Evening All,
Thanks to Sandy, Richie, Willem, DaveW, Ken, Rick and Manni for your comments which are much appreciated indeed. I have been away for the past week or more visiting my family for the first time since the end of October last year, but before I left I had done some work which I did not report because I did not have the time, so here is a catch up to take us to where the model is approximately at the moment.
I mentioned in the last post that I wanted to use a milling bit to open up the engine and gunner's cockpits in the top of the hull. I do not normally like using power tools but for this operation I had to do so. For those who do not know what a milling bit is, it is simply a drill head with two sideways cutting teeth instead of a spiral cutter that is found on a drill bit. The milling bit is fitted to the chuck piece on a drill in the same way as a conventional bit. With a conventional bit a hole is drilled in a single vertical movement. A milling bit allows the person to cut a hole using a sideways motion. I hope that the following illustrations will show what I mean:
I started by putting a conventional 1/4 inch drill bit into my (old) power drill which had been mounted on a pillar stand to hold it vertical and rigid. A pilot hole was drilled in the centre of what was to become the larger upper hull opening:
The hole was a slightly larger diameter than the milling bit. The milling bit was put into the drill and the drill lowered and set so that the bit would cut approximately 1mm depth into the wood. The drill was switched on and the milling bit lowered into the pilot hole: now the wood piece was firmly but slowly moved from side to side to cut a shallow indentation in the top of the hull:
The above process was repeated many times until the desired depth of hole was achieved:
The small damaged areas on the top of the hull were caused by the piece jumping as I was attempting to cut to the edges of the hole while it was still shallow. It required quite a lot of firm handling to stop that from happening, and as can be seen I was not wholly successful! Those areas will fortunately be concealed beneath the wings on the completed model, but I will still fill them later before the wings go on. Once the hole was more than 2-3 mm deep the problem was much easier to control. The sides of the hole are not completely square when they are milled so they had to be cleaned up carefully with a new scalpel blade.
Similarly the bottom of the holes are not as flat as I would have liked them to be, but as both the sides and bottom have to be sealed in some way I will solve the unevenness and seal in one go by lining the sides and bottom with thin plastic card!
I have also worked on two small but important parts. The first was the streamlined gear housings for the propellor mounts - these were shaped from some sprue which had been given to me by a friend and which just happened to be perfectly round and of the correct diameter:
I have also carved the propellors from hardwood strip - one is shown here with the marked blank for the second:
I will make the small spinners later from the same piece of sprue.
Thanks for looking.
Stephen.