Tracking the Elusive Tracing Paper

Got a call the other night from a total stranger who identified himself as a
fellow resident of northern San Diego county and a homebuilder, too, although
he lives up near the Pala Indian reservation which puts him even farther out in
the sticks than me.

He's trying to track down some tracing paper. He's apologizing fifteen to the
dozen but he's not a draughtsman and he's bought these plans for a thang called
an RW-20 and he'd like to try making some ribs but the rib drawing spans two
pages and he's never done this sort of thing before and he feels really silly
about calling me because a minor detail like tracing the rib drawing has blown
him right out of the water before he's even gotten started. Help?

I was smiling. (Okay, I was laughing my ass off.) But I know what he was
going through. The mere idea of building an "AIRPLANE" in capital letters with
quotes around it. And the fact all the experts say to TRACE the drawing so as
not to destroy the ORIGINAL, as if ten years from now some inspector was going
to insist on seeing the ORIGINAL drawing and would chop off your head if you
couldn't produce it.

"Grocery store," I told him. "Baking section. Look for ‘parchment paper.'
Use a new Sharpie ink pencil."

High Stammer burbled out of the telephone.

"Regular pencil won't work because the paper is treated with some sort of
anti-stick stuff but a Sharpie works fine. Or you can use waxed paper. Waxed
paper makes great tracing paper but nowadays most folks don't carry those
narrow-lead wax pencils you need to write on the stuff. Ink pencils work fine
on waxed paper but you have to clean the tip now and then."

The phone is gurgling... never thought... never realized.... never dreamed of
using...

"Or you could just drop by the shop and borrow my rib jig. It's for the RW-19
but the dash-twenty uses the same airfoil. That is, if you're using
five-sixteenths stock. If you're making the ultralight wing with the
quarter-inch stock, it won't work.. I think I've still got the router
templates for the nose rib around here somewhere too. Hello?"

The phone had gone ominously silent. Then a lady came on the line. "Who is
this?" she demanded. "And what have you done to my husband?"

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Truth is, I haven't used real tracing paper since the late 1950's when it was
replaced by frosted acetate and later by frosted Mylar. And I haven't done any
T-square drafting since I stumbled upon a copy of DeltaCAD on the remand table
at the CompUSA store in Escondido. Nine bux. Cheep.

DeltaCAD is a soopersimple 2D drafting program just a tad above a T-square &
triangle and at least as easy to use. Now I do all of my lay-out work inside
the computer. That means I get to make all of my mistakes on the display
screen instead of on metal. Ditto for rib drawings - - or any other part of
the airframe. I have to get it into the computer to begin with but that's an
arm-chair sorta chore, something you do in increments whenever you have a
little spare time.

But lotsa folks still copy the drawing of a rib onto tracing paper using a good
old fashioned #2 yaller pencil. This message is mostly for them.

If you've got a bright enough light you'll find that plain white shelf-lining
paper works perfectly well to make a tracing. Sliding glass door makes a
pretty good light-table. Bounce sunlight against the back of your drawing, you
can even use brown wrapping paper.

-R.S.Hoover

PS - I wasn't foolin' about the rib jig. Roger Mann, the designer of the
RW-19/20 (the -20 is a two-place with SBS seating; the -19 has a narrower
fuselage with tandem seating) uses a very interesting wing with a fixed slat
and Junker-type ailerons as well as an ingenious long-travel oleo-pneumatic
landing gear strut made out of the front forks of an off-road motorcycle.
Innovations of this sort are of interest to me so I bought a set of his plans
and studied them, going so far as to make a short practice wing using his
airfoil, strapped it to the top of my 1965 VW bus and ran it up & down Highway
395 to see how it worked. Which was good, except for that nice man from the
California Highway Patrol... who eventually let me off with a warning.