Today I finished some important parts of the project. The motor is screwed to a couple of pieces of high density boards which sandwiches a PVC strip(from an electrical conduit). This is installed(ie glued), at an angle, to the base of the plane like so:

The angle (the motor slightly pointing down about 5°) is done to offset the forward and down effect of a higher mounted motor. Doing this angle offset will cause the back of the main wing to have a slight down push forcing the leading edge of the wing to pitch up.

Once the motor mounting is done.. the section where the main wing is attached to the fuselage needs to be made.

The image above is upside down and shows the CF rods that’s used as the scaffolding for the wing base as well as the CF rods where the rubber-bands will be attached. I sure hope its sturdy enough!

Finally, I began making the rest of the fuselage. The space inside is big!

A deeper look at the cave..

Its beginning to look like a real Skywalker:

So far i’ve added about 50g at this point.

Finally finished wrapping the thin foam on the wings.. with all those glue I have to say they’re on the heavy side with each wing weighing approx 288g (including spars).. or a total of 576g.

This means I just exceeded my target weight for this par by at least 200g!  Anyway theres nothing much we can do anymore.. just have to continue trudging on until completion.

The main wing is getting there but.. as expected things are getting a bit dicey on the weight department. The total wing weight (without the final “skin”) so far is a hefty 461g!

Here’s the work so far:

The dihedral on the wingtips requires some care to secure:

But it seems to be sturdy enough.. I know all those glue will return to haunt me in grams =(

I began working on the main wing again today and decided to cut the two  1m CF tube spars in two and just stick a bamboo barbeque stick in  between, like so:

Bad idea.. this means that the load and wing twisting stress will be focused on the contact points of the bamboo spar and the CF tube which can mean disaster.

At this point i couldnt really revert to using the whole CF spar as the halves are already well glued to the wing. The only option therefore is to just join the wings together permanently and charge this to experience.. $%@$!.

Still about 75% complete.. the main wings now weigh about 320g.. it will most probably weigh about 450g eventually which means I have less than 100g to complete the fuselage.  Doesnt look too good, at this rate the plane will probably weigh 1kg empty =S