I need to thank Curt Nixon and Frank Carlisle for getting me to try building on a glass building board. It has proved to be a real epiphany and in suprising ways. I had ordered it from Curt earlier in the year, but living on an Island, I just had trouble getting to it. I had really decided I'd just set it in a corner for trimming balsa strips and monocoat for my RC planes. I already had 2 extremely flat building boards, one with a balsa wood surface and one in hard wood. I really could not figure out what good a board was that you couldn't put a pin into. My wing jig just didn't need any particular type of surface but I considered it might be useful with my alignment jig.
Tonight I began building on it for the first time. Frank explained you CA glue blocks on the glass for pinning to. Ok, now it was starting to make sense. The building plans can be be under the glass and not get killed. I cut a bunch of small blocks ahead of time and stable constuction was a snap. Ok, I could live with this. But then I began one of my most dreaded building steps... the cap strips. I know, whats tough about cap strips. Getting them perfectly flush to the surface at each end, that's what. I have struggled with sanding those damn things flush for over 40 years. Its always been a difficult place to finish for me. But I found a way to get them perfect with the glass board every time!
Cut the cap strip to length and angle. Put the cap strip on the glass and set the wing over it. Center the strip on the rib and use a drop of thin CA at one end of the rib while holding the wing down onto the trailing edge. Voila, its a dead perfect flush fit! Roll the wing so the front end of the cap strip is against the rib and the leading edge sheeting and add a drop of ca. Bang, a dead perfect flush fit! Then thin CA the rest of the cap strip to the rib and you are done. And the clean up of the board is just a wipe of a straight edge razor. At last a use for used up ones!
I'm feelin for ya Frank as you sand yourself to death on the twin, but I'm gonna be doing alot less sanding on those cap strips now. Thanks a bunch guys.
bob branch
Harsens Island, MI