I recommend using leadouts about 4" longer than usual, to allow easy attachment to the bellcrank.

It's such a gorgeous airplane that we added a runner up concourse award to Luca at the FCM!

How do those short little tabs add sufficient strength for the wing? I am bewildered. It seems the wing would fail, but apparantly it doesn't. I love the removable belcrank wires.
david

First, aluminum is stronger than wood.

Second, Mike is calling out 6061 or 7074, both of which are good strong aluminum alloys -- this is not soft sheet aluminum here.

Third, most of the stress at those points is either outward or inward, i.e. a nice straight pull on the aluminum.  The actual weight of the airplane is being supported on just 1/8" total worth of aluminum -- but it's well supported against bending by the wings and fuselage.  So it just needs to hold up in shear -- and clearly it's doing that.

If you were to space the wings 1/4" out from the fuselage, with tabs trying to hold against that, unsupported -- I wouldn't be at all surprised if they didn't fail in bending right where they left the fuselage or entered the wings.

If you tried to extend those itty-bitty tabs out as spars they'd fail, unless you were very careful with the shear webbing.  But that's not what Mike's doing here.

Hi Mike, so do the maple spars run the length of the wing? or how far do you run them? And the #4 screws don't sheer off. Model three on my future list I would love to make a take apart and I'd never imagined this method. Would you try this on a built up fuselage as well?

David

Nike perhaps a lighter idea and even more bullet proof would be a short quarter inch square piece of 6061 aluminium instead of the hard wood blocks. The threads in the aluminium would be a little more reliable to stripping.

David, answering in the same order:
1) leadouts are made from the Tom Morris cable, but can be any other suitable steel cable that can be tinned with regular solder. The main "hooks" are bent from 1/16" music wire, and the "locks" are pieces of  .030"-.040" music wire. All three elements (cable, hook, lock) get thoroughly cleaned by fine sandpaper to remove oxide, wiped down with acetone, and wrapped with thin copper wire ( same kind used to terminate lines) but with its insulation removed with 220-320 grit sandpaper; wrap tightly for the total length of about 1-1/4". Then everything gets smeared with flux and soldered with regular electronic grade solder. A poor man's flux for steel is a crushed aspirin tablet, but beware nasty fumes.
2) Our flaps are not removable from the wing; permanently installed using standard Dubro hinges. I've never used the removable hinge wire method; neither is it required for the wing to be removable. Instead, the flaps have received plywood pockets, as shown on one of the pictures above. Make sure there is no slop between the horn wire and the pocket. Not hard to do, as horn wire is 1/8" and so are most of the Dremel bits.
3) The only commercially available take apart hardware I'm aware of is sold by the Yatsenko brothers; it is CNC machined and of very high quality. I don't use it for a number of reasons: it's pricey (over $100 a set); it limits your fuselage width and wing thickness to whatever its dimensions are; such abundance of metal parts is only needed on combustion powered planes, where engine vibration leads to wear over time. My metal parts can be cut from a thin sheet the size of my hand with a hack saw and a drill press; weigh and cost close to nothing, and fit any design I choose.
Having said that, there are many other ways this task can be tackled, including telescoping carbon tubes. I have considered all of those options before settling on my approach as the simplest one and within my manufacturing capability.