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1/32nd Pilatus PC-7 from Scratch - 07/04 Spinner & Air Intakes


Fabster

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LSP friends,

 

Even thou I've been a follower of this great site for quite some time, this is actually my first thread which is also about my very first attempt at scratchbuilding anything. I started this project several years ago but I abandoned mostly because I lacked enough references (and experience) in these delicate matters. Just a few weeks ago I decided to retake the subject now that I have better photo references thou i'm still missing the experience, lol.

 

Anyway, I hope I guess this one finished this time while at the same time learning this scratchbuilding stuff as I go.  Please play along with me!

 

The first thing I did back then was to carve a fuselage master using 2 planks of balsa wood, based on some blueprints I requested from Pilatus a couple 2-3 decades ago. Literally! ...I put those drawings to good use, scanning them to scale them down to 1/32nd, then redrawing the cross sections in CorelDraw and creating some cardboard guides to check against my carving progress.  The resulting piece may not be 100% accurate but close enough for my purposes.  The fuselage sides (an other test pieces I also created back then) were stored for several years until now when I decided to prodeed with vacuuforming the fuselage. With the help of a friend who built a rudimentary vacuum box himself, I finally got my balsa fuselage "translated" to plastic (after a few failed attempts of course).

 

Ok, sorry for the long introduction to this project. Here are the old pictures of my balsa master and a recent image of my new vacuuformed fuselage. This adventure is going to be fun, I hope!

 

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image_zps9effcfec.jpeg

 

 

Edited by Fabster
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Awesome!  At first looking at those vac molds for a second I thought "Wow Stephen is going to love this.............a plane made just like he used to make them...........out of a solid block of wood..."  Youll get the reference if you hang out long enough.   :lol:

 

 

Welcome and looking forward to more prorgess!

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I have a little more progress from this week to show you guys.  Thanks a lot for all your previous replies, everyone!

 

So I trimmed one of the spare fuselage vacs to use it as testbed to develop and test the cockpit layout. I was "measuring by eye", looking at some interior picts that I have an trying to match distance and proportion to all main elements agains each other so a lot of trial and error to get to this point which by no means is near perfect nor complete but at least will give me a closer idea on what to do or fix next.  Remember this is my first attempt at scratchbuilding so please be gentle!  lol

 

FAB

 

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photo5-2_zps88668580.jpg

 

photo2-2_zps29293b45.jpg

 

 

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