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HK B-17...C 11/2 progress resumes!


brahman104

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17 hours ago, Gazzas said:

  Amazing!  That bombay is awesome!  And all of that skinning is stunning!

 

Thanks Gazza, it's actually a lot easier to photograph on an overcast day :) 

 

11 hours ago, JayW said:

Holy Moly Craig - there is ALOT going on in that bomb bay!  It is beautiful, not to mention functioning doors.  I shake my head in amazement.  I tell you - both you and I have major "tigers by the tail".  We both risk getting out of our lanes so to speak, and going down in flames.  But I think you have (or will have) succeeded.  Me - jury is out.

 

Couldn't agree more Jay! Although I'd definitely say you're winning looking at how everything is sitting together in one piece :) 

 

9 hours ago, scvrobeson said:

Wonderful progress as always Craig. She's a beautiful silver whale on your bench. Can't wait to see the wings added on.

 

 

 

Matt 

 

Thanks Matt! I had exactly the same thought about it; does look a bit fish-like without the rest of it. Probably need to do another mock up once the fuselage is more or less finished.

 

5 hours ago, Rockie Yarwood said:

Looking great, Craig!

 

Thanks Rockie!

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unbelievable stuff Craig!

 

..the bomb bay is just a masterwork, simply incredible detail

 

more than that though, is the skinning, the skill you have developed in getting a working facsimile of raised rivets is something very special :) It looks so lifelike and opens doors to airframes I had considered but written off as 'impossible' as they had raised rivets (would love to do a Grumman Duck for example). Your work proves nothing is impossible with perseverence, skill and an open mind :)

 

I am seriously envious of what you will have on the shelf at the end of this!

 

Peter

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On 7/26/2022 at 1:52 AM, airscale said:

unbelievable stuff Craig!

 

..the bomb bay is just a masterwork, simply incredible detail

 

more than that though, is the skinning, the skill you have developed in getting a working facsimile of raised rivets is something very special :) It looks so lifelike and opens doors to airframes I had considered but written off as 'impossible' as they had raised rivets (would love to do a Grumman Duck for example). Your work proves nothing is impossible with perseverence, skill and an open mind :)

 

I am seriously envious of what you will have on the shelf at the end of this!

 

Peter

 

Thanks very much for your kind words and unending encouragement on this build Peter! The rivets are still very much a skill in development (as is the metal work in general as I'm sure you'd agree!). It's definitely your work which inspires me to push my skills further :) 

 

Grumman Duck you say? Yes please! The raised rivets are perhaps a little less forgiving than the recessed ones, but I certainly can't imagine you shying away from a challenge like that!

 

 "I am seriously envious of what you will have on the shelf at the end of this!"
 

But will you be envious of the size of the shelf I'll need to put it on? :rofl:

 

Well I think I've just about succeeded in my personal "mission impossible." I never would have dreamed when I made the bay those years ago that it would fight me this hard, but I guess that's what you get for not having the best forward plan ;) 

 

It may not be perfect, but I've managed to hide the butchery of the bays, while preserving the operation of the doors.

 

As you'll recall, this is what I had to try and hide...

7/5

 

And on the inside....

7/5

 

 

To this.....

27/7

 

And on the other side....

 

27/7

 

Due to the uneven grinding on this side, I ended up having to cut the "Z" cap into 3 pieces, but still not bad when you consider what it looked like before. For the record, the "Z" cap on this side alone took about 2 hours to get right........ a lot of nervous test fitting of a very delicate part! You can see where I still had to grind some relief into the cap....... that's how tight the fit is in there!

 

And from the outside. This.....

24/7

 

To this....

27/7

 

It may still be a little rough, but I'll take it!

 

The battle of the bay is over. I still need to put a few more details inside, but I can now happily move onto something else (there's a right waist window that is screaming out for me to finish!).

 

Till next time,

 

Craig

 

 

 

 

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  • brahman104 changed the title to HK B-17...C 24/7 27/7 Battle of the bay - part 2

I can’t see anything ‘rough’ about that whatsoever, Craig - it’s a masterpiece of micro-engineering. This is going to be the ultimate model of a B-17 in any scale, that’s for sure. 
 

Now you need to brace yourself for the main gear bays - when you get there ;)

 

All the best,

Tom

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My gosh - what a victory Craig!  Fit and fair really look good.  And it functions!  BTW, I can relate to the size of the model.  To this day I have not figured out what to do with the 1/18 P-38, and I finished it quite a while ago! 

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11 hours ago, tomprobert said:

I can’t see anything ‘rough’ about that whatsoever, Craig - it’s a masterpiece of micro-engineering. This is going to be the ultimate model of a B-17 in any scale, that’s for sure. 
 

Now you need to brace yourself for the main gear bays - when you get there ;)

 

All the best,

Tom

 

Thanks Tom! Well if it passes your keen eyes than I must be on the right track! :). It'll certainly be unique, that's for sure....

 

Ah yes the main gear bays....... I need to return to them soon. Thanks for the reminder B)

 

Craig

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1 hour ago, JayW said:

My gosh - what a victory Craig!  Fit and fair really look good.  And it functions!  BTW, I can relate to the size of the model.  To this day I have not figured out what to do with the 1/18 P-38, and I finished it quite a while ago! 

 

Thanks Jay! Glad that's over with, and very happy with the result! I think I got lucky this time and got away with it....... My experiences here and following your corsair has certainly shown me the value of good planning and mocking up. Definitely something to consider for any future project this complex.

 

Oh yes, I'd imagine a 1/18 P-38 is probably almost the same size! Lucky I build slow :) 

 

Craig

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1 hour ago, CANicoll said:

Just found this thread, and as @Gazzas, Peter @airscale, and others have said, just amazing.  I've been fortunate to spend a bit of time around some B-17s so am just geeking out over your work.  Fantastic!!

 

Chris

 

Hi Chris, welcome to the saga! :) Thanks for looking in and commenting on the build, who doesn't love a B-17 right? Feel free to provide input from your experiences; I've learned a lot during this build, but still far from being an expert........ I hope you enjoy the rest of the journey; it's far from over yet!

 

Craig

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Craig,

 

As nice a fit as you had when you first fabricated the bomb bay compartment,  I'm sure it was no surprise there were fit/gap issues when it came to final assemble. Especially getting to the overall snug fit in the closed position! You'd expect that one area would be flush, causing another to set high or low. low or high. You pulled it off and it looks great. As is the norm for you, "that's good enough" is around the 99.999% correct mark.

 

Had it all fall into place like a Swiss watch would have been a godsend, but seeing you correct the "gaffes" with a blend of ingenuity and artistic license were modeling miracles in themselves! Maybe not 100% accuracy --- but I'm hard pressed not to believe it isn't! 

 

Terry

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On 6/23/2016 at 5:52 AM, brahman104 said:

Thanks Wolf! :)

 

So even though I got some of those fancy Uschi wood grain decals, I figured I'd have a play with the cockpit floor; when I first put the oil paint on I thought I'd well and truely buggered it up, but now that it's dry, I don't think it looks too bad. Might go over it with some acrylic paint and do some fine details just for practice but otherwise,  here's my first attempt at wood grain :)

 

FullSizeRender_zps6von1f6d.jpg

 

Onto the reverse side, and it was time to start running some of the myriad of control cables that come from the central pedestal. I can only imagine how much of a nightmare it must have been to rig this plane, or for that matter, re-run cables that had been shot out in combat. Full respect to the groundcrews! :)

 

I've got a roll of some kind of shiny slightly elastic thread which, although it's not the right colour, is relatively easy to work with and smooth, so no fuzz issues here.

 

FullSizeRender%203_zpswx3od9xb.jpg

 

For those who are familiar with the underfloor of the cockpit in a B-17 will know there's some rather complicated brackets to hold all the pullies. The trick here is to assemble everything in the correct order, as it's pretty much impossible to try and re-thread through the deep down parts once everything is on top. This must be what it's like to do rigging on a ship in a bottle...... :hmmm:  not sure I'll be taking that up any time soon!

 

Here's a few of the brackets in progress. I've cropped the photos as they're really tiny, so the imagine quality is a little rough, but you get the idea hopefully :)

 

FullSizeRender%206_zpsgqafybob.jpg

 

Sorry guys, I'd like to post more, but photo bucket is being unhelpful at the moment. I'll try again later :(

 

Craig

Craig, This build is so beyond what I could ever do, but, I have used the thin wood veneer that comes in cigar boxes to great effect on wood floors for trucks. Bonus for your application is it's two sided, so it would be to scale probably.

 

Perry

 

 

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On 3/19/2017 at 5:10 AM, brahman104 said:

 

Well when you figure it out please feel free to let me know! I'm always open to suggestion and I actually don't really know what I'm doing.....  :)

 

 

Come on Rich, you know you want to......... :)

 

Well it's been a few weeks and not really much earth shattering progress to show, but I'm chipping away at a few things so I figured I should share them.

 

When I left last time I was just about to cut into the nose section to make room to work in there once the fuselage halves went together. That's obviously not going to happen for a while but it did allow me to start forming the soundproofing in there.

 

IMG_4171_zpspiyuljua.jpg

 

I then added I beams to act as "thicknessers" for the soundproofing. This also had the added advantage of stiffening up the nose, so the final shape should now be a bit more predictable for the purposes of attaching the nosecone.

 

IMG_4205_zps4wsm5pqe.jpg

 

Then it was a case of adding rows of putty and smoothing them out to hopefully look like the segmented stitched sections. This will take more work, but it's the base that's important at the moment. It's starting to get heavy now too.... perhaps this will be a world first case of a "nose-sitter!" ;)

 

IMG_4207_zps3mcvfqzv.jpg

 

I then went and ran 20km as I'm also training for an ultra-marathon in Canada in August. North Queensland is not only extremely hot at the moment, but also not raining like it should be, except from my face.....

 

IMG_4208_zpsvovw2vgx.jpg

 

Eventually, I'll make some brass templates for the window shapes and clean them up properly, but for now they'll do.

 

IMG_4258_zpshe2e1z8h.jpg

 

I also tried to nail the colour of the soundproofing, which seems somewhat difficult. I feel that's close enough for my purposes :)

 

IMG_4259_zpsgj6yblwx.jpg

 

I finally pulled my finger out and skinned the inside of the left fuselage half, as I need to start the ribbing work.

 

IMG_4261_zpsexovllep.jpg

 

Given that I'm about to do an awful lot of riveting work (no pun intended) with the rear fuselage details, I was looking for a tool that might save me a little time, so I came up with this....

 

IMG_4257_zpsw1yb194v.jpg

 

In my mind it was going to be awesome and reduce the time taken to rivet significantly. Unfortunately, there were some ever so slight differences in the heights of each spike, so despite careful application of hand pressure, the rivets would not come out equal. There was also too much flex (I even tried another variation having longer stems for each to make them more rigid) and the patterns came out rubbish. I have resigned myself to doing them individually, although Peter's excellent template does do a fantastic job....

 

Live and learn!

 

It's one thing to make ribs for each side in the same fashion as the bomb bay, but there's some main bulkheads in the rear section that will need to be made in one piece, so I was in need of some accurate templates now that I had skinned the rear section.

 

I remembered Paul Budzik's video on using hydrocal to take the impression of the half, so I thought I'd give it a go. Obviously, this is a little different to his approach as I'm doing the whole half of each side, but I think I'll be able to use it to derive the longeron shapes/sizes if I'm clever about it too.

 

So first of all, I applied bulk tape to protect the litho.

 

IMG_4260_zpsdy7vv4fg.jpg

 

Then, and not like in Paul's video, I mixed up some hydrocal (my first time using it) and poured it in. I can see Paul rolling his eyes at my amateurish approach..........

 

IMG_4263_zpsrykourpo.jpg

 

Oh no! I hear you say. But doesn't it get hot? Could it potentially melt the fuselage? All good questions my friends which didn't actually occur to me until after I'd poured it..... hmmmm.

 

Luckily, even though it got pretty warm, it was nowhere near the 260 degrees required to melt ABS and I'm thinking that with the litho in there it also acted as a barrier for the plastic. In any case the fuselage is still alive and well and no distortion....... Lucky me!

 

Anyway, there's a bit of everything going on here. If the casting works out okay, I should be able to forge ahead with the rear fuselage details, although there's an awful lot of metal work to do in there!

 

Till next time,

 

Craig

Craig, Have you ever used a pounce wheel? Its a wheel with teeth like a gear, and they have various ones that have different count teeth on them. Works on plastic and metal.

 

Perry

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On 7/31/2022 at 4:20 AM, TKB said:

Craig,

 

As nice a fit as you had when you first fabricated the bomb bay compartment,  I'm sure it was no surprise there were fit/gap issues when it came to final assemble. Especially getting to the overall snug fit in the closed position! You'd expect that one area would be flush, causing another to set high or low. low or high. You pulled it off and it looks great. As is the norm for you, "that's good enough" is around the 99.999% correct mark.

 

Had it all fall into place like a Swiss watch would have been a godsend, but seeing you correct the "gaffes" with a blend of ingenuity and artistic license were modeling miracles in themselves! Maybe not 100% accuracy --- but I'm hard pressed not to believe it isn't! 

 

Terry

 

Thanks Terry! Yeah the whole experience was more than a little nerve wracking, but then I'm so used to hacking away big sections of this and rebuilding them I don't think anything scares me anymore! I still feel I got pretty lucky with the whole process, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out :). Agreed, it may not be 100% but it'll certainly do it for me! 

 

Cheers,

 

Craig

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8 hours ago, gbtr6 said:

Craig, This build is so beyond what I could ever do, but, I have used the thin wood veneer that comes in cigar boxes to great effect on wood floors for trucks. Bonus for your application is it's two sided, so it would be to scale probably.

 

Perry

 

 

 

Hey Perry, thanks so much for chipping in on the build :). Thanks for the suggestion, although I'm not familiar with cigar boxes and that sounds like a pretty specialised product (perhaps not available in NZ, especially considering the current Government's stance on smoking in general.....:rofl:) In any case, I'll keep it in mind for the future!

 

7 hours ago, gbtr6 said:

Craig, Have you ever used a pounce wheel? Its a wheel with teeth like a gear, and they have various ones that have different count teeth on them. Works on plastic and metal.

 

Perry

Thanks again for the suggestion Perry.... wow, that post was quite a long time ago! Not sure if you've had a chance to read some of more recent activity on the build but I do use quite a lot of those wheels for my current work. I can't quite remember the context of that post now but I do think it was in trying to emboss rivets into very thin strips which would be very hard with one of those wheels. 

 

In any case, I've devised new processes to get around that issue as my experience has grown.

 

Thanks again for chipping in, I hope you'll enjoy the rest of the build as well!

 

Cheers,

 

Craig

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  • 3 weeks later...

The journey continues :) 

 

After the battle of the bay it was time to look at a few things I'd been avoiding meaning to do for a while. The first was to get the other waist window done. I did the first one in 2019, so only three years later....:whistle:

 

Luckily, I still had the "blank" that I'd vac formed. It just needed a bit of fine adjusting to sit nicely in the hole.

 

 

20/8

 

I then did the exterior metal work which is oversize and give me a surface to stick the window back in without fear of it falling into the fuselage, like a random hydraulic reservoir........

 

20/8

 

Fiddly and slow going, but, got there in the end. It needed a partial anneal to get the indent at the rear, and then a full anneal once all the rivets were added...

I also reinstalled the .50 that had been dislodged during one of my many inversions of the fuselage during the bay work.

 

The waist window is now a happy little vegimite and looking much more complete, save for the wind deflector....

 

20/8

 

I also wanted to get the fin on, and faired in, so I could move toward getting some paint on the big girl finally! But first I needed to attach the clear tail cone, which also needed the bombing signal lights added. I thought they were meant to be red and white, but I've seen a photo were it looks distinctly more "orange," although that could just be the lens and the colouring in the photograph too.....

 

20/8

 

And in position...

 

20/8

 

Not perfect, but definitely visible! :) 

 

I added the fin, and then worked on making a nice smooth base of putty to support the fairing, which I hope to do next bench session..

 

 

20/8

 

There's a bit of a gap under the rudder at the moment, but I'll just extend the surface down to close it. I just wanted to make sure the rudder would clear so I can position it slightly offset later...

 

20/8

 

20/8

 

And an overall glamour shot for you :) 

 

 

20/8

 

She's starting to look less like a tadpole and more like a plane now! And she's almost full length now (just needs the nose piece).

 

Cheers,

 

Craig

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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