Today I took care of the elevons. They arrive in a rectangular shape and need to be cut to size and also cut into shape to be more effective and provide better handling.But first I'll show the more advanced electronics routing, battery bay placement and how the rest of the wing is becoming. Here's a detail shot of the battery bays glue-fixed inside the wing. My intention was that these battery bays provide strength to the nose of the plane. The first instinct is to use CA glue perhaps, but I opted for a bit more of the Rhino glue. The not-so-aggressive foaming process is a very nice method to fill up some gaps, especially in places where I haven't been so accurate in the construction/glueing of the bays or cutting out the foam. The sides of the bays show a bit of the clear goo that's been pushed out, but that now provides a very tight bond with the foam plane itself, making that gap rather indestructable rather than a weak spot. Someone else I know decided to help me out with the bays and he cut off some 5mm at the front and the rounded parts towards the LE so that the bays are now entirely flush. I'll have to see how the battery fits, but in the worst case it'd take a bit of temporary clear tape to make the wing whole again. The risk is that interruptions at the LE of the wing will eliminate all the lift that the rest of the wing behind it could develop. So these interruptions are better left at the end of the wing instead of at the front.

The PSU is in there too in yellow. The provided shrinkwrap is really thin and you definitely need a hair dryer to get this to shrink properly. The current sensor is in there somewhere and the OSD itself as well. They'll probably be velcro'ed eventually, because they won't naturally stick in their place like this.

With this done, I decided it's time to do the riteweave at the LE and at the bottom of the wing. I sanded off the wing surface a bit at both sides, taped off the openings and went for it. Here's a pic of the finished model so far, electronics removed, openings taped off:

And some more detail from the top. Motor taped as well to prevent any glue entering into the rotor.

I didn't photograph the M90 spraying itself, because it's complicated with your hands full of the sticky glue and the reduced time when the glue starts to tack up. Here you see the bottom of the wing and you can make out the riteweave over the wing spars, a band of riteweave over the center spars and there's riteweave on the LE as well. Just 3 cm overlap on the top with the rest folded over to the bottom. This is now tacking up further and I'll probably leave this to dry overnight. It can already be handled when I put it down. The most strategic place is to grab it at the foam near the motor. That'll stick a little bit, but at least you're not taking along a piece of riteweave that you just glued down.

The process there is actually quite easy. It works best in broad daylight. The idea is to wet the wing a bit, stick the riteweave on, then wet the riteweave sufficiently with the glue and push the glue in with your hands down onto the wing. It'll be more like pasting in the end as sticking. If it gets too tacky, just apply some more :). The better you do this, the less glue you use, the lighter the wing will be. I probably used half my can by now for the entire process, as well as providing a sticky coat for the paint I'll apply, both top and bottom.

So wing back in retraite... on to the elevons. I sawed off the ends to get the right size, then sawed off some pieces to get a better shape. The piece all the way at the left is actually sawed off incorrectly. A better shape would have been just a corner, starting from half of the width at 45 degrees to the elevon edge. I noticed this later. It won't be a big problem I suppose, so just carried on. The other end tapering off is where the elevon will be attached to the wing. The end is tapered to improve the wing handling as per the instructions. The important part of the elevon is the big ladle at the left. I could probably have tapered a bit more even, but let's see what this does.

The elevon is already laminated. Some laminate is peeling out here and there and that'll be sorted with a drop of CA glue here and there. If you look at the tapered end, quite a bit of laminate doesn't want to stick down. The bottom elevon was M90'd properly, the top one was more of a quick skim of M90. So I guess it's true that laminate doesn't like sticking to paint directly :). Notice how eventually after the hot iron nothing of the M90 stripes can be seen anymore. I didn't use the amazon iron, but I have a rather new, heavy-duty iron with water to produce steam. The steam wasn't actively used, but some leaks out anyway and steam is just extremely hot, over 100 degrees. It helps to smooth out a couple of things here and there and I thought it went quite well.

Now the only things to be done to the elevons are the horn attachments and taping them to the wing itself. In my build, the flat part of the elevon is at the bottom. Notice how the aft wing end isn't straight down but has the bottom cut out a bit. That's what's providing the movement of the elevon going downwards.

I also made two new servo push rods. The servo's can no longer be sunk in, so they'll be placed flush with the wing and the pushrods will run over it. The FPV manual does provide instructions that servo placement should be considered in relation to the internal wing spars, I just focused too much on distributing weight and making things look nice.

With the layout ready, it's time to get started on cutting out the foam where the components should go in. Depths are basically self-explanatory. The front bays are right down onto the bottom as far as it goes with 4mm to spare at the bottom. You'd probably not pull this off without the wooden bays (although less wood allows you to make it shallower). The extra lateral strength helps to keep the nose up eventually (I reckon) and the wood bottom helps to provide strength against shocks.

So to give a better detailed view of how far these cutouts go, here's the front view. The servo's should probably have gone a little further back to prevent them hitting the spars. Good idea for next time... to mark out where the spars are, until where they run inside the wing and then just keep away from those. It shouldn't cause too much of a problem here, but I may be forced to keep the pushrods out because the servo's can't sink deeper.

I decided to move the receiver a little bit upwards and hit the spar over there. The other position kept completely free of the spar. Another lesson learned there. Again, nothing to be seriously worried about. You can see the same spar run through the extreme north end of the other servo position too. I probably need to make a bit more room for the servo arm, but that can be done with the knife at any time.

How to epoxy this thing and put the motor mount in has been demonstrated by the TBS video. In my case, I just cut a slit at no angle whatsoever (straight). This takes a bit of an eye, because the wing at the top has a slight angle. The bottom also has a very slight angle, so somewhere inbetween is where the zero angle is. This is the epoxy stage finished. Notice that epoxy becomes rather hot when you apply it and it has a very funny smell. Keep the room ventilated, take care of some protection for the glue clamps, keep a steady pace mixing the epoxy, spatulate it in there, slide in the motor mount and put the clamps on. There's a good amount of time to work with, so no reason to haste. I used cheap, plastic gloves in this process. One finger of the glove touched the epoxy and it melted straight through.

Okay... I was writing this post to let the epoxy settle. It should be ready now and I can have a look if all the electronics fit nicely. Tomorrow I'm going to run the servo wires probably, connect all electronics together, see where adjustments have to be made and maybe glue in the battery bays if I'm happy enough with their shapes. Then I'll have to spend some time studying the riteweave and laminating process, wait for a nice sunny day to get started on that and start finishing off this thing.