Building the (Old) FLYLINE Great Lakes 2T-1A Kit (29)

It’s finished…done…ready to fly. As a matter of fact. the airplane has been flown successfully, but getting me, my photographer friend, and good weather together at the same time has been a problem so you’ll have to take my word for that part for a while.

There were a couple of final details that needed finishing up before the Great Lakes was ready to go out to the field for the first time. Let’s take a look at those, and then I’ll share some shots of the finished airplane after several flights.

I'm using DuBro 3" Super Lite wheels, but I'm going to modify them in order to be able to add some custom made hubcaps that will require recessing the wheel collars into the wheel hubs for clearance. The first thing I had to do was drill out both hubs to fit the 3/16" brass tubing I added to the wire axles, and then countersink each hub using a 7/16" Forstner bit to cut into one side by half the depth of a DuBro 3/16" wheel collar. (I discovered by doing some trial measurement that this would permit the hubcaps I'm planning to make to fit without binding. NOTE: You don't have to do any of this...it's OK to use the stock wheels and let the wheel collars show, if you prefer.

Please excuse the crummy focus on this shot...it's the best of the ones I was smart enough to save. This is the main axle bushed out with a piece of 3/16" brass tube to fit the wheel. I have used a cutoff wheel in my Dremel tool to grind a squared-off notch where the setscrew of the DuBro wheel collar will touch to provide a mechanical joint that will not let the collar slip under side loads.

This is the same assembly with the wheel slipped into place. Same game on the bad focus.

Here I have the DuBro wheel collar in place. You can see how it is recessed partway into the wheel hub, in the area I cut out. I determined the depth of this cutout by measuring how much clearance would be necessary between the outside edge of the collar and the custom hubcap I'll describe next.

Aluminum cans make a good source of material for all kinds of model airplane parts, no matter what was originally inside them.

I covered the bottom of the can with some masking tape to provide a surface that would be easy to mark with a pencil, then traced a circle the same size as the outer edge of the wheel hub.

I used a pair of short, curved-blade snips to cut the rough shape of the hubcap out of the can bottom.

A little filing and sanding turns the rough blank into a finished, custom aluminum hubcap. The convex shape of the can bottom provides just the right clearance between the hubcap and the wheel collar.

I used a bead of ZAP Gel around the outside edge of the hubcap to attach it to the wheel. For a small model like this one such a bond is tough enough to stand up to normal loads. If it becomes necessary to get the wheel off, it's no big deal to slip a thin blade between the cap and the wheel and slit it loose without deforming it.

Those stick thingies between the flying wires are called "javelins". On full scale airplanes they help prevent resonant vibration from creating potentially destructive standing waves in the wires at higher airspeeds. That can happen with models as well, and it's a good thing to avoid. Beyond that, adding flying wire javelins to a wire-rigged biplane just adds cool factor. These are just lengths of 3/16" dowel with the ends rounded and sanded smooth.

With the javelin held in place I marked the exact point at which each wire will cross it.

I cut a slot halfway through the dowel where each wire will intersect it in turn. As the various flying and landing wires intersect the javelin at varying angles it's necessary to reproduce those angles accurately when cutting. In the case of my Great Lakes, a 1/8" bandsaw blade turned out to be exactly the right width to match the thickness of my wires.

If you measure and cut the slots for the wires properly, everything will fit in place like this. The javelin should be cut and located so that each of the wires runs dead straight for its entire length.

I used a drop of ZAP-a-GAP to lock each wire into its respective slot in the javelin.

In full scale practice there are several ways of securing the wires to the javelins. In many cases the assembly is wrapped with tape to finish it off. Here I am using 1/8" fine-line masking tape to do that job in miniature.

With each javelin-wire junction wrapped, I sealed the assembly with a heavy coat of clear nitrate dope, the same stuff I used to seal the covering. This is a good place to use traditional shrinking, rather than non-tautening, dope.

OK, guys, are you ready for this? The old FlyLine Great Lakes Trainer, built from a leftover, swap-meet-refugee old-time stick-and-tissue kit, is DONE.

This is the new grass at our flying field in Olympia,Washington...just exactly the kind of surface this airplane was intended to operate from.

That's a 13x6 Xoar prop, which tuns out to be just about right for this airplane. You can see the dummy exhaust stacks that I carved from balsa clearly from this angle, along with the working shock absorbing landing gear main struts.

Here's a good look at the engine cowl from the other side, showing those louvers I spent all that time on.

The Great Lakes 2T-1A is a classic Golden Age aerobatic biplane, and all that character is easy to see here.

LET'S GO FLYING!

One Comment