It has been a few days since I posted the progress on my Kavalier. Jay has managed to get a LOT done on it and so I wanted to show it off a bit.

He assembled the fuselage and rounded the edges beautifully! You can’t tell, but I placed the fuselage on the stabilizer that was drying with weight on it to keep it from warping.

Here’s the inside of the fuselage where the batteries will sit. You can see the supports that Jay had to machine for the motor. He’s so good with his hands!

I double checked with him and he did a good job of reinforcing where the landing gear attaches to the plane. It is fixed gear and last year I had a bit of a problem with my landings. They were a tad bit rough and so I took the gear off of the LT a few times. Oops!

Here is the wing prior to the wing tip being glued on and the edges being shaped. I wanted to show you just how sharp the edges appear before Jay attacked it with the sanding block.

See… it looks so much nicer now! The wing tips are blocks of balsa that you glue on and then do a LOT of sanding to get it shaped just the way that you want. This is a completely manual process and I believe that Jay did a great job with it. When you close your eyes and run your fingers over it you can’t even feel the seam where they are glued together! Yes, I did do that. lol

And here it is! Yeah!! Obviously it’s not in flying condition. It still needs to be covered, have the electronics run, and the elevator and ailerons actually attached (I believe that they are just taped right now), but look at how pretty it is already!!

These are the colors that will be used on the Kavalier. I was allowed to choose them myself. For some reason everybody thinks that I would choose pink. YUCK!! Why would I choose pink??! If you know me at all, you might have a bit of an idea what color scheme I’m going for with these colors. Can you guess? Do you know?

This is my inspiration:

*sigh* Isn’t he wonderful? I could just swoon right now! I took this picture when Sarah and I went to the Football Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio a few years ago. If you have no clue who this is, it’s Dan Marino! He was arguably one of the best quarterbacks during his time in the NFL. No, he never won a Super Bowl, but he broke a LOT of records and is just plain awesome. Besides, have you seen his eyes? STUNNING!! So, yes, I will have a Miami Dolphins themed plane. I’m tempted to call it Marino 13… get it? Instead of Marine 1 😉 Yes, I know that Marine 1 is a helicopter, but it’s my plane so I can call it whatever I want! :-p