It’s March 2020 and It is now a very strange and worrying time. As I write this, The coronavirus is wreaking Havock across the planet. I hope you keep well. This post was written just a few weeks before the outbreak in Wuhan, which has now changed everything. I hope this post along with its pictures offers some pleasant distraction in this worrying time.
Welcome to part 5! Good progress so far over the winter. The model is basically built. It’s just the fiddly little jobs that complete the build but seem to take forever to do. These are for example, the hatch, the canopy , the spin molding along the top of the fuselage that joins the canopy and fin, etc etc. I hope not to drag out the build process too long. I want to get it done and you want to see it fly! wish me luck!!
Here are some of the latest pics..
Ready to cut out the hatch. It had to be room enough to get my hand in for pull cord starting, but not so big as to reduce strength in the fuselage.
Hatch cut out. There’s actually now too much room at the front, but any shorter would have cut the canopy in half and I wanted it to be fully attached to the hatch. Bit of a compromise really.. Also you can just see where the skins need gluing together!
Close up of the engine and fan ring. Gotta keep that saw dust out of the engine!
Another angle. In the pic you can see the solid hardboard fan disc, which is bolted snug to the engine and a tight fit inside the fan ring keeping the fuselage in shape whilst building.
Bamboo leading edge. Just finished straightening and bending the 1/8th diameter bamboo edging over the cooker, which is to be glued to the hefty balsa leading edge. I think, in hindsight, I’ve over-engineered the construction of the wings. There’s still leading edge sheeting to be added and with the wing spar lined with thin plywood, their getting quite weighty. The wings are super strong though 🙂
Trim tabs. Okay so here I’m cutting the wing trailing edge to add trim tabs. I opted for single ones on each wing instead of the the two that I originally designed-in. lets see if they work!
In the meantime, I did a little work on the the canopy. In this shot I had a go with forming a canopy in glass fibre over the already carved balsa canopy shown above, but I wasn’t happy with the result, and it was a lot of work. So i decided to hollow out the windows instead and sand the balsa thickness around the windows as thin as possible. You’ll see it in later pics.
Yep, all looking good and nearly finished. Just a little bit of tidying up of the model construction here and there. Next post will feature fitting the hatch and putting the model together ready for final sanding- and I tell you, its a beast!