Building the (Old) FLYLINE Great Lakes 2T-1A Kit (27)

There are a few more construction tasks left before this airplane is ready for her first trip outside the shop. They may be small, but they will attract the attention of anyone who looks at the model. I’m going to finish the cockpit by adding the windshield glazing, some coaming and padding, and a dummy pilot, and I’m going to make a set of scale exhaust stacks.

On most airplanes like the Great Lakes, the pilot’s headrest fairing behind the seat gets a cover or pad of some sort. As often as not this is covered with leather.. If this were a competition scale model we would have specific info on what needed to be replicated, but for this project I’m happy with reproducing the appearance of a typical vintage airplane. A piece of 1/8″ balsa sheet provides a form for the pad and a scrap of craft store leather works as the surface covering. Here I have cut the balsa core to match the contour of the headrest already in place on the airplane and I am using it to trace a pattern on the leather.

I have trimmed a piece of the leather to fit around the balsa core with enough overhang to wrap completely around the edges. SLO ZAP is my choice of adhesive here, to allow me extra time working with an open joint.

I like to use a calibrated finger as a precison tool for wrapping the leather tightly around all edges of the balsa core. The SLO ZAP adhesive gives me extra time to get eveything in place. When it's just right. I'll turn the asssembled pad over, leather side down, on a clean surface and press it down hard for a minute or so to set the adhesive.

With the leather wrapped securely around the core I stuck it in place against the rear cockpit former and headrest with SLO ZAP.

On this airplane I chose to build up the windshield frames and paint them before inserting the clear plastic panels. This permitted me to do a thorough job of painting without having to worry about masking inside surfaces. Now I'm ready to put in the plastic....these are the center/main panels for the front and rear windshield assemblies. Each is cut from heavy (approx. .012") clear plastic sheet from the hobby shop, trimmed to fit exactly in place, and masked with tape front and back (inside and out) with areas left bare that will glue against the the inside face of each frame.

This is the rear windshield center panel ready to go into place. I will add a bead of canopy glue around the perimeter, where the plastic is not masked, and press the panel tightly in place inside the frame.

This is the rear windshield main panel in place, with an extra strip of masking tape to hold it while the canopy glue dries.

I have trimmed and fitted the main and side panels of both windshields. Because I am using relatively thick clear plastic it was necessary to bevel the edges of the side panels to get a snug fit inside each frame assembly.

This is the tailskid assembly I made up from scrap. The base plate is a length of 4130 aircraft steel cut and bent to fit. I silver soldered a piece of ordinary hobby shop steel wire into place as an extension, drilled two holes through the plate into the plywood panel already in place, and assembled the whole deal using a couple of sheet metal screws. Like a lot of other features on this model, the tailskid is "close", but not "exact scale".

The dummy engine exhausts on the FlyLine plans are shown as curved lengths of rounded-section balsa carved to shape and painted. I wanted a bit more durability so I laminated a bow of balsa 5/" x 5/8" using several thin strips of balsa, bent wet around a simple form and glued with Titebond aliphatic resin wood glue. When dry and sanded a bit to clean up the edges, it looked like this.

Carved and sanded to an oval cross section, the base stock for the exhaust stacks is ready for a finish.

As I did with the cabane and interplane struts, I used strips of silkspan, wet, wrapped around the balsa shape and attached/sealed with generous amounts of clear nitrate dope. This is one place where I used full-shrink dope rather than non-tautening.

Scale Pilots USA (Matthew Schofield ... mpschofield@gmail.com ) proved us with a sample of one of the new scale pilot figures he is developing. This one is a 1/8 scale WWII Navy figure, just right for the Great Lakes.

The trial run of pilots are made of a heavier material than will be used in production, so I used a rotary bit on my drill press to open up the inside and remove about 3/4 ounce of weight.

Some artist's acrylic paint from the craft store and my pilot is ready to go flying. Painting scale pilots is a unique skill in itself and there is a lot of material available for you to check out.

With the base stock fully sealed, dry and sanded as smooth as I can get it, I cut each of the four required exhaust stacks to length.

The four stacks are glued to a base plate made from a scrap of 1/32" plywood in exactly the location necessary to fit the existing hole in the top cowl. Here I am opening up the end of each one with the traditional Dremel tool to simulate the open end of a pipe.

The plywood exhaust stack mounting plate is simply glued to the inside of the cowl.

I sprayed the completed row of exhausts with various colors of Testors metallic acrylic paints for a burnt metal appearance. When the rest of the finishing work is done I will airbrush a few exhaust stains to the cowl behind them.