Evening All
Progress has been slow of late because I have been absent from home again and I have been trying to keep up with some of the tasks around the house - life can be a real distraction sometimes!
The first thing that I did was to add the horizontal plate on the nose and cut out the section where the engine will fit later. This piece was 20thou card. I also shaped a piece of similar card to make the windshield and glued this into place. The flying surfaces were completed too. I drilled the holes in the wings for the struts, together with a single hole in the lower wing to take a piece of rod which will be used to attach the fuselage to the wing.
I added the rudimentary cockpit details - floor, seats, control column, rudder bar but did not know what to do about instruments as I could not find any details, so I just left them out. Judging by other early machines it is likely that the instruments were minimal and were placed wherever was convenient at the time - there were probably not standard fixings. I cut the struts from 20 x 30 thou Evergreen strip. Everything was painted and then the fuselage structure rigged with rolled 40SWG copper wire.
The next stage required care and patience because the fuselage has only one contact point with the lower wing and the alignments vertically and horizontally need to be accurate or the whole model will look wrong. To achieve this I used a pin to attach the fuselage to the wing as described, but I also added the 4 inner struts as these support the fuselage sides and help to keep it upright. The top wing was placed on to the struts while the latter were still flexible and the whole sub-assembly jigged to keep everything square and properly aligned. As usual my jig was anything but state-of-the-art: I hope that I can demonstrate that simple items available to most modellers can be used very effectively provided a little thought and planning is carried out beforehand.
When dry the sub-assembly is remarkably strong - not flyable yet but certainly strong enough to handle and be able to add the outer struts without fear that the thing is going to fall apart.
Thanks for looking.
