Okay, I haven’t made a lot of headway, but I did at least print out the pattern for my F-22 and cut the pieces for it. It’s literally the very first time I’ve done this, so the pieces aren’t perfect, but they aren’t bad. Witness:

The foam pieces for my F-22, with the radio transmitter to give some sense of scale.

I basically made the patterns by printing out the pieces, taping them together and then cutting out each individual piece. I then held them down and traced each piece with a wide point sharpy onto the foam, and then cut them pretty much freehand with an exacto knife, trying to cut pretty much all of the black off. It mostly worked okay, but the cellular nature of the foam made for some slight rough divets, and I found the first knife I used was actually a bit dull, which is a no-no. Switching it to a new blade helped, and the main body deck (which I cut last) was pretty good.

It’s some progress. I’ll think about it a bit more, and then figure out what else I need to do. I know I need to put in some carbon fiber rods across the body to stiffen it. I’ll have to review some of the online help to figure out what the best order to do things is. It also appears that Mark’s version has some kind of internal stiffening between the two identical body parts, not sure though, I’ll have to check it out.

Okay, off to vacuum up the styrofoam bits…