Evening All,
Many thanks again for the complimentary remarks that many of you have made. They really are greatly appreciated and help me to continue with this project. I have been a bit slow because I have had a lot of painting to do and have had to wait while it all dries. The bands on the struts took a long time especially as I had to mix the paint and had to get the mix right for two batches as even my patience ran out after I had gone boggle-eyed after painting about half the struts. And there will be more to do later……
The first step was to attach the booms to the wings and tail surfaces:
The front elevator has only been put into the picture to help me to see what the model will eventually look like.
The 4 struts around the fuselage nacelle were fixed with glue first, followed by the two centre struts on the lower horizontal tail surface. While these were still flexible I put blobs of glue into the relevant holes on the top wing and tail assembly and lowered it on to the struts. Most of the struts went straight into the holes, the rest were pushed with a pair of tweezers. Putting glue into the holes means that if a strut does not fit glue is not smeared over the wing surface. Then the whole was jigged and allowed to dry out overnight. Alignment was by Mk 1 eyeball: provided that the jig surfaces are straight it is not difficult to get things to align properly.
I have shown this picture because many people seem to think that complex jigs and tools are needed for successful scratch building and I just want to show that they are not. I model on a very low budget and I cannot afford expensive equipment, and I doubt whether I would get a better result if I did. You just need to think trough carefully each stage, prepare things beforehand and then be systematic and patient. At this stage the assembly required careful handling but was remarkably stable. The outer wing struts were added next, one side at a time, and firmly held in place with a suitable weight while they dried out.
Finally the two forward tail struts were glued into place and I had a structure which I could handle and which was not going to fall apart. This may look weak but really it is not - the struts hold everything in place and the model can be turned and moved easily.
I decided to start to rig some of the struts because there will be a very large number of wires on this model (somewhere in the order of 200 when it is finished) and not all of them are going to be very accessible when all of the struts and undercarriage are in place. So I have rigged parts of the inner wires around the sides and rear of the fuselage and the tail. None of these will be easily damaged later but they are relatively easy to put into place now. All wires are made from rolled copper wire held with CA.
The last image shows that I have added the rear inner wing struts so that I could rig this part of the airframe at this stage as these wires will be very tricky to put in place with boom struts in position. This is about as far as I have got at the moment. The next stage will be to add the remainder of the wing struts and then the boom struts and rudders, after which I can start on the undercarriage.
Thanks for looking.
