Almost done...

I'm finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel on this project. All the big pieces are starting to go together and at the time of this writing all that is left is some rigging and the shaping of the propeller. I suppose I'll also have to fashion some sort of base for the plane to be attached to, in order to help keep it away from damage. Here's what's happened since the last post:

First up, the tail needed to be attached. When I went to fit the tail, I discovered that the turtleback ended a bit too far back on the fuselage, resulting in the tail hanging off the back. This made it so that the rudder wouldn't go on, and clearly, some adjustment would be needed. I brought out the razor saw and trimmed a few millimeters off of the turtle back.



This made some room for the tail to be fitted and the back edge of the vertical stabilizer lined up properly with the back of the fuselage.



Since I cut off the laser-cut part, I needed to craft a new rear rib for the turtle back. Fortunately I had kept the scrap thin plywood that the turtleback parts had come attached to. I snipped off a little bit of that wood, and fashioned a replacement rib. Here you can see it glued in place.



That new piece had to be stained to match the rest of the plane, and then a coat of polyurethane. Next, the tail was glued in place, the rudder attached and the various control lines rigged to connect to the cockpit fittings.



Next up were the lower wings. Below you can see the rough fitting. This mostly just consisted of me drilling out the holes for the connecting pins to go into and then setting the wing in place.



The lower wings are supposed to have one degree of dihedral. In order to get just such a thing, I had to build a little support rig which I could add little shims to until the wing was at just the right angle. Below you can see my high-tech angle measuring method along with my low-tech support and shim method.



Once the angle of the wings were set, a bit of epoxy held them in place permanently. Next, a similar fitting for the upper wings, although those just sit on top of the inter-plane struts, so were a bit easier to fit. They really just required a boring out of the connection holes, so that the wings could lay at the proper angles.

Finally, below you can see the state of the model this evening. The top wings are epoxied in place and the inter-plane struts are glued in place.



Next up: rigging and shaping of the propeller.

And Picking Back Up Again...

I'm back!

I realize it has been a bit over two months since the last blog update, but I feel as though I have a decent excuse. It turns out that I went and got married about a month ago. So, what with various wedding preparations, the wedding itself and then the honeymoon afterwards, I hardly had any spare moments for working on the ol model. But now that that is all settled and I've got some free time back again, I have finally got a bit of an update.

I'm getting into the home stretch now, and the model is beginning to wrap up. I've assembled the wheels, which were a combination of cast hubs and rims and photo-etch spokes. It seems like these sorts of things never fit quite right, and so each wheel has one side that is a little more warped than I would prefer, since the spoke discs were just a hair bigger than they should be. Someone with more patience and some fore knowledge of this might file them all the way around to be just a little smaller, but I'm not and I didn't, so I just bent them into place and called it good.

Below you can see the wheel, and also the little jig that I made from the engine stand and a leftover part of the axle. This setup put the rim and the hub at just the right offset to keep everything centered nicely.



While that was going on, I also was working on putting the gear assembly together. It was a fairly simple setup, with the same fitting of metal parts to wood that was required on the interwing struts that I put together earlier in the build, but haven't fitted to the plane yet. With a bit of sanding and shaping, the various wooden parts were contoured and smoothed. Since this gear was going to have to support the weight of the model, which, with the engine in there, is not insubstantial, I decided to do a little reinforcing of the joints. I drilled a few holes through the joint/hub part (where everything connects) and put some metal rods through that and into each other piece of wood. Hopefully this will add enough strength to keep everything happy attached.



With some O-rings stretched around the wheels for tires and some string wrapped around the landing gear, the plane is finally standing on it's own legs! On a side note, there is a tail skid that Ive finished as well, but I don't have any photos of that handy, so look for that next time.



Here is a close up of the wrapped string. On the full-size plane, this added reinforcement to the wood, perhaps keeping it from splitting on landing. On the model, it is just nylon string glued in place with a dab of superglue.



To simulate the simple bungie-cord-like suspension that the plane had, the model has a couple of metal fittings and some wrapped white string. This is actually holding the axle in place, though, so I had to be sure it was good and tight. Once in place, a dab of superglue made sure it wasn't going to go anywhere.



Finally, bringing the blog up to what I was working on just a few hours ago, the aluminum cowl around the cockpit in in progress. Below you can see it bend into place. I used the plank-soaking tube that I made for the Armed Virginia Sloop model (out of some simple PVC pipe) as a form to bend the metal over. The metal just gets bent a bit and then glued into place with the help of a few tabs that wrap under the wooden longerons.



Next up: windshields, cowling trim, and beginning to put all of the parts together!

Engine Is In the Plane!

At long last, tonight I mounted the engine to the fuselage!

Here are a few images showing how I got there.

First, I made a few more 'springs' for the rockers and such.



That gave me the parts to finish up the cylinder assemblies.



Next up was the polishing and mounting of the exhaust headers.



After that was a bit of wiring. This was tricky, as the instructions just mentioned gluing the wires to the spark plugs. Except that, in reality, the wire is very stiff and wouldn't stay glued to the plug tips. Anticipating this issue, I drilled tiny holes in the side of each plug and glued the wire tips into these holes. This was a bit of a pain, but seemed to work out decently. Next up were some little dowels, painted brown, to simulate the fiber tubes that collected and routed the plug wires on their way to the magneto. Finally, there were another eight wires that came out of the dowels and into the magneto.



With that step complete, the next step was to mount the engine to the fuselage. While the engine isn't quite complete, all of the remaining steps require that the engine be in the plane, as they mostly involve various tubing and wiring.

Ta Da!



Next up: Wiring, tubes, the radiator and propeller.

Engine Updates

As some may have noticed, it has been quite a while since my last update. Those same some might be thinking, "Oh, it just another blog, where the updates get further and further apart." I would like to rebut that with, "Balderdash! The updates have been sparse recently because I am in the midst of wedding planning and have had very little time for modeling, let alone model blogging!"

With that said, I got a bit of time this weekend to do a little bit of modeling, and got the model desk reassembled (the web cam part had been taken apart for wedding related reasons). Once things were back in order, cleaned up and ready to roll, I managed to test out an idea I had been toying around with for some upgrades to the engine, and I think they turned out pretty well. But first, let's get up to date with the state of the model.

When last I wrote about it, the engine was just beginning assembly, with the large pieces coming together. The next step in the process was to add the cylinders. Here are a few of them, sanded and polished and ready to be epoxied to the engine block.



In order to get them all properly aligned (there is a bit of slop in the attachment points on the engine block), the directions recommended using the intake runner and exhaust headers to insure that everything will align later on. In order to make this easier, I set the whole engine assembly up so that the cylinders balanced on the top while the epoxy set.



And then the other side:



After the cylinders were all in place, I added on the water inlet piping and the air intakes.



Along with those, there were other miscellaneous pipes that got added. Below you can see the test-fit of the intermediate piping. The kit came with some clear rubber tubing for these parts, but since rubber tubing is a pain to paint, AND I already had various sizes of styrene tubing, I decided to go with the hard styrene tubes, cut to length.



That tubing was then painted black and glued in place on both sides.

This brings me to the previously-mentioned upgrade. The kit has various pushrods, rockers and such for the top of each cylinder. Cast into two of those parts are 'springs' that I felt were not satisfactory. The castings were shallow and hardly looked like springs at all. So, I decided that I could replace the springs with a center rod and some wound wire that looks like a spring. I wound some very thin wire that I had left from a previous kit around a mandrel tool, and cut some lengths of thicker brass wire for the centers. I cut off the cast springs, filed everything clean and drilled some tiny holes to keep the center rods in place.

Here are the results on my first test cylinder:



I think these look much more like the real engine. I've got a pile of photo reference of the engine that I have collected and have found it very useful to refer to while building.

And that brings us up to the present. I've got two of the eight cylinders done with the springs, as of tonight, and hopefully I can continue with this during the week and next weekend.The next update should see the engine mounted on the fuselage! Stay tuned!

Engine and Deskcam

The Engine!

So, I've finally arrived at the reason that I purchased this kit in the first place: the engine. I was completely taken by the engine detail in the product images and wanted a shot at making that same engine and perhaps even improving upon it. The engine, fuel tank and radiator are all mostly made up of cast Britannia metal, which is a mixture of tin, antimony and copper. These parts are all delivered in the kit as raw castings, which gives them a dull surface and sometimes rough details.

Some of the raw engine block castings:



This means that the bulk of the work on the engine is the cleanup, sanding and polishing of these parts, in order to bring them up to a quality finish that complements the rest of the kit. I'm currently wearing through various sanding sticks and a few bits of sandpaper, but I've got some higher grit sandpaper arriving tomorrow, which should make short work of getting these parts in order.

First item to be added was the fuel tank, which was actually a combination of a cast metal frame and photo-etch front and back plates. Here you can see some pictures of the final product after quite a bit of sanding, polishing and a bit of buffing with the ol Dremel. Added to that are three other separately-cast parts, the fuel cap and fuel gauge on the top and sediment trap hanging off of the bottom. This tank is held in place by three brass strips, two cradling it underneath and one over the top.





Next up was the engine block itself. For a little while I was working with the block, unattached from the fuselage, but once I started adding more parts, this seemed less and less practical. So, I took a bit of scrap wood and built a little engine stand for it. Here you can see the engine cleaned up a bit and mounted on the temporary stand.



Stay tuned for more additions to the engine as work continues!


Desk Cam Gets a New Computer and Comes Back to Life!

As, I'm sure, many of you noticed (or perhaps didn't notice), the computer that runs my model desk web cam and time-lapse camera managed to die a couple of weeks ago. I think the culprit was the local power company replacing a nearby transformer combined with the computer power supply being on its last legs. Whatever the cause, when the power supply failed it took the motherboard with it, so now all the computer is good for (after I replaced the fried power supply) is moving a bit of air around. Yup, the only things that seem to still work are all of the fans. Alas, poor computer, I knew it well.

As the untimely demise of my model desk computer left me without a way to run my time-lapse camera and no way to update my desk cam web page, I had to find a new way to run things. Fortunately, I still had my old laptop computer in a closet (actually, the original desk-cam computer ALSO came back to life out of a closet), which I thought might be able to be used in a pinch. So, today I dragged it out, plugged it into all of the appropriate cables, updated and installed various bits of software, and now have a whole new computer running under my model desk!

Rest in Pieces, old model desk computer.

:(



Long live the new model desk computer!



The upside here, is that I've gained a great deal more leg room under the model desk and probably will save a little bit of electricity. Here's the current state of the model desk, including new computer and such:



That's all for now. Tune in next time for more engine progress and hopefully no further news about the model desk computer ;)

Cockpit Fittings

Picking up from the last post, the rigging for the fuselage is complete between the tail and the cockpit. I've left off around the cockpit so that it is easier to add various fittings, seats, etc.



First up in the fittings were the rudder pedals and their connections and mounting points.



Those were followed by the control sticks and their various connections.



Next up were the seats. The kit came with photo-etch metal backs and wooden seats. The instructions mentioned that the real seats were covered with cloth on the backs and had pads on the seats. I decided that I should add a few of those extras to the seats on my plane. I had some tubing left over from a previous model that I used to line the edges of the seat backs. I feel that this had mixed results and I am not entirely happy with the results. For the cushions, I decided that I would find some leather-like fabric and wrap that around some wood.

I went to my local hobby shop in search of such a material, but they didn't have anything like that for purchase. But I DID notice a dollhouse chair there, for about $8, that had the type of material that I was looking for. So, I decided that instead of going store to store, looking for what I wanted, I would just buy the chair and strip the cloth off of it.

Behold, the sacrificial chair:



And the end result of my chair-enhancing efforts:



Before installing the chairs into the cockpits, I had to do just a bit of rigging. Here you can see the aileron control wires.



And finally, the seats installed.



With this done, I'm moving on to the engine and fuel tank. It's a fun-filled world of cast metal and sanding/polishing. Stay tuned for further adventures!

Strings and Things

At the end of the last update, I had assembled most of the wooden components of the fuselage. Since then, almost all of the rest of the wooden parts have been attached, the whole thing has been stained, and I've added a few coats of polyurethane. I'm now on to an intermediate step of adding many of the rigging strings to the back half of the fuselage before starting to add the various controls and engine parts to the front half.

With that in mind, here are some photos of what I've been up to, along with brief explanations.

Below is an image of the turtleback all assembled. It turns out that it would have probably been a better idea to assemble this off of the main fuselage, and then add it later, as it ended up making some of the rigging a bit harder.



Here is the whole fuselage right after having the turtleback attached and right before staining.



Here are the two control panels. The front one (for the navigator) has a little scratch-built map case. Although it's a little blurry in this image, the knob for the map case door is made from a pin head. I've left the dials and such off, as I wanted to stain and polyurethane the parts first.



Here is the fuselage right after staining.



Once the stain and polyurethane were on there, I could start gluing on some of the photo-etch metal parts. Here is a close-up of the frame that goes in front of the engine.



Here is a close-up of the little door that is at the front end of the turtleback.



Next up was something new to me: printing my own decals. The kit doesn't provide any sort of instrumentation graphics, but rather only comes with the cast metal base parts. I thought this might be a good excuse to try my hand at making decals. I picked up a package of ink-jet-printer decal sheets and a can of decal sealer at my local hobby shop and then spent a few hours scouring the internet for images of old airplane gauges. With some cleanup work in Photoshop, and a bit of experimentation with the printer, I was able to print myself a few sheets of gauges. The sheets below have so many because I wasn't sure how tough the decals would be, and fully expected to ruin a few before getting one to transfer correctly. I also printed one set on a clear sheet and one on a white sheet. It turned out that the decals held up great and the white-backed ones looked good, so I have lots of extra gauges now.



Here you can see a few of the gauge decals in place. Once all was said and done, I think they ended up a bit smaller than I would like, but I had erred on the small side to be sure that they would fit in the tiny embossed ring of the cast metal part.



Here are the two completed control panels in place and with all decals applied.



A few more photo-etched parts in place. The half-circle one is where the pilots step is, used to step up into the plane.



The engine-bearing supports, with various straps, wires, etc, holding them in place.



Finally, a sneak preview of the (in progress) next fun-filled step: Rigging the fuselage.



Thanks for tuning in! Hopefully next update will see the fuselage complete and work on the engine beginning.