Gnomey, Thank you, Sir. It's greatly appreciated.
Mr. Ed, glad you shared with me your input on control line flying and your experiences with both silkspan and heat-shrink films.
I used the dope-n-tissue method on the Wright Flyer. For the S.E.5, I used the heat shrink films.
From my own (humble) opinion, the heat shrink films are much easier to apply than the dope-n-tissue method. I figured the latter to be a great teaching aid for beginning modelers to advance themselves into heat-shrink films. Once the silkspan procedure is mastered, it seems everything else is easy. The techniques used for heat shrink films insofar as spreading out the film over the framework is pretty much the same as if it were silkspan. Using the wing as an example, just perform the initial stretch of the covering from the root to the wingtips. To do this, gently "tap" the iron on the film to the wing root first to hold the edge of the film in place, then pull the rest of the film out towards the tips. Then gently "tap" the tips to hold the first stretch. From there, (to me), it's just a matter of gently spreading the sides out and working out the ripples and gently "tapping" the iron on the leading or trailing edges as you go along.out from the wing root to the tips. The beauty of this is with this "tapping" method, you can easily lift the film from its original spot and move it such that you can stretch out even more winkles. Can't keep removing the film too many times though as it will eventually wear out the adhesive backing.
After the winkles have been worked out as best as possible then iron continuously all along the edges of the wing frame such that the film is now adhered to the whole frame and not just spots of adhesion here and there. **Note: only iron the edges: this includes the entire wing root rib, all along the leading edge, trailing edge and the last rib before the wingtip.. Try to avoid the dozens of ribs in the middle that make up the wing. If you iron on over the centered ribs in the middle of the wing, the ribs will "grab" onto the film and prevent the film covering from shrinking evenly along the entire wingspan. Afterward, you can gently (I keep using that word, "gently" a lot here, sorry), glide the iron over the surface and watch the rest of the remaining small winkles disappear. Still try to avoid touching any of the middle ribs themselves, or at least not to the extent the adhesive backing will stick to the whole chord of the rib. You can concentrate the iron on some particular spot that has more winkles than other areas to help "iron out" the winkles. Just focus on the surfaces between the ribs as much as possible. The top side usually requires two separate film pieces. One main piece for the wing itself and a smaller piece for the wingtip. This is mostly due to the compound curves at the wingtips.
Once this wing covering is in place and all of the winkles are ironed out, then you can go over the ribs in the middle to help hold down the film.
I've tried using only one piece on the top surface by ironing the film over the last wing rib near the tip. From there, I would treat the remaining film covering as if it were a separate piece. Unfortunately, that idea didn't work. So it was back to using two separate pieces for the top side of the wing.
One more thing: try to have the "lips" of the film that runs all along the leading edge of the wing (and the trialing edge) to wrap around the leading edge (trailing edge too) to the underside. Then cut off the remaining films. This is so when you cover the opposite side of the wing, the next covering will overlap the first covering and "hide" the initial edge of the first application.
The underside of the wing should be covered first, then the top side. This allows the top covering to overlap the edges from the underside. You can use a new sharp # 11 razor to cut the remaining edges off. Try to use a metal flexible straight straight edge to cut just under the leading or trailing edges such that the cut itself is not easily seen. This will help keep the cuts nice and straight and even. On the S.E.5, I used "antique" for the undersides and a separate color of "olive drab" on the top side. The olive drab was wrapped around the leading edges to just be seen from the undersides. I've included a picture here of the center section of the top wing to use as an example. Here, you can see how the second covering; olive drab, wrapped around the edges of the section to the underside and then cut with a straight edge. What is not seen, is the antique color is also wrapped around the edges underneath the olive drab. It's sort of like a "double wrap."
Hope all this helped.