Part of the fun is coming from lasering the parts from 1.5mm balsa sheet. I start with the free plan from AeroFred, I chose a Bristol Beaufighter because... why not! The workflow is - crop the formers one at a time in Adobe Acrobat, save the former as a .JPG, import that into LibreCAD and trace around the shape. Save that as a .DXF which I import into Vetric Aspire where I scale it to the size measured from the Acrobat crop, add the stringer cutouts, add the second half with the mirror function and tidy the shape up and finally save it as a .SVG which will import into LaserGRBL for cutting on a 3 Watt laser. I may be tempted to go for a stronger laser with a air pump option sometime but the balsa will all be 1.5mm. thats 1/16" to the imperialists
The free plan from AeroFred
The part to be worked on cropped from the plan
The shape traced and the stringer locations marked
Stringer cut outs added and the shape mirrored to produce a full former
The file loaded into LaserGRBL ready for the cutting.
It's pretty time consuming but very gratifying when you see the part releasing from the balsa plank.
Anybody else still into RTP?