It’s early 2020 right now, but this post was written last year, so it’ll make sense. Enjoy!
Yo!! whats happening? Welcome back to the Natsneez build. Nearly finished!! Nearly ready for flights!! It’s been awesome to document this model design and awesome to start flying it 🙂
So I’m now on with the cowling. I showed some pics earlier in the blog where it was in a raw un-carved state, then carved and split in half in order to fit it around the engine and tank, and now in fully carved state. What I need to do now was create a hinged hatch in order to access the engine to start it.
I’ve been thinking of various way to do this, and the sketch below shows probably the most solid way of achieving this.
I thought about hinging the hatch using fabric hinges, but I wanted a neater looking and stronger solution. So I’ve gone with a brass tube and piano wire method, epoxied into the corresponding parts of the hatch. Check out the pics…
I seemed to have forgotten to take a pic of the hinge before installing it! Ah well… you’ll have to trust me, it’s there! The cowl is retained by four used scalpel blades broken down in size and epoxied to the removable bulkhead. Then on the back side of the cowling, I let-in and epoxied four circular magnets into the edge – 2 at the top, 2 at the bottom. The cowl then just snaps on into position when offed to the bulkhead. Works pretty neat.
You know, I’m still not sure about the spinner thing. The one I’m using at the moment just looks too big. And I’m struggling to find one smaller – about 1 inch or 25 mm diameter. So I’m contemplating leaving off the spinner and shaping the front of the cowling a lot smaller. It would save weight and maybe eliminate the lead weight I’ve had to use at the back for the damn thing to fly straight and level!
P.E. Norman wrote a build article for his model. Click here to download and read it. Definitely helped me with my build 🙂