Is that the same Twister airfoil? If you're going to scratch build it, I wounder if it would be better to leave off the mini ribs and just sheet the leading edge. It would be 1/8" thicker.
AFAIK it is. I used the Twister ribs from a kit.
OK. Twister vs. sheeted wings:
- A sheeted wing has better torsional stability, particularly if you put in sheer webs to make a D-tube. It's also more rigid to fore-and-aft motion.
- A Twister-style wing, before you cover it, is very floppy in torsion, and somewhat floppy in fore-and-aft shear -- you can move the wingtip forward and backward an inch or so without hearing wood starting to crack, and more than that without major damage
Those two factors pretty much define the pros and cons of the two wing construction techniques.
The Twister wing is floppy until you cover it, and once you do it depends on the covering for its dimensional stability. Leave a Twister out in the sun and it'll warp up, or if it's a 'coat wing the covering will go slack and it'll be floppy. A wing with a D-tube won't do that. Except when you need to take out a warp, the D-tube wing wins hands down.
Now let's crash the D-tube plane. When the wing hits the ground it's rigid. The fuselage decelerates
fast, and the entire wing needs to decelerate right along with it. There's no way that the wing can give gracefully. The result (and I've fixed my share of such damage) is that you get some combination of the wing breaking at the root, the wing leading edge getting crushed where it passes through the fuselage, and the fuselage getting crushed around the wing saddle. This is Bad News.
OK, now let's crash the Twister. The wing is fairly rigid, but only because of the covering. When the wing hits the ground, the covering bursts, and the wingtips are free to continue going forward. At best all the glue joints are fine and you just need to recover the wings (with 'coat, because why else use this wing construction?). At worst you break a few ribs and/or spars, or one wing panel comes off just outside of the center sheeting. Repairs take significantly less time than that D-tube plane would, and are simplified because there's no crushed wood.
My bottom line is that if you're past the stage where you're crashing all the time you should build something with a D-tube wing. If not, build a Twister-style wing. Ironically, I was thinking just this when I built my Twister in 2012, and as I was building it I pretty much stopped crashing. So I have this dimensionally unstable wing that I'm always taking the warps out of, yet the worst damage that's happened to it was from an electric motor that came loose from someone else's plane and crashed into my wing.