Heres a little project I've been working on. I love the Long EZ, and I like building balsa models, so why not combine the two. I know real EZs are made of fiber-glass/foam composite, but that wouldn't be as fun as designing and building one with balsa. First I needed a three-view line drawing of the craft. Well amazingly, not a single one exists on the ENTIRE internet... at least not one that I could find. Enter FS2004!

From this screenshot I croped out just the fuselage and then converted it to gray scale.


Add and "emboss effect to draw out the lines, and there we go.

After that I printed it out to the scale I wanted and drew in the the pieces where I wanted them. Note that I don't have a scanner so I used my camera for this shot.

I did the same with a view from above to plan out the wings and canard, also to get the dimensions of the fuselage ribs.



All of the plans in the "from above" point of view came from the same screen shot, so I know they are in scale with one another. The view from the side however was a bit tricky, but I managed. Shortly after I started construction, I freaked out because I thought I was building in the wrong scale, but I checked all of my measurments between the wing and fuse plans and it all matches up. Long EZs just have small-looking fuselages I guess. Anyway, check out part two to see the first part of construction and see a neat little trick for transfering patterns to wood.