Many thanks for bearing with me Stephen and Zac. Hopefully I have made good use of having my work space back this week, it has certainly been great fun playing around with styrene, glue and paint again.
Enough waffle and on with the update.
I made the tail fin:
20221029_203202 by
Richard Williams, on Flickr
The rib tape is made from white decal strips, I tried so hard to make stitches from both fine wire and fishing line but it was far too hard for me to line them all up correctly and the trial runs looked utterly horrendous. I settled for tiny punched rivets. To the naked eye (mine at least) they are barely visible and appear just as a texture which is good enough for me. It doesn't look much for two days of modelling but holding it up to the light gives an idea of why:
20221029_203257 by
Richard Williams, on Flickr
The structure was made from 1mm square styrene and round rods. It was a little warped at first but boiling water followed by clamping in a vice solved the problem.
I also made the main fuel tank from styrene sheet. The straps are just 1mm Tamiya tape with more punched rivets, 0.5mm this time. Although I am modelling the aircraft in Jamo's magnificent photo set I decided to abandon the idea of dual control for the sake of simplicity and my sanity.
The struts are made from wooden coffee stirrers, I was quite pleased with them at first but looking at the photo they don't really resemble the struts on the BE2c. I may remake them.
20221029_204444 by
Richard Williams, on Flickr
Well it's great to be back at the bench after such a lengthy absence, I hope it won't be another year before my next update!
Best wishes all, sorry to have gone AWOL for such a long time.
Richie