Evening All,
Thanks Ken, Terri, Frank and Rick for your encouragement - much appreciated.
Frank: I know the temptation when one sees a new or obscure type. I do not have a stash but I do have a long list of aircraft types that i might like to scratch build - and like you I would need the lives of several cats to have the time to build them all! In addition I would need a much larger house to keep them all!!
I have been dithering with this project because I was not sure how to fix the lower wings to fuselage assembly. I had run through several possibilities in my mind:
1. Fix the lower wing via the V struts to the fuselage, then place the middle wings on the fuselage to measure where the strut holes should be. Drill the holes in the middle wing, attach it to the fuselage and insert the wing struts. Finally add the top wing.
2. Put the middle wing on to the fuselage with the strut holes pre-drilled and struts already in place. Mark off on the lower wing where the struts would be and drill holes, then fix lower wing to fuselage. Add top wing.
3. Drill holes in the three wings, put either the lower or middle wing in place, add the second wing and struts and hope that everything lines up. Add top wing.
Option 3 was not a good one - no matter how carefully things are measured from the plans, models are never exactly the same as the plans and it was very likely that the strut holes would be mis-aligned. So it was option 1 or 2. I decided that because the middle wings have to be butt joined to the fuselage, there was a good chance that they would break off while trying to fix the lower wing into place, so I went for a variation on option 1, except that I drilled the holes in the middle wing before I put the lower wing in place. Not a good idea....
The lower wing went on well - with support the structure dried well and square. The problems started when I tried to fix the middle wings because the strut holes did not line up so I had to fill them and drill new ones. That was a real fiddle, the more so because the forward struts have a distinct bend forwards above the middle wing. After much effort I have fitted the lower and middle wings and struts - now I just have to put the top wing and cabanes into place:
I will have to touch in the paint on the wings to conceal where I have filled holes and scraped the existing paint.
The last image shows the top wing ready to put on to the struts: that is not going to be the easiest operation either as there are so many strut ends to cement at the same time. I decided to leave that for a couple of days after all of the messing around with the lower wings. More later.
Thanks for looking.
Stephen.