Catching Pictures in the Air

[Martian]

The height looks considerably better and an ingenious solution to boot!

 

Martian

 

 

[perdu]

Now that's the way to do it, that's given exactly what you needed

 

Yippeeeeee

[Fritag]

Excellent problem solving and execution and then beautiful writing as well.  Cracking thread 

[rob85]

Very cunning Tony, we all knew you could do it... I mean you made an active wing fold on a barra, surely nothing is out of grasp?

 

Rob

[keefr22]

Mad. Utterly and completely mad. But utterly & completely brilliant at the same time!

 

Great stuff Tony, even  is impressed again!

 

Now you just need to add a ton more gubbins to the roof of the thing....!!

 

Keith

[Sprueloose]

Awesome skylight effect. Elegant bit of butchery! Oh god, now look at all the structural detail to add. Lovely! 

Major surgery and math, this build has everything!

Terry

 

[Brandy]

Lovely job, Doc Baron!

 

Ian

Edited April 27, 2017 by limeypilot

[The Spadgent]

Nice roof off action going on. great fit afterwards too. Those blades look a bIt vicious, watch yer sticky out bits for heavens sake.

 

johnny .

[TheBaron]

23 hours ago, hendie said:

I'd add a small vertical length of thick plasticard along the length to add some rigidity,

I shall probably get all Judaeo-Christian and whack a cruciform shape in there, just to be safe.

23 hours ago, Cookenbacher said:

Brilliant surgery Baron, and well explained to boot.

Many thanks Cookie. Some days things just seem to work well don't they, and others...well, that's what alcohol was invented for wasn't it? 

[Ex-FAAWAFU]

On 26/04/2017 at 7:29 PM, TheBaron said:

 

 

 

 

Am I the only one who thought you'd turned it into some sort of Hendiesque Ekranoplan?   <homer> Mmmmm, Ekranoplan </homer>

 

Superb job on the roof.  This is one of those bui;ds that you never want to end.  Love it.

[Nigel Heath]

Good work on the major surgery.

[TheBaron]

22 hours ago, Martian Hale said:

The height looks considerably better and an ingenious solution to boot!

As the old maxim says: 'Measure once, have to buy a second Boxcar.' 

22 hours ago, perdu said:

Now that's the way to do it, that's given exactly what you needed

 

Yippeeeeee

I might even assay a 'Yippeekyay' to follow that. Plus, I now have two large slabs of plastic cut-outs to stick up on Eek!bay as 'rare vintage Boxcar roof.'...

22 hours ago, Fritag said:

Excellent problem solving and execution and then beautiful writing as well.  Cracking thread 

Many thanks Steve. I am conscious that as one problem is solved, it invokes a whole slew of new ones: It'll end up more Fabergé than Fairchild at this rate!

21 hours ago, keefr22 said:

Now you just need to add a ton more gubbins to the roof of the thing....!!

And to think I initially thought when I looked at this kit that the roof would be a relatively modest undertaking...There's probably almost room for Little T in the back by now...a Fairchild Rexcar!

21 hours ago, Sprueloose said:

Major surgery and math, this build has everything!

I was always an odd child. 

19 hours ago, limeypilot said:

Lovely job, Doc Baron!

I think I'd have been a good ship's doctor in the early 19th C. Lots of sawing and strong language.

18 hours ago, The Spadgent said:

Those blades look a bIt vicious, watch yer sticky out bits for heavens sake.

The official statistics are full of people like me. I read of a woman recently who stabbed herself trying to lever an Smartie off of a gingerbread man's icing...If I'm going to go I want it to be something injudicious that leaves people filled with wonder at the size of the explosion.

 

1 minute ago, Ex-FAAWAFU said:

<homer> Mmmmm, Ekranoplan </homer>

Double-Mmmm to an Ekranoplan Crisp. I find those Caspian Sea Monsters incredibly scifi and enticing:

 I mean: 'Corr!!!'

4 minutes ago, Ex-FAAWAFU said:

This is one of those bui;ds that you never want to end.  Love it.

At the current rate of modification it may in fact become an infinite regression....

3 minutes ago, Nigel Heath said:

Good work on the major surgery.

My thanks Nigel! If it's a short reply like that from someone of your skills then I always feel I've gotten something right.

 

Nothing to show you guys tonight as it has been a taxing day quite frankly; not busy by any means, but there is only so much stupidity that one can absorb in a short space of time before a wave of fatigue sweeps across you. I hope to get an hour or so in tomorrow tidying up the surgery so speak to you then.

 

Tata for now and have a great evening all of you.

Tony

 

[Ex-FAAWAFU]

On 26/04/2017 at 7:29 PM, TheBaron said:

 

 

 

 

Am I the only one who thought you'd turned it into some sort of Hendiesque Ekranoplan?   <homer> Mmmmm, Ekranoplan </homer>

 

Superb job on the roof.  This is one of those bui;ds that you never want to end.  Love it.

[TheBaron]

Hello you fellows.

 

A  little bit to add; today was busier than I'd anticipated, partly due to the sheer quantity of calorie-swag we need to haul back from Lidl these days to feed two teenage boys. To add to the 'humour' of the activity I put my back out twisting to reach down into the trolley at the checkout out so currently dosed with painkillers and strapped to the Tens machine for a few hours. Sod it.

 

For variety's sake, when I got to the bench eventually I decided to take a break from the roof and finish off some outstanding matters on the other side of the bulkhead, up on the flight deck. Having read Ted Taylor's excellent notes on building this kit that darling Miggers has furnished us with a link to earlier in the thread, I recollected that the navigator/radio-ops table need to be lowered so as not to sit proud of the cockpit windows on the starboard side.

 

In my case this task was complicated by ye toylet cubickle impinging upward into this region. Test fitting revealed however that I could remedy this by dumping the original toilet roof and sanding down the walls by a mill. or so, to thence use the underside of the kit table table as the new toilet roof. Additionally I disciovered that it was necessary to reduce the thickness of the table at the corresponding points as well in order to lower the overall height sufficiently:

A birr with the Dremclone and smoothing with w&d took a minute or so to achieve the desired result. With that fixed in place the cockpit already starts to come to life:

You'll recall in a previous installment that I'd broken the top off of the cargo bulkhead, so after some fiddling around i worked out a supporting framework to hold it in place, incorporating the shelf that sits over the radio gear:

You can see also that I had to curve a sliver of plasticard over the corder of the toilet cubicle that sticks out slightlybeyond the table. A little ugly but the least obtrusive solution, given the limited visibility there'll be in the final view through the rather distorting cockpit windows. With everything glued into place that seemed secure enough overall now, but nonetheless I CA'd a couple of PE scraps onto the rear side to strengthen the original breaks in the framework, 'just because':

I'll leave all that to harden now tonight before filing those strips down to agree with the contours of the bulkhead. There's a job of adding textured foil to this side of the structure also, and I suppose I need to turn my mind in the near future to scratching up the toilet facilities to go inside the cubicle.

 

Oh yes. The roof: haven't neglected it - I'm hoping to use the shape of the original roof as a template for a new thinner version. To do that I first need to clean up all those cuts made in the upperworks a couple of days back in order to get an accurate profile of where wall and ceiling meet. Once that is done it will be decision time about what details are necessary to add onto it. A lot of the roof and attendant structural detail on operational aircraft (as opposed to the completely exposed views you see in shots of museum aircraft) was concealed by soundproofing fabric, but even so, the ceilings of these aircraft were still quite 'busy', with the central paratainer rail retained from earlier variants, oxygen cylinders, a ladder type thing that I've no idea the function of, sheaves, and even a camera installation on Pelican 9 to film the recovery out the back. Certainly there's enough there to keep me happily occupied for a fortnight or so at least.

 

Reading through Vol.1 of The Blitz:Then and Now that arrived a week or so back, I've become rather obsessed with the shapes of an H8 version of the He111 that crashed near Lulworth in Dorset in 1940:

Knowing that particular part of the coast rather well (there's a pub just inland from the crash site in Chaldon Herring - 'The Sailor's Return' - that does superb food and ales) I was fascinated to think of the contrast occasioned by this beast of war falling to Earth amidst peaceful fields like an alien spacecraft.

 

 As you can see from the photo, the thing is festooned with all that balloon-cutter stuff mounted across the front that makes it look like the helmet of a medieval Teutonic knight, like this fellow in  Durer's famous engraving Knight, Death and the Devil:

I'm not as a rule overly-animated by Luftwaffe subjects, but the Gothic nature of this variant and the tie-in with a beloved geography are quite compelling. I know Hasegawa do a version of the H8 but it's rather expensive, so I have to find out if the rather cheaper Revell H6 is a suitable candidate for modification.

 

They're 'einkels etc.

Tony

 

 

 

 

[hendie]

20 minutes ago, TheBaron said:

a ladder type thing that I've no idea the function of

 

this may be a wild guess, but I think they're used for climbing up and down things with.

[TheBaron]

59 minutes ago, hendie said:

 

this may be a wild guess, but I think they're used for climbing up and down things with.

Garn. You Pullman builders and your fancy ways.

[perdu]

You may quibble (quietly I hope) but guess what?

 

He is absolutely right

 

I think...

 

 

 

 

 

Nice catch in the cockpit mate

 

[CedB]

Great work on the cockpit Tony.

Already planning the next project eh? Balloon cutter... hmmm, nice.

Hope your back gets better soon.

[TheBaron]

...so anyway, the vicar blushes, and Miss Prodworthy says: 'I can't believe it's not butter!' just as....<ahem> Ah! There you are!. Now who's been saying what? 

 

17 hours ago, perdu said:

You may quibble (quietly I hope) but guess what?

 

He is absolutely right

 

I think...

No point asking me, I'm still as baffled by it...

 

Now then Bill and hendie, have a look at the following photo: (I'll risk the ire of the NRO for posting a couple of these shots from their Star Catchers publication, but I'm presuming as they are originally credited as USAF material and this is an eduoccasional use, that I'll not be getting a MOAB for lunch.)

^{Image credit: USAF}

Them two frameworks attached to the roof on either side of the yellow sheave affair; I've been calling these ladders purely on grounds of visual similarity and ignorance on my part as to their exact function. Do other aircraft - cargo or otherwise - have ladder-type thingies on the roof like here? If so what are they? In other photos the shorter left one appears to be bolted to the ceiling, the right one I'm not sure about. Anyway, I'll be building them, whatever function they have: I've a pencil blowtorch ordered on account of a soldering suggestion of yours a while back Bill so this might be its perfect christening. And Crisp had mentioned solder paint as well.......the wages are  just in - I wonder if the children could eat less this month?

 

16 hours ago, CedB said:

Already planning the next project eh? Balloon cutter... hmmm, nice.

I'm planning to spoil lots of children's birthday parties.

The back is much better this morning Ced, cheers!  A combination of anti-inflammatories, heat, Tens machine, and core muscle stretching yesterday returned the required parts to correct alignment. Shopping is dangerous - don't risk it!

 

Feeling as fresh as a spring daisy first thing this morning therefore I leapt from the scratcher to  discover that the  weather had turned promisingly ghastly. After inhaling a snootful of tea it was into the workroom to contend with miniature realities. 

 

Yesterday's remedial table and toilet grinding (eww..that sounds like a particularly sordid lap-dancing routine) seems to have done the trick regarding  the cockpit window issue:

After that is was up to the rooftops with Mary Poppins in order to test a surmise that a cut-down version of the original roof could still prove useful:

In terms of internal height, now that we have the required extra clearance, the kit part sits happily in place (though the rear portion has been cut off as you see in order to fit the new 'step-up' at the very back) and needn't be discarded. The only real issue as you can see here is that of needing to widenthe roof panel slightly to adjust for the slightly different profile of the fuselage higher up into the wing roots:

You can see what I mean a bit more clearly from the inside:

That gap might appear a tad drastic, but if you hop back to that colour view of the real thing I started this post with, you can see that most of that ceiling/wall region is hidden by angles of padding and other various structural obfuscations. All I really need to do here is extend the ceiling on either side by about a millimetre or so:

This was accomplished most directly by just laminating a profile along either edge out of thin plastic strip until the correct width was achieved:

Any residual gap on from inside will be masked off by the aforementioned padding and so forth, so we don't need to be overly obsessive beyond this point:

For the purposes of maintaining overall strength over the top of the wing/fuselage mating point I do want to add some extra framework though, a couple of crosswise parts and a single longitudinal piece in a kind of cruciform shape. Out with the contour gauge:

And thence to a grindy-barrel sesh on the D-clone:

They'll do:

Well, nearly. A dry-fit reavealeth mine error in leaving the deeper of those two as broad as ye Bosphorous:

A few millimetres to be whopped off there as you can see in order for it to be able to sit flush.

 

I'm glad to have got to that stage today: the next 2-3 weeks are going to be extremely busy and I don't anticipate much opportunity outside of weekends.

 

There's a lot of small gubbins for the roof that can be worked on in the odd half hour that may crop up here and there though, as at this point I feel that the roof-height dilemma has been satisfactorily resolved and we can move on.

 

Nearly forgot. Here's a shot of the Pelican 9 crew taken immediately after they'd landed on completing the first successful capsule recovery mission:

^{Image credit: USAF}

Just noticed here that there is no long 'ladder' at all on the starboard side of the roof - this build'll be a doddle now!

That big drum however I will have to add, as the recovered capsule was first wrapped in black plastic and sealed inside the drum in order to form a lightproof seal for transportation to the film processing facility.

 

Whatever you're worshipping this Sunday, I wish you the joy of it.

Tony

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Spookytooth]

Oh, the contour gauge, a very hand y bit of kit to have around, especially when scratch building.

22 minutes ago, TheBaron said:

Shopping is dangerous - don't risk it!

It is a necessary evil Tony. LOL

 

It all seems to be going good sir.

Pleasant afternoon to you and your family.

 

Simon.

 

[hendie]

56 minutes ago, TheBaron said:

Now then Bill and hendie, have a look at the following photo

 

Well, I don't think they're ladders. Looking at your first photo, the "rungs" look enormous - much larger than needed to support your average hooman.

In the Pelican 9 photo, you can see that the not-a-ladder is suspended from the roof by two similarly large(ish) diameter tubes with a "V" brace in the middle at rung 2, and a single vertical brace at rung 1.  No doubt there are similar supports along the length of the framework.  It looks as if detaching the item would not be a simple task.

 

It may be my imagination, but in the color photo, the not-a-ladder on the right looks as if it curves up towards the roof at the end closest to the camera.

 

I can only think that a structure that substantial inside an aircraft, must serve a purpose greater than providing the crew a monkey ladder to swing across to break up the boredom on long flights, but as to the real purpose... I do not know.

 

 

[The Spadgent]

Brilliant progress, really enjoyed catching up with this after my boozy weekend. The pit is looking so ace. Might even get some paint out soon? 

 

jont.

[hendie]

11 hours ago, TheBaron said:

After that is was up to the rooftops with Mary Poppins in order to test a surmise that a cut-down version of the original roof could still prove useful:

 

this brings to mind a small but interesting event from last year.  All the plants in our company have volleyball teams, and every year we have a league.  I got fed up with the team name always being something about beer (as were all the other team names) so thought I would try something different and proposed that we call the volleyball team The Mary Poppins Fan Club

Surprisingly, it was vetoed (even although I was the team captain.)  Undeterred, I went and bought myself a nice camo T-shirt and some print yer own, iron-on transfer thingies.  I found a nice piccie of Ms Poppins with her brolly, added some nice The Mary Poppins Fan Club text and ironed it on.  It was great !.... everybody hated it.

All was fine until one night while driving home after the games ( 9 games per night, so..) about 10 pm or so, I decided to pull into a gas station on the way home to get a drink.  What I had (in)conveniently forgotten was that I live a what could be termed a redneck area (I'm not... honest!), and I strutted into the gas station with my Ms Poppins artworked proudly emblazoned on my frontal area (I's a large boy) to find the gas station filled with a swarm of roughy-toughy rednecks talking about their trucks 'n' stuff all go silent, and look at me with some rather strange expressions. 

 

I got my drink and high tailed it out of there.   (didn't stop wearing the t-shirt for the volleyball games though!)

 

In my defense, the entire text read    

 

The Mary Poppins Fan Club

Be afraid.....

Be Very , Very Afraid !

 

(maybe that scared 'em enough)

 

 

[TheBaron]

22 hours ago, Spookytooth said:

Pleasant afternoon to you and your family.

Thanks for that Simon. Hopefully a nice afternoon today as well, which started  with a thick mist earlier and now the sun is beaming.

21 hours ago, hendie said:

I can only think that a structure that substantial inside an aircraft, must serve a purpose greater than providing the crew a monkey ladder to swing across to break up the boredom on long flights, but as to the real purpose... I do not know.

Who knows? It has certainly become a counterpart to the 'mystery aperture' in the Barracuda wing root from my last build.

14 hours ago, The Spadgent said:

Brilliant progress, really enjoyed catching up with this after my boozy weekend. The pit is looking so ace. Might even get some paint out soon? 

Hope you had a good time at the hop-enthusiasts' convention John? I wouldn't hold out hope for pigmentation any time soon, though I did get round to ordering gloss black and white aluminium last night, so the urge is clearly  there!

11 hours ago, hendie said:

I got my drink and high tailed it out of there. 

 Magnificent!

I see that they've just released the security footage of you fleeing the scene hendie: 

 

Only a couple of photos today as I won't bore you with the unexciting tasks I've had to attend to in terms of measuring and tidying up various features. One item I wanted to nail today was obtaining a correct level for the ceiling up the front end of the fuesalge, essentially so that it is consistent at both ends of the aircraft:

After footering around with pencils and pens held in tweezers (I know, ridiculousm, but you gotta get it out of your system sometimes..) the easiest procedure was simply to shove a metal ruler down the length of the interior and use it to scratch a level into the walls with the sharp corner of it - inelegant but direct. (Before Weights & Measures come down on me, I know the door heights need adjusting and yes the celing was slightly ahoo in that shot... )

 

One reason I wanted to do this first was so that I could add a couple of thick pieces of scrap plastic to act as a brace for gluing the roof at the right level when the whole structure is eventually sealed up; the only other regions where celing and fuselage make direct contact for gluing now are the forward bulkhead, rear recess at the back, and the spar box, so I wanted an additional fixing point to these to make sure everything lines up correctly at the end. In the the process of sorting that detail, a more careful inspection of sizes and heights revealed that I did need to re-contour the roof up at the forward end, in order for it to match the higher point  on the fuselage wall where it will now be re-positioned to. A lot of time this morning was therefore taken up simply by constant back and forth between the sander in the D-clone and the aircraft, gettting this done accurately.

 

After that, it was back to completing the cruciform structure for the spar-box that I'd begun work on yesterday, using a half-lap join on the longitudinal and crosswise parts, before adding some scrap bracing to secure the whole thing inside the central part of the wing:

I tested fitted that new wing structure and thankfully it matches the wing spar region of the kit pretty decently, so that's a major structural item taken care of now. Despite the couple of hours all that took not a lot of evident progress to show, but I feel more comfortable moving forward having spent that time today checking the interaction of parts.

 

Care to join me in a May Day dance?

 

"It was the First of May - a righteous holiday..."

 

[perdu]

Happy may day, one and all

 

There, that's the conventions out of the way, those cruciforms look as if they'll do the job proper proper Tony

 

She's getting to be a habit, this cargoplane of yours

 

I hope we ain't all gotta dance like Dickyboy though, I just hasn't got the knees for it. 💃

 

If I'd known dancing was going to be required I'd have asked the doc for a pair of performance knee bits rather than the long-life variety off the shelf.  

 

Jesting aside I do think the ceiling will be perfect with some sound deadening pads built in

 

Carry on number one...

 

👮

 

 

 

 

Some of these emotis are a bit...

 

Odd huh?