The Profile Foam Wing Template program was designed to generate templates for cutting foam wings with a hot wire cutter. This Freeware program was written by John Garnham in 1995 and has been maintained by Frankie Arzu. It will run on Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and Windows NT. Although no online help nor documention is provided, the application is so simple to use that these are not required. Learning to use the program only requires that each of the buttons at the top be pressed to determine its function and a short explanation as to how the airfoils are generated.

Any text editor can be used to generate a file with the coordinates of the airfoil. The airfoil that is depicted is a Clark-Y. Click here to view the coordinate file.

The first column is a fraction of the distance from the leading edge rearward. The second column is a factor of the chord for the distance from the median line. This is standard practice for displaying coordinates for an airfoil. When an airfoil section is selected, the program reads these coordinates to generate the image. A file for one of over 1100 airfoils can be downloaded from UIUC Airfoil Coordinates Database. The only changes that has to be made to the file are to change the name from a .dat extension to .cor extension and remove the airfoil description from the first line of the file.

The File menu option is like most other Windows based file operations. It has options to create a new file, save the existing file, printing the existing file, or exiting form the program.

The Section menu option has options for choosing the airfoil file, setting the chord length, setting the leading edge stock thickness, and setting the skin thickness.

The Layout menu option has options for setting the foam thickness, setting lead-in and lead-out lengths, and setting washout angle.

The View menu option has options for setting the items that are displayed in the window. These can also be set using the buttons on the menu bar.

Each of the buttons have microhelp windows which pop up when the cursor passes over the button. This helps to identify the function of the button and which feature is toggled on or off.

Since online help is not provided with this package, the Help menu option does nothing more than show information about the product.

Basically, that is the extent of the operation of the Profile program. It does a very good job is displaying an airfoil image and is extremely simple to use. The program can be downloaded with some sample coordinate files. Although this program is Freeware, it works as well as some of the expensive commercial packages.