Look what Santa brought!

I love the ultrasonic cleaners, there are lots of times I would use one. Even just for shining up an old engine so it looks better on a new model. We had a thread about improvising them and still think of making a pint-sized fixture to mount on my palm sander. But I wouldn't want to leave it unattended.

We have scaled back on gifts too. There is no sense giving something that only needs dusting off when it's time to tidy up the house. I got a book of paper planes designed by Dean Mackey. There are different types for distance, accuracy and flight time, with targets and a landing strip with a hangar to try and park it in. I can use this to play with my new 5 y/o defacto granddaughter(soon likely to be official). My son is already trying to train her in the sciences, and she seems to process it.

Got a tear-off brainteaser calendar which has stumped me every time so far. $50 bucks from my Mom got me some balsa wood and an aluminum micro miter box. Michaels sucks, they don't have any instant CA or bottle tips. But I took my scale and weighed my wood and got some nice pieces that I needed.

I tried my new mitre box tonight.


I cut a 45 in a 1/4" spar to test it. It has a lip on the bottom to overlap the edge of the table and stabilize it, that's a big help. But my saw like the one in the picture jams when you get down to the wide part above the blade. No problem, I have a similar sized Jap saw that doesn't have that problem. But then the blade bottoms out before it cuts all the way through the wood. The reason is there are channels in the bottom of the box to fit several different sizes of wood. But the reliefs to allow the blade to drop all the way to the bottom aren't finished. I had to take my hack saw and deepen them before it would cleanly cut all the way through. That was a stupid way to make it, they packaged it before it was finished, and obviously not tested. Works fine now.

I read an angry ranting review by a dissatisfied buyer. He spent more energy being mad than I did fixing it. Now I can cut matching angles. It won't do a 22.5 deg. angle, but that could possibly be added. I'm happy with it.

My Twister wing kit came with four 36"x1/4" square dowel halves, meant to be joined for the two full wingspan spars. They weighed 13.5 grams, 14.5 grams, 8 grams, and 5 grams.... WTF! What a combination. I had some light stock, so I tried manually cutting 45 deg. joints and scabbing a 9" piece onto each end of the heaviest pair. But some of my epoxy joints set too brittle and were weak. It was too cold in the shop and I s'pose I didn't use enough hardener. I started redoing it, but all the manual mitre cutting ruined my elbow, so I had to quit.

Now that I got my new tool from Santa, I can get back to work. I took my scale to Michaels and bought four 36" 10 gram spar sticks. I watched Sparky build a wing the other day and asked him what his 36" spars weighed. He said 4.5 grams. No way I'm going that light though, I know I need more strength the way I punish a plane. I thought the 14.5 was too heavy, so I settled on 10 grams each. Now I can fly through this project. After joining the spars it's all ready to be glued up. I also have some basswood stock in case I get ambitious and use a foot of it in the center. But I still have to impatiently wait a little longer for my elbow to heal. Something's always broken, if not a plane, it's me  
Thanks Santa(Mom)!
Rusty