The landing gear is done.
The Wheels are built up using cardboard using the kit design.
These are the individual pieces:
Pieces glued together with a hole drilled in the center:
Wheels painted dark grey primer. The tires are rounded out with a glaze, MH ReadyPatch, and sanded, repainted reglazed, and sanded and painted again.
Glass beads at the center hole to cause the center skin to achieve a conical shape. I use a .031 music wire to canter the beads while they are drying.
Conical skin attached:
The method that I use for WWI landing gears is to use as struts K&S 3/64 Brass rods. These provide the necessary stiffness and the diameter provides additional bearing area at the connect point vs. thin music wire wrapped in paper. The goal is to construct the landing gear so that the airplane sits properly from all angles and a structure that is stiff and stable that can handle adjustment during construction is required to achieve this. The Fokker landing gear presents a challenge as the sub wing needs to be positioned accurately and quite frankly, gets in the way. The kit design has the struts connect from the fuselage to the wing separately and as music wire wrapped in paper. My experience with this situation always gave un-satisfactory results. The direction that I took for the struts is to make loops of the brass rods painted red primer and feed them through the sub wing. Later they will be separated to final V shape. The axle is .031" music wire wrapped in paper velum which is glued to the lower wing.
The wing skin is folded over and the struts are separated. The rigging wire is pre-assembled using EZ Line.
Another view. The end pieces are left off as my plan is to add glue at the side locations and paint in red primer after the wing is properly positioned on the fuselage.
Struts and sub-wing assembled to the fuselage with glue added to the sub wing end pieces.
Final look with wheels and rigging wire in place. Turnbuckles are rendered in velum paper wrapped around .031" music wire as done on the Phonix DI
