Evening All,
Thank you again to all who have stopped to have a look, and especially to those of you who have posted such positive remarks. To receive praise from modellers of the calibre that you represent is very greatly appreciated.
I have made some quick progress (for me) recently - not too many distractions - that will not last so I am not sure quite when I will finish this - hopefully within the next two weeks.
Here is an update as to how far I have managed to get as of yesterday evening.
I painted the undercarriage skids and struts before I added the axles for the wheels. The axles are wire from a paper clip and the brackets holding the axles were from thin rod. I represented the bungee springs with black thread. All of this was fitted before I attached the wheels.
The wheels were made by scribing 4 circles on to 60 thou card and then cutting out squares with the circles inside them. I reduced the squares to circles by cutting off the corners with a knife then finished with a file. I driledl a hole in the centre of each disc and then filed the edges all around to get the taper of the wheel covers. (Strictly the wheels should be bare spokes but in this scale I gave up on that idea and had covered wheels instead). The tyres were made by taking a length of 50 thou diameter rod and the handle of a metal round file. I bent the end of the rod 90 degrees to give a small piece to hold on to with a pair of rat-nose pliers, and held the end of the plastic rod against the handle of the file, plunged the handle of the file into boiling water and slowly rotated the file while holding the plastic rod so that it was forced against the handle in the water. By steadily rotating the handle the rod formed a spiral around the handle. When I had 5 or 6 complete turns of plastic around the handle I withdrew the it from the water but kept pulling the rod at both ends until it was cold. I slid the rod off the handle and I had a spring shaped coil which I used to cut the tyres.
The diameter of the coil has to be less than that of the discs so that the rod will fix hard on to the discs: if the coil diameter is larger this method will not work. I placed the rod ring over the card disc and pushed the ends of the ring until I could measure the length that I needed and cut it. Only a little adjustment to the ends of the rod with a little careful bending and a little filling was necessary to get a good wheel. Any diameter wheel can be made this way - just adjust the thickness of the rod to the size of the tyre required, and the diameter of the spiral to the diameter of the wheel. The wheels were fixed to the axles with superglue.
From the photo you can see that I have also rigged the wings and undercarriage - this was appropriate at this stage as much of the model is accessible and most of the rigging is in places where it is not going to get damaged while I work on other parts of the assembly. This is time consuming as you all know and it amazes me that I have been able to do so much so quickly - this cannot last!
The tail skids and support struts were made from thin rod. The control horns were cut and shaped from Evergreen strip and hinges made for the rudders from rod inserted into tiny holes drilled in the edges.
I am posting a couple more images to try to make up for the lack of them earlier when I could not get my camera to take good close-up images. That problem has now been resolved so here they are. The first is to show that the bird cage effect applies to all parts of this model - rigging the underside was an exercise in itself, and was easier than the wings because everything is easily accessible.
This is why I rigged the rear of the inner bays of the wings at an early stage - access is difficult at the best of times - with rigged booms life would be much more difficult. Hopefully there is a clearer view of the engine than before too.
This is the front end and hopefully a better view of the cockpit. With the front elevator in place some of the rigging in this area would have been very difficult indeed.
There is still much to do - bracing for the booms, anti-drag wires and control wires, the front elevator and associated rigging, etc, but I will continue to finish this before the next posting, which may, as I have written, be a little while.
In the meantime, thanks for looking.
