Home made protection bag for wings:
Every model pilot knows the problem: Most damages to our models happen not during flying or because of a crash, they happen during transport. The bigger the model, the bigger the possibility of a damage during transport gets. Especially wings are very sensitive, but they can be protected quite easy. The magic is some wing protection bags and neraly everyone should know them. But if you won't fly a model out of the high cost range, some wing protection bags are quite fast as expensive as the model itself. but there is also a very good, cheap and easy solution to build them on your own. The also home made protection bags from the pre owner of my Saltos expiried their lifetime, so I started to build new ones.
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Needed material:Bubble wrap (can be purchased in every DIY store)
Ironing board (it stays clean, so you can borrow it from your wife) Baking paper Shim (Plywood or similar)
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Ironing:
As first step, the edges will be ironed together. For that, place the baking paper over the bubble wrap and start to rion carefully. You'll need a few tries before you find the correct temperature and pressure. The plastic of the wrap should get melted a little bit and because of that, the front and back side will be melted together. Also because the air in the bubbles should go away, you should get a very good connection.
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As same as to the short edge, you should do that to the long edge. You can iron really near to the wing, because of the isolation of the air in the bubbles, the wing shouldn't get even a little bit warm, and I haven't been able to iron so close to the wing that it won't come out or in at the end easily.
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Postprocessing:
At the end, only the too big boarders needs to be cut with a scissor. I let the boarder be around 1cm, so the connection is very tight and before it would open, the wrap would tear anywhere else.
I made with that method protection bags for the wings, the V-tail and the attachable wings and needed around 1 1/2 hour. As you can see, you get a very beatiful soltion which lasts long and is working perfect. If you want it optical even more beatiful, you can also buy an aluminium steamed bubble wrap which is much more expensive. |
If you want to do a protection bag for a fix mounted elevator or rudder, you need to make a template of cardboard or similar. Two elevator protection bags can then be fixed together with some velcro strap. You can also use a velcro strap to connect two protection bags for a one piece wing.