1. Gliders - The wing elevators have now been attached to give the gliders a little negative incidence. As soon as the joints are cleaned up and smoothed out, the wings will get a final overall finish sanding.
3. A balsa block is cut to rough size and mounted on the wood lathe's faceplate in preparation for turning out the glider nose cones. Even though the stock is trickier to mount, I prefer face turning over spindle turning on nose cones because they can be finished right to the tips.
Here, a piece of scrap 1x4 pine is centered and screwed to the faceplate, and the balsa stock is center glued to this piece. The plan is to turn each nose cone one at a time out of the same piece of stock.
The stock is now mounted on the lathe, ready to go. There's an old woodturner's / woodcarver's adage that applies here:
"Turning / carving a [nose cone] is quite simple. You just grab a chunk o' wood and remove all the parts that don't look like a [nose cone]."
Were it that easy....
By the way, while I'm here, I just have to show off the fancy-shmancy stand I built for my lathe a couple of years ago. This bit of shop furniture was constructed completely using vintage hand tools, i.e., hand saws, hand planes, brace & bit, and files. Not a single operation done with sacrificial electrons.
Let me tell you, hand-shaping dimensional 2x lumber is quite the physical workout! That's why I call them 'Armstrong' tools....
