this is a useful technique, esp. for wing wood. It still ain't optimum. I went through a pile of run of the mill 1/16 in wood the other day. Pieces weighed from 11 gr. to 33 gr., or from 6 lb. to 18 lb/cuft density. The sheets also varied from a few beautiful pieces of A and C grain. About 10% of the wood was really nice grained, 6 lb. sheet. You can just imagine what using 33 gr. sheets is going to do to the weight of your new stunter. Just one is all you need in the outboard wing to get an ounce of tipweight! The worst thing is that the basic airframe can go from say 28 oz for a big stunter to over 50 oz., just from wood selection alone, just from picking 10-12 lb. RC wood versus going through and selecting out the light, stiff, high quality wood. While a few ounces of excess weight aren't a big thing, I don't think anyone will argue that an extra 20 oz. on a proven design is a good thing.
Don't throw away the heavier wood though, as long as it has decent grain. Wood is just as strong as it is dense. So the trick is to redesign the structure and change things to remove the excess wood. One example, fuse sides. If they are heavy, make some judicious cutouts, especially behind the CG back to the tail. Strong, hard wood is never a real problem up around the engine, but it doesn't take much behind the CG to support the tail. Maybe even go so far as to strip the wood into strips and build up the rear end like a stick and tissue plane. A stick and tissue frame with a lot of diagonal cross bracing can be as stiff and strong as a sheet structure. It can look prett darn good too. You see a lot of this with the ARF planes. The laser cutter allows the designer to use cheap light ply instead of balsa and cut away the excess down to fractions of a millimeter.
Topic: Next best thing to light weight (Read 988 times)
