The last practice part that I'll make before starting on the airplane is a book end. It involves most of the operations that I'll need to learn to build the plane such as glass cutting, foam preparation (slurry), BID and UND layups (flat surfaces, corners, and compound curves, flox corner, knife trim, concave and convex foam carving, glass to glass surface preparation and sanding edges).
Once all the kids were in bed I had a bit of time to cut the 7in x 7in x 2in foam block. This seems trivial but it took me numerous tries to cut this the right size without damaging the corners of the foam blocks. I finally realized that it was better to cut the foam about 1/8 - 1/4 inch longer and then sand it to size. I tried cutting it with an exacto knife and straight edge, butcher knife and straight edge and a coping saw.
The best results were as follows:
a) mark with pen on all sides of the block b) very slow cuts with the coping saw alternating my attention to both sides of the block to try and stay on the lines c) sand to size.
