The detail that made me grin the hardest: a homemade hot-wire foam cutter pressed into service as a simple weight on the workbench. Of all the tools on that bench, that one sums up the whole project. This is part three of a balsa wood flying wing, and Aerodynamic Cow's resourcefulness shows up everywhere. The skeleton itself is coming together beautifully. Ribs are cut from balsa sheet over printed plans with a red-handled craft knife, then laid out in numerical order on paper templates marked with dimensions. From there the shaped ribs are threaded onto a black cylindrical spar tube, each one bonded with wood glue and held with wooden clothespins while it sets. Extra strip spars and trailing edge framing are glued along the rib slots, and the whole assembly is lined up over the drafted blueprint. The dark carbon fiber tube running through the ribs as the spar looks properly beefy. Plenty stands out to me. Thin servo wires already run from the center section, and a ducted fan sits embedded in the middle of the fuselage. The design side is being done properly too, with XFLR5, FoilSim III and the Flying Wing CG Calculator V2 all in the mix, and the maker has said the wing uses Prandtl bell shape lift. The one trade-off is the rib cutting. Every rib is shaped by hand with a knife instead of being machine cut. The maker has said there is no access to a laser and that they cost quite a bit. Hand work it is, then, and that patience is part of the charm of a build like this.
Project by Aerodynamic Cow. Watch it on their YouTube channel: