This one was worth waiting for. A couple of weeks ago my good friend Gary Ritchie, who does all the flight photography you see here, called me and suggested that the weather was about as good as it would ever get at this time of year and did I want to go flying? As it […]
All that’s left before flight testing is rigging. In this case that means both rigging the functional controls…hooking the servos to the surfaces…and making up the wing and tail brace wire groups. Let’s look at the servos first. I used Sullivan Gold-N-Rod splined nylon flexible concentric tube connectors (S-504) for the connections between the rudder […]
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 […]
It’s time to put some paint on this airplane. If this were going to be a competitive model I would already have gathered whatever color references were available, most likely photos or published artwork, determined exactly which paint products I would need to get the most accurate possible reproduction of the colors on the full […]
You may have noticed that up until now I have paid no attention at all to one of the most obvious “scale details” on the airplane…the windshields of the twin open cockpits. All too often open cockpit model windshields take the form of a chunk of clear plastic stuck to the top of the fuselage […]
With the model covered, clear doped and primed, just about ready for color, there are a few more details I need to take care of before that final paint job can begin. The one I want to tell you about this time provides a perfect example of the way building scale model airplanes is in […]
Whether we call it “silk-and-dope”, “dope and tissue”, “polyspan and nitrate”, or whatever, covering and finishing model airplanes using a sheet of paper or fabric and then sealing it with various paint products involves two different operations. We have just finished the first, which is cutting, attaching and shrinking the covering material (in this case, […]
Both the upper and lower wings are covered, ready for finishing. It’s time to get started on the fuselage…but…there’s some more stuff I want to be sure you know about. I have included A LOT of information on building model airplanes from kits in the form of stories from my own experiences in my book, […]
In the last session I covered the lower wing. There are a few things on the upper wing that are different, so this time we’ll have a look at that part of the job. I’ll cover the upper center section here. Remember, everything you learned about polyspan in (20) still applies.
It’s time to put some covering on this airplane. I am using materials/products on this project with which you may not be familiar, so I’ll describe each of them in turn and share my sources with you. The covering material itself is the big one. You already know that I won’t be using one step […]