It’s been a while since I have done any work that counts on this airplane…in fact, I have to confess that I’ve been letting it gather dust in my shop for about a year. I set the Stinson aside to work on the old FlyLine Great Lakes Trainer kit. That project turned into a twenty-nine-installment […]
The next step is the addition of the leading edge sheeting and the capstrips to the wing structure. All of the assembly up to this point has been done with the wing flat on the building board, kept in alignment by various built-in jigs and spacers and held in place by those big lead building […]
OK…now it’s time to get started on something that will make it clear just how BIG this model really is…let’s build the wing. As it turns out, even if my workbench were long enough to lay out both the right and left panels of the wing at the same time, I would have to walk […]
The vertical tail assembly…the fixed vertical fin and the rudder…are built in the same way as the horizontal tail. That building task also presents me with a chance to talk about some of the reasons those parts are designed, or engineered, the way they are. You could build all the tail surfaces on this airplane […]
The next step called out in the instructions involves sanding the entire horizontal tail assembly. It helps to remember that “sanding” in this case involves two different jobs…shaping, and smoothing. Shaping comes first, and it can be scary if the plans don’t show exactly what the finished part is supposed to look like. In the […]
Last time we were talking about building the forward horizontal tail surface (stabilizer) and how a little extra effort helps all those parts to fit right. The first photo shows the entire tail surface built up and ready to be sanded. This time I’d like to discuss several of the steps involved in building the […]
Last time I talked about how big this airplane is. It is made up of a whole lot of very small parts, and I want to explain some of the small things you do with them that can make a big difference. If you are working with plans and patterns, or with old-time printwood kits, […]
Speaking of building, let’s talk a bit about just how much of an old time building project this particular model airplane is…or is not. The Top Flite Stinson kit is designed around what experienced model builders usually refer to as a traditional, built-up structure, which means that the engineering, the shape and function of the […]
At just about the same time I was planning those structural changes to the little Berkeley Super Cruiser, I decided to go ahead with a project that had been lurking around the edges of my imagination for a couple of years. This one is a bit bigger. You’ve seen the ads for the Top Flite […]