Evening All,
My sincere thanks to all of you who have replied to the updates - I really appreciate your very positive and supportive comments. William you will now be able to see what the aircraft looked like at the end of this post.
I had to correct an error before proceeding with the front upper wing. I had mis-interpreted the drawings when I put in the radiator pipes: what I had thought were the pipes were in fact control wires to the tail surfaces - the radiator pipes were not on the drawing at all! A quick change in position of the pipes was carried out and they now look much better and plausible. The front upper wing was mounted in the same way as the rear upper wing - by using custom made jigs which were secured with masking tape:
I had learned from experience when mounting the rear upper wing that I would have to invert the model to fix the struts - the masking tape ensured that I could do this while keeping the jigs and wing in place. The centre section struts were fitted first - that meant that the wing was held in part by the struts while the jigs supported the outer parts of the wing when I handled the model. I had to invert the model to be able to fix the struts to the underside of the top wing:
The remaining struts were inserted as per the rear wing and the jigs removed as soon as one pair of struts had been inserted on each side of the centre section. Rigging followed with some difficulty because the fore-aft wires were not easy to get at and access to the bay wires at the rear was restricted by the rear wings. Two separate sessions were required to get this far:
The tail surfaces were assembled before I fixed them to the booms. This allowed me to rig some of the control wires and bracing and made life easier getting everything square and true. The booms were also rigged before the tail surfaces were attached. The horizontal tail plane was CA'd to the upper surface of the boom and the control wires rigged:
Finally I added the ailerons to the rear wings, the windscreen, propellors and the last of the control wires from the tail unit, and the anti-drag wires for the wings and the model is complete:
I am in the process of finishing the trolley on which the machine was carried to the launch ramp and a simple base on which to mount the model as it is a bit fragile and awkward to handle. I hope to be able to post pictures of the model on the base in the completed models section in the next few days and give more views of this rather different aeroplane.
Thanks for looking.
Stephen.
