Buecker 131 Jungmann - eastern front recon

[Fanes]

58 minutes ago, monthebiff said:

 

Funnily enough Joachim,since my WIP re-surfaced this week I have been looking over it and getting all of my research material back together as I am thinking of getting it back on the bench!

 

Regards. Andy 

Yeeehaw!

I may start my 188 in a distant future with your build as a reference.

[Out2gtcha]

Great work so far!

[Fanes]

Major update (reporting in)

The cockpit is done and the fuselage closed up.

Sadly the cockpit's cross bars weren't a good fit even after I cut them down ~2mm.

Luckily this won't show and the fuselage did close (althoough with some gaps/steps).

First of all a glamour shot of the IPs:

 

The front coaming/fuselag/engine cowl is a tricky multi piece assembly. One side looks fine..

 

big gaps on the other side

 

But nothing too drastic with some gentle force. The photo shows the test assembly. Before comitting to glue, the toothpick was shortenend and did spread the part to the appropriate size.

 

Unfortunately I had to choose between a step on the upper or lower rear fuselage. No real choice, so I went with the bottom and black CA as filler

 

The engine cowling suffered from poor manufacturing. The disappearing rivets are a reminder of the horrible surface from Italeri's Starfighter..

The orange peel is a surprise but for sure not a welcome one!

 

The port side is a little better but far from what I expect from ICM kits

 

But it's not too bad overall and should be an easy fix.

To conclude with something nice: here's another shot with a look into the cockpits to enjoy

 

I'll tackle the engine cowl in the next days - when I'm in the mood and then the paint booth isn't too far away.

Which reminds me: still need to draw the masks for the insignia and unit emblem.

 

Joachim

 

 

[Alain Gadbois]

Nice cockpit!

Too bad for the poor fitting parts. Could it be because of a different plastic compared to the ICM kits?

Wonder if the others who built the ICM kit had similar problems.

 

Alain

[kensar]

I hope you can fix that to your liking.

I built an ICM kit and didn't have the fit issues, but it was a bit dicey with all the separate parts involved.  It took careful fitting of every part.  The plastic in the kit was extremely soft - almost unusable.

[Fanes]

9 hours ago, Alain Gadbois said:

Nice cockpit!

Too bad for the poor fitting parts. Could it be because of a different plastic compared to the ICM kits?

Wonder if the others who built the ICM kit had similar problems.

 

Alain

Thanks Alain!

I guess it's not the plastic (as soft as the usual ICM) but more or less quality control/state of the tooling.

Every part has a significant amount of mould seams to be removed and the rear fuselage was slightly warped which didn't help with alignment at all.

Since there weren't any of those hickups in other WiPs, I guess a little bit of the issues was induced by th builder

7 hours ago, kensar said:

I hope you can fix that to your liking.

I built an ICM kit and didn't have the fit issues, but it was a bit dicey with all the separate parts involved.  It took careful fitting of every part.  The plastic in the kit was extremely soft - almost unusable.

I hope so too, Ken!

You spotted the mistake, I guess.. Careful fitting was something I did after the problems with the internal structure appeared

Completely agreed on the soft plastic. The landing gear looks extremely flimsy (replaced it on my I-16 with brass).

 

Cheers

Joachim

[Fanes]

I really hate rivetting and rescribing but it's definitely necessary.

Running my RB productions rivet wheel along some tape made fine impressions in th eplastic. Not as deep as the ICM sinkholes but okayish.

I checked the result with a black enamel wash.

 

 

Starboard is a little bit more messy but the cowl will be dark RLM71.

 

It's starting to look like a Buecker:

 

Two details on the road to the paint booth.

Opening up the exhausts. They're as on every ICM kit not hollow not even a little.

 

And the pitot got a little attention as well. Drilling wasn't an option, so I added a brass tube and two 0.2mm copper wires for the cables you can see on the real Jungmann.

 

and 32 times smaller:

 

That's it for now. Next photo will be with the black base on

[RLWP]

1 hour ago, Fanes said:

 

 

the cables you can see on the real Jungmann.

 

They are pipes. There's one pipe leads to the front to measure the pressure due to forward speed. But this pressure an accurate indicator of speed as it will also change with atmospheric pressure - like climbing to altitude. So there is another pipe that leads to a ring of holes around the circumference of the tube to measure the static pressure

If you make a pressure sensor that has the ram pressure on one side and the static pressure on the other, you get a speed indicator

 

 

Richard

Edited December 4, 2021 by RLWP

[MikeC]

1 hour ago, RLWP said:

If you make a pressure sensor that has the ram pressure on one side and the static pressure on the other, you get a speed indicator

Aka a pitot head.

[Fanes]

1 hour ago, RLWP said:

 

They are pipes. There's one pipe leads to the front to measure the pressure due to forward speed. But this pressure an accurate indicator of speed as it will also change with atmospheric pressure - like climbing to altitude. So there is another pipe that leads to a ring of holes around the circumference of the tube to measure the static pressure

If you make a pressure sensor that has the ram pressure on one side and the static pressure on the other, you get a speed indicator

 

 

Richard

Thanks for the clarification Richard! Makes completely sense to have two pressure connections for the airspeed measurement.

Fluid mechanics are definitely one of my weak points

[RLWP]

19 minutes ago, MikeC said:

Aka a pitot head.

 

Or Pitot-static tube

 

It's probably that bloke Bernoulli's fault

 

Richard

[RLWP]

5 minutes ago, Fanes said:

Thanks for the clarification Richard! Makes completely sense to have two pressure connections for the airspeed measurement.

Fluid mechanics are definitely one of my weak points

 

It's a aspect of aero modelling I like. When you know how something works, you can spot details on aeroplanes:

 

 

Separate tubes that go up the strut, through the wing  and down the cabane strut. They have to bridge the join for the detachable upper starboard wing, so there are loops with a joint

 

Richard

[Fanes]

Well, thanks to the third anti Covid shot yesterday, there was no way to do any painting today.
But I felt good enough to draw the graphics for the paint masks.

Took me a while to get them to my liking (thankfully there are no letters with outline this time).

Now they're ready for the Silhouette to do its magic.

 

 

I'm thrilled how the NAG3 emblem will turn out since there are five separate masking parts which will need a clean cut and careful placement on the Jungmann.

 

Edited December 5, 2021 by Fanes

[Fanes]

No paint yet, but a preliminary step

I figured that determining where to attach the rigging lines would be easier on the unpainted Buecker.

To my surprise there's quite a large amount of rigging necessary (it's a first time for me).

The instructions weren't helpful in regard what goes where, but the walkaround proved to be very helpful.

Every anchor point got a black do with a sharpie and a small hole to take the line or eyelet.

 

A close up on the wings

 

Now it really is ready for primer.

The masks needed some correction, too. Some fool draw the wrong (early) style for the crosses..

[Fanes]

Black base

Well, this will be a boring post.

I laid done Tamiya's semigloss black thinned with levelling thinner to get an even yet thin base for the following steps.

 

Unfortunately a ghos seam reappeared on the rear fuselage. So a serious amount of black CA was used to fill any of it.

 

 

After some quick passes with sanding sticks and a poloshing cloth another coat of black was added and the result is much better.

Even though the closeup with the macro lens shows a slight hinch of a seam which won't be visible on the flat RLM71 finish - or at least I hope so.

The soft palstic makes any filling and sanding a little bit unpredictable for me.

 

Once the black base is fully cured, I'll start painting the first colour for the insignia.