Hello and welcome to shimming your wing. This is a very important part of foil-boarding, being able to shim your rear wing angle. Okay, so your fuselage here is the connection between the fuselage and the rear wing will give you the angle. Right now this is a zero angle of attack here um that comes as standard in fact it’s probably got maybe one degree of angle, but there’s many times you want to get to three degrees of angle, so we need to build something like a wedge-shaped shim. That’s going to be able to give us that angle that we want there’s a lot of ways to do that. So what you want to do is have something that’s waterproof and that you can work with that is strong, stiff, not compressible, and you can make it into a shim.
To work with it, you can use a machine. I’ve got a Dremel, or a drill, or sandpaper, or whatever, to get it going. Okay, so just focus on my hands here. So we’re going to try a technique today of making something with a hot glue gun. We haven’t done this before but we’re going to try that. I’ve got a multi-temperature hot glue gun here and put the multi-temperature glue-sticks here and we’ll just start heating that up. So the idea is to build up something there. I’ve got my heat resistant baking tin here and then I’ve prepared my fuselage with a little bit of tape because i want to be able to get that off, and I don’t want to necessarily make this this permanent. I’ve poked through the tape, and I’ve made some screw holes. I’m going to add my screws in because I want holes. These have a little bit of grease on them but i might put a little bit of tape on them as well, because we’re building it with glue, but we don’t want to glue everything together with it. So i’m basically using the glue to create a nice plastic substance. All right, now so I don’t get glue into the threads i’m just going to do a little bit of tape around the threads of these screws, this one is only going to be about you know three four mm thick here.
All my glues should be heating up nicely.
Okay, now sometimes you can have if you have a big job made with hot glue it can sometimes fall apart, so what I’ve got is a little bit of something extra. Here I’ve got some of this kite-fix mesh, that they do kite repairs with. It’s basically a nylon mesh. I’m going to just use that as a base to strengthen it, so i’m actually going to take these screws back out.
This has a sticky-back adhesive, a little bit of adhesive on there. I’m going to go bigger than I need. I’ve never done it like this way before, so let’s try that out
Okay, you can see here I’ve got my tape just so it won’t stick directly to fuselage. I’ll tape it there where I have this substrate. See how that mesh is all right. So the next task is to start laying down glue.
It took a whole stick just to fill that gun up. Just doing the center line first, i’m not deliberately getting any on the threads or anything like that. I also don’t want to create too much excess for myself to cut it off later.
Now I haven’t got anything for the top surface yet. I do know by eyeball approximately what kind of angle i’m going for. So i’m guessing we’re starting to build that up.
Now this mesh is kind of floating up into the into the material and that’s fine but it means i’m gonna lower temperature so it solidifies faster.
We’ve been using a lot of other things, other than this for shimming. We’ve been using duct tape, dried wood, we’ve tried cardboard, whatever you have on hand because usually it’s done at the last minute.
Okay this is gonna do for our first try here okay we’re gonna unplug this we’re gonna let this harden and come back, but that’s the idea there. Okay, so we’ve got a shim. Basically it’s going to be wedge-shaped. It’s thicker on the front, smaller on the back. We’re actually going for about a three-degree angle, and it’s going to have two screw holes through it. I just need to trim the side, so we’ll wait for that glue to solidify and then we’ll be able to show you the result.