Attended the Triple Tree Aerotow yesterday near Woodruff, SC. Great experience for this newcomer! Beautiful, graceful scale sailplanes and the event hosted by the always-hospitable Confederate Air Farce. I learned a lot.

To better fit intended blog structure, follow-on comment regarding the Electra Wing build has been moved to the Electra Wing thread below, rather than posting each successive entry as a new blog item.

With this posting, I’m about caught up to present build status. There is something about watching a wing take shape that gives a real feeling of accomplishment. Sheer size and structural beauty I guess. The wing went together well, but I was disappointed that many of the rib slots for the main spar were cut too tall. I put a drop of epoxy in the gap for the worst ones and let Titebond fill in where it could on the others.

The fuselage has been finished to this point for sometime. Reading Electra postings here, it is clear that climb out will be much more impressive if either a 3:1 gearbox and a larger prop, or a brushless motor is used instead of the furnished direct-drive T-600 motor and 8-inch prop. For awhile I toyed with going to one of those configurations immediately, but then decided to first use the basic direct drive installation and components as furnished, and then once that baseline is established, make enhancements from there. Going slow… I am new to a lot of this…..

I did distrust the battery compartment latch design as being somewhat flimsy, and instead used a small piece of lite-ply backup and a blind nut to anchor the swivel to the fuselage. I also used a 2-56 nut epoxied in place on the inside of the hatch to anchor the mating swivel post. I’m hoping to avoid the experience described by monty_11!

The next step with the fuselage was to temporarily installed the wing and the stabilizer and make any adjustments necessary so that they are perfectly parallel. So … had to set it aside until I could first complete the wing - which at that point had not yet been started.

Started the Electra in April 2006.