If you put a piece down how do you find it again?
Sometimes when I'm doing something especially fiddly and keep dropping it, I just say
the hell with it and get down on the floor and do it there!
Here's where I picked things up again a couple of weeks ago. Almost two years to the day from where I left off. Some of the tasks ahead of me seemed almost insurmountable back then. But I've managed to finish a few other projects in the meantime and each one helped me come up with solutions to various problems.
The first thing was the cabane struts. These are more decorative than structural as the wing struts are already nice and solid. I ended up doing them in styrene rather than brass or silver. One handy thing I discovered when test fitting struts on my earlier Pfalz and S.5 builds: dip the ends of the struts in water when you are doing the test fits - the capillary action helps hold the strut in place and lets you move it about without having it fall to the floor all the time!
I also could not think of a decent way to do the vertical struts on the booms properly. Previously I had inserted some .2mm rod down some .5 or .6mm tube and flattened it to make the aerofoil section. The extreme ends of the tube bit into the rod however and caused one of them to snap after it was soldered to the booms. Grrr!
I had a eureka moment the other day and realised there was an easier solution. My strut stock is sterling silver wire that has been flattened to the right proportions. So I cut them to length and did a saw-cut line down each end with a jeweller's saw fitted with a No.7 blade. This created a notch that the .2mm wire could fit into.
I soldered the .2mm wire into each end then shaped the struts to give them a bit more a taper. The scary bit was threading them into the location holes that I had drilled in the booms back in 2019 and finally soldering them in place. To my surprise though, the slot which held the .2mm wire acted like the nib of a fountain pen. As soon as I touched the soldering iron to it, some of the solder in the slot remelted and ran up the wire to locate it to the boom. Phew!
Some more shaping needs to be done, but the main assembly is actually pretty strong considering how fine it is. I don't want to tempt fate too much though, as the two horizontal struts that complete the box assembly are only butt joined. Best not to overhandle it...
The B'1 codes under the wings had me stumped too. There was nothing remotely like them in my spares box and was uncertain as to how I was going to do them. In the end I thought I would have to leave them as black dots and hope something came along later when the rest of the model was finished. I've become less reliant on ready made decals of late however, and I suddenly realised the other day that I could just print the blummin' things myself. I found an image of the Wingnut Wings decal sheet online and scaled this down in photoshop, using it as a guide to draw my own. This was printed out on an A4 piece of paper. Then a bit of clear decal was taped over the spot and the paper fed back into the printer again. Which gave me this:
The printed decal is black with the B'1 portion in clear. To get around this I cut a slightly smaller disk of white decal and put it down first. Then placed the black decals over the top. Not bad for an afternoon's work.
After that I was able to get the undercarriage assembled. A mere 15 parts
I had spent a week or more fussing over these bits back in the day, so it was nice to have them drop into place with only a small adjustment needed to one of the supporting struts.
That's where its at for now. I think the gravity tank and some of the rigging will be next. I'm hoping to get most of the front end done before the booms get attached. I'll add more as it happens.
Cheers!
