Tools and Adhesives
Tools etc:
This is a very quick and easy plane to build, not requiring special techniques or equipment, but
even the building of Composite-ARF aircraft requires some suitable tools. You will probably have
all these tools in your workshop anyway, but if not, they are available in all good hobby shops,
or hardware stores like "Home Depot" or similar.
1.
Incidence Meter
2.
Steel straight edges, 90° squares and rulers for alignment.
3.
Sharp knife (X-Acto or similar)
4.
Allen key set
(metric)
2.5mm and 3mm.
5. Sharp
scissors
6.
Pliers (various types)
7. Wrenches
(metric)
8.
Slotted and Phillips screwdrivers (various sizes)
9.
M3 and M4 tapping tools
(metric)
10. Drills of various sizes
11.
Dremel tool (or Proxxon, or similar) with cutting discs, sanding tools and mills.
12. Sandpaper (various grits), or Permagrit sanding tools (high quality).
13. Carpet, bubble wrap or soft cloth to cover your work bench (most important !)
14. Car wax polish (clear)
15. Paper and clear tape
16. Denaturised alcohol, or similar (for cleaning joints before gluing)
Adhesives:
Not all types of glues are suited to working with composite parts. Here is a selection of what we
normally use, and what we can truly recommend. Please don’t use inferior quality glues - you will
end up with an inferior quality plane, that is not so strong or safe.
Note
: Especially with the sandwich laminates the use of CA adhesives requires extreme caution.
The sandwich foam will soak off any excess CA, and inside the foam this will start to cure, cre-
ating heat, which can deform the outside of the composite part. Use CA only for ‘tacking’ things
into position, and preferably
thick
CA, without using any ‘Kicker’, and then glue permanently with
slow epoxy resin, mixed with either milled fibre (for strong joints) or Micro-balloons for lightweight
fillets.
1.
CA-Glue ‘Thin’ and ‘Thick’ types. We recommend ZAP, as this is a very high quality.
2.
5 minute-epoxy (highest quality seems to be Z-Poxy)
3.
30 minute epoxy (stressed joints must be glued with 30 min and NOT 5 min epoxy).
4.
Epoxy laminating resin (12 - 24 hr cure) with hardener.
5.
Milled glass fibre, for adding to slow epoxy for strong joints.
6.
Microballoons, for adding to slow epoxy for lightweight filling.
At Composite-ARF we try our best to offer you a high quality kit, with outstanding value-for-
money, and as complete as possible. However, if you feel that some additional or different
hardware should be included, please feel free to let us know. Email us: feedback@composite-
arf.com. We know that even good things can be made better !
Composite-ARF IMPACT
7