As I make my circuitous way around my various builds I tend to settle on one, have at it to the best of my ability and try to hang in there until one of two things generally happen. Either I finish it (rare, but gradually becoming less so) or more commonly; I suffer an "excess of inspiration" and go skipping off on some other tangent when my glance falls upon one of the half dozen or so projects I have going at any one time.
It's not ideal, but at least it stops me getting bored. It also means that everything *touch wood* will see the light of day eventually.
Anyway, so it was by roundabout means I found myself back with the Royal Aircraft Factory's answer to the age of sail: The FE.2b
Some of the regular visitors will remember this from last years RAF group build, which can be found here viewtopic.php?f=45&t=5492
I'd got it to the stage where the wing ribs were done and the majority of the core internals were fitted. Being entirely scratchbuilt there is heaps to do and references are often vague, especially regarding the particulars of the undercarriage. This is pretty much where I stalled.
I was able to make a start again and posted the story so far over on the busy Britmodeller website. I had the good fortune to get some assistance from a chap there who owned the Wingnut Wings 1/32 scale kit, and he measured some of the key dimensions of the undercarriage struts for me. By dividing everything by 4.5x I could get the exact measurements of what was needed in 1/144.
The first part was the main legs. These are the beginnings of the racy looking Trafford-Jones style undercarriage. The core is .4mm nickel silver tube with a brass sleeve around it that was filed down to an aerofoil section. .2mm wire stubs get soldered into the end to locate them later on. The aircraft I hope to represent had the oleo springs exposed, so these were replicated with annealed .10mm wire.
Then I soldered them together for strength an began to clean them up with thin strips of wet n dry paper to get into all the nooks.
After the best part of a week (and an entire season of the Last Kingdom on Netflix) I managed to get the struts made and cut to length.
Test fitting involved holding my breath for long periods of time...
Some adjustments were needed, and the star struts in the middle looked a bit clunky without a proper aerofoil section so I superglued each face to a piece of styrene, then filed them one at a time. Much better!
I really had to get the undercarriage sorted before I could move on. Otherwise I would be overhandling the thing trying to do it later. Once it was out the way I was free to tackle the outer nacelle. It was finally glued together and all the joins made good. Panel lines were scribed and the fasteners and whatnot embossed in with various bits of metal that were shaped for the purpose.
The stitching on the sides of the nacelle needs to be raised, so this was done in a similar method to the wing ribs.
Once it was unmasked I had a bunch of raised lines. These were tidied up a bit and then dabbed at with the edge of a needle to give a bit of texture and hint at the stitching.
I say hint at the stitching, cos believe me... It's bloody small!!
