The summer weather is still not showing signs of coming to an end and I’m trying to squeeze out as many hours of flying as possible. Shorter daylight hours however provides an opportunity to use mornings and evenings to start preparing for the coming winter’s projects. l’m expecting a nice Chocofly surprise in the next few weeks/months that will have priority, but shouldn’t be too much work. The main project for coming winter will however be the Diana4, which I’m hoping to maiden in Spring 2024. Work on the Diana4 already started last year. The fuselage is as good as done (just need to fit the canopy): I also finished the elevator and rudder, built the wing joiner and prepared the sleeves.

The next step is building the wings. We cut the styrofoam cores for the wings at the end of last year. The original Diana4 will have a wingspan of 18m, that means that our scale 1:3.5 will have a wingspan of 5.14m. As my car is just large enough to accomodate 2.5m wings, I will build them in one piece.That makes the wings easier to build and, importantly, saves weight.

Today I started preparing the building board. I’m normally using an 18mm MDF board of 260x40cm to build the wings. For the Diana4 I have extended the board with another 30cm. I’ll also need to extend my working table to accomodate the longer building board (I’m using IKEA tabletops, which are light, incredibly stable and perfectly straigth). After preparing the board and table I started preparing the foam cores. Using a vacuumcleaner with a brush I removed the “angle hair” on the cores, resulting from the hot wire cutting. I also removed the last 4-5mm of the trailing edge of the wing cores to ensure that the trailing edge of the wings is nicely sticking together and can be sanded really thin.

Next step is to draw out the wing layout on the table and prepare the foam shells.