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.

Fuselage Continues

In the last post, I mentioned that I was not happy with the construction method used in the kit instructions to make the mortised fuselage ribs. The instructions wanted the ribs to be cut from a solid piece and the mortises carved out from those. I made one test piece and found that: a) this is really hard b) the wood that the kit came with for these parts was not the best quality, and tended to flake apart during the carving and c) the final product, because of a and b, was simply not as refined and clean as I would like.

So, what I ended up doing was to get three strips of wood, cut the mortise shape out of two of them, and then sandwich them all together to create a much better looking part. Below you can see what I ended up with, as it is being glued to one half of the fuselage.



Once I got those parts all made, putting together the two sides of the fuselage went pretty quickly. Below you can see the two sides attached to the fuselage building jig, which holds everything straight and square while the cross pieces are glued in.



On the real plane, the top longerons (supposedly a real word) are spliced together behind the cockpit. I'm assuming this is because either a piece of wood that long was tricky to find, or perhaps the front of the plane needed wood of a different type that the tail did. Either way, my whole plane is made of basswood, and it's actually pretty easy to find a 16" long strip of wood, so I don't have to put in a real splice. Instead, the instructions had me wrap a section in thin nylon cord, to give the look of a spliced section.



At the tail of the fuselage, there are a number of additions that are meant to strengthen the structure around the tail skid. For my purposes, this just meant a couple thick strips on the sides and a few steel wires in between the top and bottom.



It was at this point that I found that I am going to need to start skipping sections of the instructions in order to facilitate the stain and polyurethane that I am putting on the model. I need to get as much of the wooden parts together, skip the addition of various metal parts, and still try to leave it all open enough that adding the metal parts later is easy. So, at this point I've skipped adding some of the engine mounting hardware because of the large photo-etch parts that that would require and have, instead, moved on to installing the cockpit flooring. Below you can see my efforts to get the two floors relatively level before fitting all the support beams underneath them.



Finally, here is the fuselage out of the building jig, and with the floor support beams in place. There is still lots of work to be done on the fuselage, but actually only a few more steps before I stain the whole thing and apply the polyurethane.



That's all I've got for now. Stay tuned for more action-packed model-building chronicles!!

Tail Completion & Fuselage Start

Lots of pictures and not much typing on this post. Enjoy the show!

With the vertical stabilizer and rudder complete, I moved on to the horizontal stabilizer and elevator. The construction on this was very similar to that of the wings in that it is mostly laser-cut ribs and strip wood for strengthening and connecting. Here you can see the ribs with the lower cap strip and strengthening strips:



Here you can see the horizontal stabilizer going together on the plans sheet.



The leading edge on this piece is a steel rod, bent into shape after being heated up. The diagonal ribs are just strip wood cut and sanded into shape.



Once completed, this part can then be attached to the vertical stabilizer. Here you can see the connected pair drying after being stained.



Once the stain and polyurethane was on the parts, I added the little bits of copper tape, which are meant to simulate the metal bands that hold the leading edge to the ribs.



With that completed, the hinge slots were cut and the brass strips were cut for the fake hinges. Below you can see the elevators attached and the tiny fake hinges in place.



Before setting these parts aside, I did a little bit of rigging on the elevators and rudder, so that they are all ready to attach to the fuselage later on in the build.



With these parts done (for now), I was ready to move on to the next major step in the build...

The Fuselage!!

First and foremost, I had to put together a jig that will allow me to construct the fuselage in a square and true manner. The fit comes with a bunch of laser-cut parts that go together to form this jig, and below you can see it coming together.





The little dowels are so that the fuselage pieces can be attached with rubber bands later on. Also, the jig is glued down to that piece of foam board, so that it stays nice and straight through the process.



And finally, I've just soaked and bent the long pieces for one side of the fuselage frame. Here you can see it pinned down to the plans, with a few of the frame bits glued in (on the left side).



I've found that I'm not happy with the construction method for the three middle ribs. The pieces are supposed to have a mortise cut into each side of the rib, which is itself 1/16" thick. I've found that it is quite difficult to do this in a manner that doesn't look terrible. The wood tends to flake apart, or just look sloppy when I try to cut such a small amount out of it. Rather than keep trying or just settling for either non-mortised parts or sloppy-looking parts, I've decided to get some strips of very thin wood and attempt to build a sandwich-style rib, since I think cutting holes in thin wood will end up looking better than the carved-mortise version. I should end up with a part that looks just like it was carved out, except much cleaner and with much less hassle.

Tune in next time to see if my plan works ;)

Wing Skids and Tail Parts

As the building continues, I've finally completed all the little details on the wings. There were lots of little metal fittings, bits of rigging, and wooden supports that go along with the wings that all needed to be built before I moved on. For example, you can see below, the supports that go between the upper and lower wings. These were made from laser cut basswood with cast metal fittings on each end. Unfortunately, the notches that the cast metal fit into were not laser cut into the parts, so these took quite a bit of carving, sanding and filing in order to shape the wooden parts correctly. Once the metal parts were fitted, then the wooden middle needed to be sanded round and the metal ends polished to a shine.

In this image, the parts are drying after having been stained to match the rest of the model.



Similarly, the below part is the support that goes between the upper center wing section and the top of the fuselage. A similar carving/sanding/filing technique was required on these in order to get the metal end fittings integrated.



Also on the list of odds and ends were the skids that go on the bottom of the lower wings. On the real plane these were installed to help prevent catching a wing tip on a messy landing. On the model, they are made from a bent piece of wood. Since this bend was somewhat extreme, given that it was a 1/16" x 1/16" piece of wood, I decided to try a few new techniques for prepping the wood for bending. I tried wrapping it in a wet paper towel and then microwaving that, but didn't really have any luck there. Finally I just settled on good old fashioned soaking of the wood for an hour or so each. Below you can see the wood parts pinned down to the plans as they dry.



And here are the skids installed on the bottom of the wing, prior to stain and polyurethane.



That pretty much wrapped up the miscellaneous wing parts (there were a few others, like the king posts on the upper wings, but I don't have photos of those), so I finally got to move along to some non-wing parts.

First on the list are the tail surfaces. I started with the vertical stabilizer and rudder. The vertical stabilizer was a quick build, since it was just strip wood, pinned over the plan and glued in place. The rudder was a little more complicated, but still fairly simple. Like the wings, the rudder has a trailing edge made of bent wire. I used the same technique as I had previously to make the wire easier to work with. This involved annealing the wire, using a cooking torch (like for making creme brulee) to get the wire red hot and then let it cool back down again. This makes it a bit softer after it cools and easier to work with.

Below you can see the bent wire pinned in place and shimmed off the plans just a bit (so that it is centered to the leading edge) with the first of the ribs glued in place.



I've just finished the rudder, which was also pretty much just simple strip wood, cut, sanded and glued in place. Below you can see the completed parts. They still need to be stained, polyurethaned and then fitted with a few metal parts, but that'll come later, once the elevator is done. I've got to wait until the elevator is done because the bottom of the vertical stabilizer needs to be sanded to fit the top of the elevator so they both need to be complete before I can do the final fitting and then stain, etc.

The finished parts:

Testing Out New Blog Location

Today, I've finalized my new web site and new blog location. Technically, the blog still can be found in the original Blogspot location. It can now also be found on my own web site, here: http://www.hello-napalm.com/scaleModeling.php The reason for this was to bring my scale modeling stuff together with my photography and computer graphics work, all on one site. This also allows me to put the completed model galleries, desk cam and any other related model things all together. Plus, I'm now able to manage all this silliness from a single application, which is what this post is meant to test.

Here is a photo of an olympic cat, to see if the pictures work as well:



You'll probably notice a few formatting changes as far as the way I add photos and such to the blog, in order for the format to work a little better with the new site, but otherwise, things should be the same as always.

And One Month Later....

The wings are all rigged and nearly complete!

After a few weeks of tying tiny little copper fitting to short lengths of string, I managed to tie at least a few on to the model itself.  I managed to come up with a fairly successful system where I tied all of the string to the little copper turnbuckles first and then tied them to the wing itself.  I originally was doing one string at a time, tying the turnbuckle to the string and then the string to the model, but found this to be pretty slow going.

Here you can see a bunch of the pre-tied turnbuckles ready to go onto the lower wing panels.  I have found that some of my ship-modeling skills have been helpful when it comes to knots and such.

Once I had all of the rigging in the wings complete, then it was time to add various other copper and white metal fittings.   This gave me the opportunity to use a new toy I purchased at the beginning of this project.  It is a 'Hold and Fold' photo-etch workstation from the nice folks at The Small Shop.  As you can see in the photo, it is a billet aluminum clamp-like device that let's me clamp a bit of photo-etched metal down (very precisely) and then fold it using that great big razor blade.  I got to use it a bit today to crease some of the rigging plate things that go on to the wings and will eventually be clamped between the wing and the posts that connect the two wings.

I also spent a bit of time filing, sanding and polishing a few cast white metal parts which were put together to become the little pulleys that control the ailerons.  I've still got two more to add, but here are the tops ones in place:

 

That's all for now!  With the wings nearly complete, I'll soon be moving on to the tail parts.  Until next time.

Wing Staining & Rigging

Work on the wings continues...

Since the last post, I've finished the staining of the wing panels and then put a few coats of a semi-gloss water-based polyurethane.  This is to seal up the wood as well as to add some depth to the finish.  Overall, I am pretty happy with the way the finish turned out and it makes a fantastic contract to the white metal and copper parts.  Here is an image of one of the stained and finished lower wing panels:

 It did take quite a while to get the stain and poly on there, since it all had to be brushed on by hand.  I feel that the results were worth it, though.

 The next step in the process was to add the adhesive copper tape strips to the ends of the ribs at the trailing edge.  These are to simulate the bands of metal that clamped on the trailing edge on the real plane.  This was pretty easy, since the copper tape is very malleable, and can be smoothed down with a fingernail and the edges burnished smooth with some tweezers.

 Here is a photo of the aileron  edge with tape applied.  I really like the way the copper looks against the stained wood.







Next, I pulled out a few of the white metal parts and had a go at polishing them up a bit.  They come with a fairly matte finish and with some imperfections in the casting.  I bit of work with various sanding sticks and they shine up nicely.  Here you can see the aileron control horns attached to the ailerons, and also the fake hinges (made of strip brass) sticking off of the back of the parts.

Now, I am on to the rigging step, where all the turnbuckles and wires that maintain the internal wing structure are put into place.  I'm finding that some of my experience on the Armed Virginia Sloop model is coming in handy, in that I can reuse some of the rigging techniques that I learned on that project.  Here is a pic of the first part that has been completed:

This rigging stuff, while not too complicated, is a bit fiddly and generally slow-going.  I'm expecting that I'll probably spend the next couple of weeks on this, and will have another update once that is complete.  Stay tuned until then!