This article is more than 1 year old

Vulture 1 sprouts wings and a tail

Lots of lovely construction snaps for your viewing pleasure

Picking up where we left off last time, the tail structure is ready to accept the rudder and elevators:

More straw bracing in the tail

We mocked up both from paper...

The mocked-up elevator and rudder

...and then lovingly crafted the real rudder from a three-ply paper laminate:

The rudder

We made the laminate by glueing together three sheets of bog-standard paper with Photo Mount, and leaving it for 24 hours under a big pile of books. The paper tabs are to ensure that the two halves of the rudder come together with a clean edge. We found that simply applying glue along the join resulted in an uneven joint, which in turn distorted the rudder when we teased it over the straw structure.

Once the two halves were mated and glued together with epoxy, the rudder could be fixed to the structure. For the record, all the glueing from here onwards is with epoxy, unless otherwise stated.

The rudder in position

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