On the Workbench
Here are the latest photos of the (many) half-finished models in the Stuart workshop. At least when they are in the uncovered state,
you can see some of the construction methods more clearly than
when they are finished. I tend to have several planes on the go
at any one time, which prevents boredom setting in, but does mean
they tend to take a long time to finish!
Albatros D.V
This is the Golden Age kit, which I can highly recommend, in the process of conversion to
CO2 power. The motor is a Gasparin GM 120, and I am hoping to hide the filler nozzle
inside a removable pilot. You can see the tank between the motor and nozzle. I have built in a lower access
hatch under the motor so I can get
at the mounting bolts, and will have a removable nose block behind the propellor. Scale is close to 1/16th. As usual,
I could not resist putting in a couple of extra fuselage stringers. This should
not be a problem, as I will have no weight of rubber in the rear fuselage to worry about.
Curtiss P-6E Hawk
OK - here is the plan. The model in the background is my 1/24th scale 15.5" span model
built from the old Comet plan, and it is a great flier, but gets lousy
static marks in scale competitions - not enough detail, and a see-through tissue
finish. So, I have started a slightly larger version, 1/20th scale, giving a span
of just under 19".
This will have exactly the same outlines, incidence angles and centre of gravity
(so hopefully it will fly as well as its little brother), but more detail
and a fully painted finish. The fuselage now has a scale number of stringers,
and there is more sheet round the nose
(It is bound to need noseweight anyway, so this is only putting in the
weight in a useful structural way).
This new photo was taken in May 2003 and shows that at least some progress has been made,
as the model now has an upper wing and a tailplane. The wing has twice the number of ribs
as the original Comet design (though still nowhere near as many as the real one!) and separate
ailerons. The tailplane has scale structure and the elevators will be hinged with
wire from sandwich bag ties.
Dornier Do 335
Not much to say about this one - it is the West Wings kit, started in a fit of enthusiasm when it first came out, and sitting around in this
state for a couple of years. I am planning to power it with two rubber motors, one driving
each propeller. The kit is very well designed, but there is plenty of scope for weight reduction.
Macchi C.202 Folgore
This model is from the Pres Bruning 1/24th scale plan, available
from
Dave Livesay's plans download page. Nice proportions for a flying model,
so hopefully it should go well (one day!) Note I have now built the wing as well!
Gee Bee Model X
I was building this model with a group of other modellers who belong to the Yahoo "ffcookup"
Group. The idea is that we all build the same model at the same time, and share our building
experiences, hints and tips as we go. The problem is, most people have finished theirs several years ago, and mine is still not finished! The Plan chosen was the Tom Nallen design, 18" span of the Gee Bee Model X, which
was given away with Flying Aces News a few of years ago. It has been a very enjoyable build so
far - a nice light design of a charming little aircraft. The airframe without tissue weighed just 9 grams.
Some more progress to report now (May 2004) as the airframe is covered, and I have even managed
to carve one of those tricky wing fillets. Shame I have now got to do another one and make it look
identical to this one. Who knows, maybe I will actually get it finished this year!
Fokker D.VII
This is how far I got with my second attempt to join in with a build
for the ffcookup group. The kit is the Golden Age Reproductions 20"
span Fokker D.VII, which is an old Scientific design from before the
war. Very light design, as you can see (e.g. 1/16" square trailing
edge), with the potential to be a real floater.
You may notice one non-standard Fokker D.VII feature, namely the two
cockpits. This is because I will be finishing mine as a post war
Belgian civil machine that was used for giving joy rides.
Heinkel He 46
The original idea was to build something to take along to the memorial event for models designed by
Doug McHard, held at Old Warden in 2003. You will not be surprised to hear that I never got it finished in time,
though as you can see, most of the structure is done. the span is 18 inches, and this plan featured in the
centre spread of Aeromodeller, way back in April 1972. I was captivated by it then, and built it within a
week of the magazine dropping through the letterbox. Sadly,
my skills at the time (I was only 15) were not up to building such a delicate model, and I never had any success flying
it (far too heavy, and rather warped, I seem to remember). This time round, I have been doing the best
I can to build carefully and keep the weight down so I can do the design justice.
Pfalz D.XII
This is the DPC models kit, which I started for another cookup on the Small Flying Arts site.
Again, long after the cookup is finished, my model isn't!
I managed to get the two bottom wings and one of the upper ones done, and even covered one of them. I modified the kit design to add scale rib spacing,
and separated the ailerons.
The Esaki tissue
has been printed with five colour lozenge on my ink jet printer. To improve opacity the upper surface is chalked on the rear with
light grey pastel chalk, and the lower lozenge with white chalk. The rib tapes (also chalked tissue) were added afterwards.
Some progress to report in December 2005, as for no obvious reason I got renewed enthusiasm for this project. You can see there is now a fuselage and a complete upper wing, plus the tail surfaces.
These latter were scratch built using the Windsock Datafile drawings as a guide, and feature laminated outlines. Rudder and elevators are hinged with soft wire.
The complex lower wing fairings are a distinctive feature of the type, and rather than use paper fairings as suggested in the kit, I have tried to carve them from soft balsa block, let in between the formers and the 1/32" ply root ribs.
The saga continues! I cannot believe how fast a year can go past. Here we are in December 2006, and the model staggers slightly closer to the finish line.
The fuselage has been covered and airbrushed, as have the tail surfaces.
To get the slightly
fuzzy colour demarkations on the fuselage I used "sausages" of blue tac, with masking tape attached to the top of the blue tac outboard of the area to be painted.
The paint spray gets slightly under the radiused edge of the "sausage" giving a softish edge. If you owned a finer airbrush than mine, you could of course do it freehand.
Skyleada North American YF-100 Super Sabre
As you can see from the plan, this old Skyleada design is not overendowed with stringers, and begs the question, just how many sticks
of balsa do you need to reproduce a round fuselage?
One thing I could not live with was the square lower corners of the air intake, so I added a pair of stringers instead of just one, which
allowed me to break the corner. I also added a hollow laminated intake, which as well as looking more realistic, also gives you somewhere
convenient to hide noseweight.
Uncovered fuselage and wings show fairly light structure. Note some sheet in-filling round the nose, and under the canopy and spine.
Just the canopy and spine to add now. Test glides in the garden showed it to be very nose heavy (like the Skyleada Mystere was) so
I took the opportunity to cut out the tailplane and refit with more negative incidence. The result was
a much floatier glide. The last thing you want with these models is to have to add tail weight!
This photo shows the motor trough. The Rapier is mounted where the Jetex 50 is shown on the plan. The model is 14 inch span
with plenty of wing area, so I am hoping it will go alright with a standard L2 motor.
Here is the model in the state it was it before the first flights. As it turned out, I am glad I did not add any markings! Flight trials could be best described as "disappointing".
With the model balanced for a reasonable glide, under power, it began to stall, and this got worse and worse during the flight, to the extent that it started doing flick loops. Eventually the wing
to fuselage join gave way, so I have a bit of repairing and recovering to do. The conclusion I came to is that the motor is mounted just too far forward, so as the propellant
burns off, the model becomes more and more tail heavy. I will modify the model to move the motor mount further rearwards before I fly it again.
Veron Tru-Flite D.H.C. Chipmunk
Hey ho, another Cookup, and another unfinished model. This one was hosted on the Yahoo "ffcookup" group, and was
for any Veron Tru-Flite model. I chose the Chipmunk, and this was as far as it got. The only significant modification at this point is the
extra fill-in sheeting around the nose.
To be honest, I doubt I will regain the motivation to finish this one, because the wings just look too long and spindly. Looks like a
special high altitude Chipmunk!
Peanut scale Gotha Go 145
Here is another type that seems to have excellent proportions for a peanut scale model, the little known (though it was produced in large numbers) Gotha Go 145 trainer.
I have decided to take a much simpler approach to this one, and have designed the model more along Flying Aces lines, with light weight taking
precedance over scale structure. The fin and tailplane look big enough to not need any enlargement, so the only deviation from scale will be a slight increase in wing dihedral.
The colour picture shows the intended scheme for the model, an aircraft from a Luftwaffe glider unit.
September 2007 now, and the model is really beginning to take shape. Fuselage just about done, and the fin and tailplane completed. The rudder will be
hinged but the tailplane is one piece. If I have got the incidence angles wrong, I will have to shim it. Fuselage sheeting is sanded 1/32" sheet, as I do not
possess any 1/64".
January 2008 and the Gotha is finally ready for painting. Wheels are laminated balsa sheet. The undercarriage has some flexibility
as the rear bamboo struts are a sliding fit in two slots under the lower wing root. This is a big model for a peanut, and I should be able to get quite a lot of rubber in it.
Kharkov R 10
This was one of my Geneseo purchases, the Easybuilt laser cut kit of the Kharkov R 10. Wingspan is 22"
and it looks a very good potential entry for the Flying Aces WW 2 mass launch event. It certainly has plenty of wing area.
So far it has gone together very quickly and easily.
Armstrong Whitworth Argosy
This, I freely admit, is a rather ambitious project, and it has been in the back of my mind for a few years.
I am sure flying performance will be limited by that huge lump of a fuselage, but the thought of seeing a rubber
powered Argosy taking to the air was just too tempting to resist. I have fond memories of these from my air spotting
days at Ringway Airport (Manchester), so the colour scheme will have to be BEA.
The size of the model was governed by two factors; firstly I needed to swing two 7 inch Peck props on the inner nacelles,
and secondly the model had to fit into my existing model box. The plan was thus drawn with a wingspan of 38 inches. By cheating
slightly and moving the tail booms out half an inch per side, this allowed enough space for the props, and also had the added advantage
on giving a useful increase in tailplane area.
I decided to make separate plug-in outer wing panels, with the dihedral break immediately outboard of the booms.
This allowed the rest of the model to fit in the model box.
The construction is heavily based on Chris Starleaf’s Dash 8 design, using a cracked rib wing construction, but using two spars rather
than one because of the relatively wide chord.
The booms of the real aircraft are noticeably slab-sided, so mine are basically boxes made from 1/16” square balsa, with
formers top and bottom to give the rounded shape.
This photo shows the first of the inner nacelles, covered and attached to the front of the tail boom and the wing.
There is not a huge amount of room inside the nacelles, so the formers were made from 2 cross-grained
laminations of 1/32” balsa, allowing the openings to be cut relatively large without weakening them too much.
Here you can see some of the complicated curves around the nose and cockpit area. I had to inlay soft block under the cockpit aperture.
Truly a face only a mother could love!
Here are the outer nacelles under construction. There will be only approximately 4.25" distance between
the prop hook and motor peg, so I am hoping to use long skinny motors with the six inch propellers to achieve about 40 seconds of low
power. Probably all I can hope for is to produce enough thrust to counteract the drag of the nacelle and props. The much longer inner motors will be doing all the work. Note
how the wing sheeting has been cut away to save weight and also give extra clearance round the rear peg.
We move on to January 2008 now, and the wings are temporarily placed on the fuselage. The weight of what you see here is 71.5 grams.
The tailplane has a adjustable elevator using soft wire hinges and both fins also have hinged trim tabs.
The rear fuselage block was roughly carved from soft balsa and then hollowed out with a Dremel before glueing it on.
Final shaping got a bit hairy because I almost broke through the balsa whilst sanding.
Curtiss Shrike
This is the Diels Engineering kit of the Curtiss Shrike, a pre war aircraft of great charactor, and enormous wheel pants!
I was originally going to fit an electric motor, but have now decided to go for rubber power instead, and built an Aich Val for electric instead.
Mods to the kit so far (I can never leave anything alone) are a 10% linear increase in tailplane size, a 1/4" a side increase in wing dihedral, and the
addition of moveable elevators and rudder. I also decided to give the tail surfaces a streamlined section by adding strips either side to the cross pieces.
Aichi Val
The large wing of the Val makes it a good candidate for indoor scale, so the Diels Engineering 1/24 scale kit seemed an ideal subject to try out one of the Atomic Workshop Voodoo 25 electric motors and
Zombie controller. One or two changes were made to the plan, for instance the wing incidence was increased so that the bottom surface was at 3 degrees positive, and some extra dihedral was added.
Also the tailplane is sized to be a compromise between
true scale and the rather large one shown on the kit plan. In fact it is exactly half way between the two. I think I can get away with this smaller tailplane because
I suspect the centre of gravity of this electric model may be a bit further forward than on a rubber model. This will give an effectively longer tail moment. Both the fin and tailplane
have been streamlined by adding strips either side and then sanding to shape.
The wheel spats would be rather vulnerable in a heavy landing, so I fitted a torsion bar arrangement in the wing before covering, as shown in these photos.
The wire runs through a plastic tube and is fixed to an inboard rib. The wire sticking out at the dihedral break can be rotated backwards without excessive force.
The wire is here slipped into plastic tube glued to rear of spat centre lamination (later covered by the outer laminations)
Here the spat is sprung back to reveal the location tab at the front which sits in a slot next to the wing rib.
To avoid buckling of the long 1/32" sheet balsa wing ribs I reinforced all
the bottom edges with 1/32 x 1/16" strips (between the lower spars) and also added 1/32" sheet gussets at the trailing edge.
Wing fillets have been added from notepaper and a cockpit floor from light 1/32" sheet to give me something to glue the crew onto.