Starting with the wings

I had to wait for the retracts to arrive before I could start with the wings. Luckily this didn’t take long and last week I received my order. It’s a set of 85-degrees 60-120 sized retracts with a pair of matching oleo struts from E-flite. E-flite calls them P-47 struts, probably because they fit their Hangar 9 Jug, but they do not resemble the real ones all that much.. which isn’t a problem for my semi-scale build, even more because they look very nice and of course, a lot better than wire struts:

Before starting building up the wing structure, next to some general prep work, I had to modify a number of parts to fit these specific retracts. Most modifications are mentioned in the build instructions, but I had to pick only some of them and I also needed to modify the rib cutout for the retract mechanism, as I use servoless retracts that didn’t exist when these plans were drawn:

Once that was done, the structure of the left wing arose very quickly on the building board:

Nice to see how all those ribs line up, floating above the plans due to the building tabs:

I would have liked building both wings simultaneously, but I do not have enough room for that, so I have to build them one at a time, but I think this could go very fast from here nonetheless.