to length, I deliberately left that until after the wing tips, because it's easy to take off more than you expected when shaping the wing tip, and if the wing was already cut to length you could end up making it too short.

As you may be able to see, I've already done the one on the lower right (alongside the one I'd already made). Now to do the same for the upper two. Then I've got to work out how to cut out the ailerons without losing any material and thus creating a gap between control surface and wing. More on this soon.