1:72 Maquette Ilya Muromets

[GAJouette]

 Ian,
Fantastic works my old friend. Keep up the outstanding progress.
Highest Regards,
Gregory Jouette

[RAGIII]

Outstanding progress Ian! This is continuing to be a great build of a unique subject!
RAGIII

[jamieg]

I really like the way the pastels gave variation to the colour. I am going to have to try that.

Jamie

[IanB]

Thanks for the feedback gents, much appreciated!

 I did a little more on the fuel tanks today, but they needed a little touching up so I've had to put them down until that dries.

I used .010" brass rod for the vents and level indicators (calling them gauges is perhaps being a little optimistic!). they have been fitted and painted as necessary. When the touch up on the brass is dry I'll dirty them up a little and attach them to the side pieces. Then I can attach the whole lot to the fuselage and rig it all.





 I also started to take a more detailed look at the rigging, and creating a plan for it. Harry Woodman provides some very useful diagrams in his Datafile special, but these are for the later blunt nosed Veh. The sharp nosed one had some extra wires (MORE? Really?) in the inner bays. There were two more double wires, one from the top and one from the bottom of the inner engine struts to the bottom of the cabane struts (both front and rear), and the inner two bays had single cross bracing wires on the lower halves for and aft, presumably to aid the engineer if he needed to clamber out and fix the engines in flight. I've marked the extra wires on the diagram....



 If i'm going to do all that, I might as well do it correctly!

Ian

[ondra]

Wow, Ian, what a magnificient build! Great job.

Cheers

Ondra

[RAGIII]

Continuing to be awesome Ian! Looking forward to the rigging!
RAGIII

[IanB]

I'm glad someone is Rick!
Ian

[Des]

Coming along really well Ian, great job on the fuel tanks.

Des.

[Juan]

Beautiful work Ian, love what you have done so far.

[Alexis]

As always Ian , enjoy following your builds and this is turning out wonderful so far 




Terri

[Manni]

Ian, superb build. Very,very nice. I am looking forward to the rigging. Top.
Manni

[IanB]

Thanks everyone, Terri - good to see you're still here, albeit a little more in the background!

 I added all the support wires to the tanks using 1.5lb monofilament...



(yes, it is there!) then attached them to the side panels.
 After that there was only one thing to do...attach the assemblies to the fuselage and finish them off. That meant adding the support braces under the tanks, attaching the support wires, and rigging the centre section. For that I used 2lb mono as it is a little thicker. The rigging on the real thing consisted of single wires, and double/triple wires taped to batons to stop any broken wires fouling the props. I will use these 2 sizes of mono, plus thin strip for the larger 3 wire assemblies, to give a better sense of the variation in the rigging.







 Unfortunately there's more touching up to do. I clamped some scrap plastic against the sides while attaching the cabane panels, to keep them vertical and aligned with the fuselage, I then used a little PlasticWeld and some must have crept under the scrap. When I removed them some of the paint came away too....Other than that I'm pretty happy with how it's coming on!

Thanks for looking in!

Ian

[NinetythirdLiberator]

Don't know how on earth I missed this one, Ian.  Fantastic progress!  I need to make one of those and display it next to my Staaken!!!!!!

Cool. 

Dan

[Juan]

Superb modeling at this scale (or any other, but specially 1/72).  Looking forward to your progress.

[TobyCoulson]

Continues to impress. Outstanding