This article is more than 1 year old

Vulture 1 sprouts wings and a tail

Lots of lovely construction snaps for your viewing pleasure

With the rudder on, it was just a matter of making good the tail with paper skinning:

The rudder glued into place the the lower tail formed

Skinning the rear fuselage

The skin is standard printer paper glued to the paper straws. We abandoned all attempts at stressed skin surfaces since this proved disastrous for the structure.

In fact, the paper straws are in themselves pretty strong, and since they're extremely light, there's no impediment to throwing in lots of structure and considering the skin as simply a protective covering.

We made the elevators in the same way as the rudder:

One half of the elevator with attaching tabs

Once they were on, we finished the skinning and made good all the joints with a general-purpose rubber-based repair adhesive. Job done.

The finished tail

You'll be wondering how the paper will be protected from the elements. The answer is off-the-shelf gloss spray paint - in the case of the tail a striking orange:

The tail is painted a striking orange

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like