Fvdm

That's a great cockpit. Nice detailing.

Wow, those fasteners are awesome. Stil a few more to go? 

I was posting a reply and didn't see your reply Juraj. Great pics and thanks for the help

Wow, those fasteners are awesome. Stil a few more to go? 

Fuselage Frame
 
After a lot of research online I discovered that the drawings easily found online were not as accurate as I would like, so I decided to build it in 3D in my computer... then used that as the template for the physical model.
 
This is the template drawing I generated from the 3D model.  The color coding breaks down as follows:
Light Blue - 3/64" plastic rod (main fuselage structure) Dark Blue - 1/16" plastic rod (Landing gear support) Green - 1/32" plastic rod (cowling internal support) Purple - 3/32" plastic tube (Tail surfaces support)
 
For simplicity I decided to build this out of plastic...I originally had planned on using brass or aluminum, but decided that Plastic gives me a lot more flexibility and control, and is easier to work with.
 
I bought a simple magnetic whiteboard (small) and some magnets... one type comes in a roll that I could cut and use as guides (see the image below), the other type are very strong map-magnets that I used to hold down clamps as shown.

 
Once both side structures were completed my problem was how to keep it all square when adding the connecting structure... what I came up and why I am using a magnetic building board, was using the magnets and several 2" angles.. I used the clamps to pin the structure flat.. this insured the structure was square in width and height.

Note that I am using the part of the plan marked TOP, this is because I am adding the structural supports for the top of the fuselage (it is top down in these images)

 
As I moved down the fuselage, I had to slide the angles down and move the clamps at each frame station due to the curvature of the rear half of the fuselage.

 
... I then rotated the entire thing 180 degrees so I could do the same for the bottom structural supports.  Note that I have moved the frame to the part of the plan marked BOTTOM.

 

 
The completed fuselage frame:

 

Spent a couple hours putting in some more screw heads..I must have some loose ones in my head..
I used slightly larger screw heads than what I guessed as to what they are on the real thing, I figured the heads are probably in the 5/8"-3/4" diameter range, the heads I used are about 1" in scale at first I thought they might look too big but when paint goes over them they look alot smaller than what the raw brass looks like.
 

Two of my photos:

fl2012d2_0684_upr by Juraj Jankovič, on Flickr
 

fl2012d2_0691_upr by Juraj Jankovič, on Flickr
 
Click for bigger resolution. There are few more pictures in the album there. I hope it helps a little.
 
Juraj

I really don't think the pivot points are online with the black marks you have indicated.  The pivot point (hinge-line) is about at the aileron leading edge... see the following images:

 

 
 
 

Looking good so far.

Before I could prime the fuselage i had to place some more parts. One of this parts was the lower center wing. And man o man, did I mess this up 
When I glued this part I saw something strange. I looked at the model, I looked at the manual , I went to the wall en hit my head against it. 
 
In the manual you will see at the end of the toothpick some sort of adjusting.
 

 
Now look at my piece
 
eal
 
Something did not go wel here. While cleaning this piece i must have tought this were some kind of sprue or something so i cut it off..........
 
A well, after realising what I had done I had a good laugh en fixed it with some styreen rod and a piece of a earbud.
 

 
This will do for me. After this I sprayed the fuselage in the primer and went on with the wings. I had the idea of cutting out the ailerons but there seems to be a different between the top side and the bottom side.
 

 
The piece of tape is of the same lenght. When the aileron moves upwards, the pivotting points are at the black stripes. (Is it called pivotting points or is it called hingeline?)
But where are the pivotting points when the aileron moves downwards??????????
 
I really have no idea and I can't find it in the references so I think I will leave it as it is
 
Thanks for watching.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Nice one with the centre section, I think we all must have cut off bits at some time or another thinking that they were part of the sprue.
That aileron does look a bit odd, leaving it alone is probably a wise move.
 
Cheers
 
Dennis

Very nice work!

I was going to wait to post this build thread until I got farther along, but thought that it might be a good complement to Garage21’s Sopwith Camel thread and kkarlsen’s amazing Fokker Triplane thread.  By the way Kent, your build thread is what inspired me to start this build, so thank you.
 
After working on my 1/16 scale Stearman and realizing that I had bitten off more than I could chew with my first model in decades, I lost interest and eventually stopped work on it a while back and decided to look for something that would excite me more and start again... maybe in a smaller scale with something a little simpler in order to move quicker.  Then I saw Kent's Fokker Dr.I thread as mentioned and decided to jump back in.
 
I decided on a 1:24th scale, built from scratch Fokker E.III from 1915:

Jerry Boucher, the artist of the above Fokker E.I painting (© J.J.Boucher) kindly gave his permission for me to use it in my post.
Please visit his website, his work speaks for itself in its quality and presentation:  www.the-vaw.com
 
This was a very simple aircraft and there are some excellent resources online... though I am going to have to recreate the scale drawings necessary to build this plane as there are no complete plans  easily accessible online (that I have found).  As you will see I will be building the aircraft in the computer in order to generate good usable scale drawings and then will use those as the basis for my build, which will mostly be plastic and resin, with brass and/or aluminum parts used as necessary.
 
I will also be building many of the difficult parts and assemblies in the computer and using my 3D printer to supply them.  This entails a lot of trial and error as you will see. 
 
For those interested I have an Anycubic Photon 3D printer which is an LCD (Digital Light Processing) DLP printer... basically the 3D model file is sliced into masks of varying size (set when setting up the 3D model), the light from the LCD shines through the unmasked portions of the 3D file hardening the printed part one layer at a time as the build plate rises from the resin tank.  At the finest setting it can be set to an accuracy of .1mm, which provides amazing detail.

 
Here is my 3D fuselage (frame only) model... I will discuss the fuselage assembly first:

Since the last update i was going to work on the fasteners. The fasteners Trumpeter made on this model are ugly and real thick. In the BIGED set are some nice fasteners. To place these fasteners I had to cut the molded fasteners, sand it and place a replacement. Difficulty here is that there are three sort of fasteners, round ones, triangels en square fasteners. The instructions on the Eduard sheets are a little vague so I opened my reference pics and placed the fasteners. 
 
Here an overview. There are a lot of fasteners. The otherside looks the same.

 
A little bit in cose-up 

 

 
Now I have some clean-up to do and then it's time for a light coat of primer.
 
As you can see I have also placed the horizontal stabiliser. The elevators a placed a little down but I am not satisfied yet so I am gonna place them a little more down.
 
In the meantime I also worked on the engine. I had some PE to add but not to much. 
Here are the baffles placed. These are placed to force the wind through the cilinders for cooling.

 
According to Trumpeter I had to place this part (I don't know the name, sorry)

 
According to Eduard the ring and wide spokes had to be removed

 
All is then inserted in the Townend ring and a little oilwash is applied.
 

 

 
 
All tips and critics are welcome.
 
Thanks for watching.
 
Ferry
 
 

HAPPY NEWYEAR!
 
My first post of this new year is about closing the fuselage. All i was needed to do was made the fuel-/oiltanks. I sanded them flush, sprayed it red and used self adhesive alu tape to represent the bands. When that was done i placed all things in the right side of the fuselagehalf and closed it.
 

 

 
I think the fit of the kit so far is great. I didn't have to use a lot of persusion and there are almost no gaps.
 

 
 

 
I then went on to the horizontal stabilasor. I used some PE here because the controlhorns of the kit and the trim tabs are not great. On the left the adjusted piece.
 

 
A little bit of cleaning up to do.
 

 
 
That is it for this time. Thanks for looking in and untill the next update.
 
Ferry
 
 
 

hello fellows
 
Slow progress since the last update, but thought i'd post couple picture before I start the internal rigging
 





 
Very enjoyable when i get time on the bench

I know boring, but starting to set cockpit parts.
 
B-25J by The 3rd Placer, on Flickr
 
I'll mention one issue though, the IP center support seems longer than the outside legs. This causes a see saw effect left to right when its inserted into the locator holes at the cockpit floor.
I suspect its just a mold mismatch and the fix was to remove the center locating tab and block sand the center post until it was level.
 
Ryan

First up, I finished the elbow rest for the Ruhrstahl X-4 control stick. Since no pics of the actual elbow rest exist (that I know of) and the fact that this is a later iteration of the X-4 this is what mine looks like. 
 
Its not perfect but looks the part IMHO. It actually swivels and locks out of the way, swinging back toward the console, but I have it locked in the extended position so people can see what its actually for:
 
 

 

 
 
 
 
 
Next up it was time to make sure the fuselage was closed up.  I got the fuselage closed up, and the spine graphed on. The fit on both was actually pretty good:
 

 
 
 
 
 
Next up, I got the QB exhausts painted and installed. These were not rusted out, nor super weathered ,but I used Alclad jet exhaust, followed by some Alclad pale burnt metal, and then some flat clear with soot on the tips. All sounds complex, but the colors sort of blended more than I expected
 
They actually look much better IRL than in pics:
 

 
 

 
 
 
 
 
Then I took some time and got the engine covers installed. This took some doing, as the rear engine covers were a tight fit, and getting the trailing edge around the exhausts was a bit of a task.
For this, I was in a quandary about how to mask all those exhausts stacks off. What I ended up doing, was some fancy dancy masking, by actually making a pocket of tape for the exhausts and attaching them to the panels before gluing in the engine cover panels, both front and rear.  This seems a bit odd, but it resulted in a very tight mask around each exhaust set on each side. So far this has worked out better than I hoped, but the litmus test will be once the model is painted, as I will see if the tape comes off as easy as I hope it will.
I made sure to attach the inner portion of the tape with minimal attachments to the inside surface of the engine covers, so when it does come time to remove the tape, there wont be a lot of tape holding things in place from the inside.
 
I also could not resist putting the cowl, cowl flaps, rad front and both props on as a mock-up to see what things are going to look like:
 

 
 
 
 
 
As you can see, I also cut down the port side exhaust intake shield, as I thought it looked odd extending so far beyond the rear of the exhausts:
 

 
 
 
 
 
 Both rear engine panels did fit, but they were tight, and will need a bit of finish sanding/tidying up:
 

 
 
 
 
 
All in all, Im very please at how fast this one is going together, and how well its turning out:
 

 
 
 
 
 
Tomorrow today (starting right now actually!) we are supposed to get 6 - 10" of the white stuff,  and hit a low of -5F, so the boss just said to work from home. That means its Friday and Ill be working on work model stuff here.
 
I think tomorrow I will be hitting the spares drawer to see what I can find in the way of louvers or scoops for some extra rear engine cooling for the A-2 Trop.  I also got the Eduard exterior in, so am also going to try to get the rad screen painted and installed as well.
 
As always cheers and thanks for dropping in on me!

Before I could prime the fuselage i had to place some more parts. One of this parts was the lower center wing. And man o man, did I mess this up 
When I glued this part I saw something strange. I looked at the model, I looked at the manual , I went to the wall en hit my head against it. 
 
In the manual you will see at the end of the toothpick some sort of adjusting.
 

 
Now look at my piece
 
eal
 
Something did not go wel here. While cleaning this piece i must have tought this were some kind of sprue or something so i cut it off..........
 
A well, after realising what I had done I had a good laugh en fixed it with some styreen rod and a piece of a earbud.
 

 
This will do for me. After this I sprayed the fuselage in the primer and went on with the wings. I had the idea of cutting out the ailerons but there seems to be a different between the top side and the bottom side.
 

 
The piece of tape is of the same lenght. When the aileron moves upwards, the pivotting points are at the black stripes. (Is it called pivotting points or is it called hingeline?)
But where are the pivotting points when the aileron moves downwards??????????
 
I really have no idea and I can't find it in the references so I think I will leave it as it is
 
Thanks for watching.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

found some motivation for the second saet and some placement off the parts
 

 

 

 
next up the other ip and mid consol
 
Mark

Thank you, I must admit I have surprised myself with this one.
 
Cheers
 
Dennis

Before I could prime the fuselage i had to place some more parts. One of this parts was the lower center wing. And man o man, did I mess this up 
When I glued this part I saw something strange. I looked at the model, I looked at the manual , I went to the wall en hit my head against it. 
 
In the manual you will see at the end of the toothpick some sort of adjusting.
 

 
Now look at my piece
 
eal
 
Something did not go wel here. While cleaning this piece i must have tought this were some kind of sprue or something so i cut it off..........
 
A well, after realising what I had done I had a good laugh en fixed it with some styreen rod and a piece of a earbud.
 

 
This will do for me. After this I sprayed the fuselage in the primer and went on with the wings. I had the idea of cutting out the ailerons but there seems to be a different between the top side and the bottom side.
 

 
The piece of tape is of the same lenght. When the aileron moves upwards, the pivotting points are at the black stripes. (Is it called pivotting points or is it called hingeline?)
But where are the pivotting points when the aileron moves downwards??????????
 
I really have no idea and I can't find it in the references so I think I will leave it as it is
 
Thanks for watching.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Looks nice! Well done

Nearing completion of the cockpit:
 

 

 
Some more wood work...
 

 
More soon...

Ok friends a post with two objectives.
First:
I have begun the weathering on the 1/32 Hasegawa P-40E.  Using both a cheap set of oils and Abteilung 502 paints.
I want to give this build a finish that suggests a story of an aircraft that has seen some hard use but is still airworthy.  The aircraft was based out of India and supported flights over the Burma hump.  









Now the second objective is the quality of the pictures.  I have spent quite a bit of time over the last four or five days trying to dial in a better quality picture.  These are the latest in the test.
Please all comments, critiques, and criticism are encouraged.

Joe