Bandsaw Steve

Back on Track Following that last mess I was suffering a temporary lack of mojo and was finding all kinds of things to do other than work on the Avro. Today however, at least in Western Australia, we celebrate the Queen's Birthday - Happy Birthday Liz! With this we get a public holiday. So really it was my duty as a loyal subject of her majesty to get stuck into this again and to try to get this project back on track. First I needed to cut this bit of NZ white pine to the shape shown below. Just take a small block of wood - drill where the corners need to go and carefully hollow the thing out using a fine fretsaw and a chisel. This bit has to go on section 'D' as shown below. This is part of my attempt to create the illusion of a hollow fuselage. When peering into the rear of the instructor's cockpit I would like the viewer to see a void rather than a solid block of wood - hence the hole I've made. Here it is being glued in place. PVA once again - nothing special. Now to something that might just be a little bit special; a rather useful product that I've owned for a couple of months and am using here for the first time. This is a wood laminate (yes real wood) about 1mm thick and with a very effective self-adhesive backing. For all practical purposes it's a sheet of 'stick-on wood'. Here's the packet it comes in and the name of the company that makes it - 'Urban Crafter'. I found it in an arts and craft shop but I presume it's also available online. I'm going to use it to recreate the distinctive ribbed effect on the rear decking of the top of the fuselage. Here I'm measuring off the length that I will need... and here I've marked up the individual panels that I will need to cut out and stick onto the turtleback that I made a couple of months ago. This stuff cuts almost exactly like thin cardboard - no difficulties at all. Once the required 'planks' were cut out I just peeled off the paper backing to reveal the adhesive and stuck each bit on one at a time. Very easy. In the photo below you can make out the ribbed effect that results. I reckon it looks pretty good. It was certainly a dead easy way to do this job. If you ever want to recreate a 'genuine wood' finish without too much hassle I think you should seriously consider this stuff. It's good. Unfortunately this will be covered in paint when the Avro is complete but it has got me thinking about the best way to make wooden boats. Now onto something a bit trickier. As mentioned in the previous post, the cockpit sidewalls are proving difficult. Essentially the difficulty is that I want them have the distinctive angular facets of the original, and I want them to be thin so that their true internal shape and the dimensions of the cockpit can be seen. Essentially the sidewalls were just one layer of fabric thick - so the shape on inside was identical to the shape on the outside. Previously I used vac-forming to achieve this but now I have decided to experiment with some brass sheet. First I roughed out the shape to match where it will have to fit. Easier to do with both the front and rear of the cockpit now permanently in-place. Then I used this photo-etch bending tool to hold the brass and a Stanley knife - with a very rusty blade - to scour the position where the facets start and finish. Hopefully doing this will allow a nice sharp delineation of those edges. Of course, I then bent the sheet along the scoured lines and trimmed the sidewalls to a tighter fit. Trimmed the top of the sidewalls down a bit. Leaving this. Not perfect - but not bad either. I'm happy with the fit, the thinness of the sidewalls and the sharpness of the angular facets. I think this is looking much better than the last effort and reckon I can now see a sensible method for building the cockpit. So as per usual here's a bit of a 'project to date' wrap up. Including this shot with a pen and a 20cm-long ruler for scale. and a quick peek at what it looks like with the top wing on. So - I think we are kind of back on track. Steve

OK - so hopefully nothing to be too scared of?

A great piece of work quickly executed - still, ‘Redshift’ does imply great speed. Any details on how you fixed the upper wing? Were there any particular problems or tricks involved? This is the part of the 504 build that I’m dreading.

Impressive!

Very good!

Ah yes... subtlety. I think I read something about that once.

Fantastic!

Or indeed even how to spell it!

Hello Anticlockwise. As I note that you have just generously showered my Avro 504 build with a bunch of ‘likes’ I conclude you must be an individual with great taste, intellect and a discerning nature! Welcome to BM.

That wise man is my dad - 40 something years working as an upholsterer taught him that! Upholstery fabric is expensive, even more expensive than vac-form plastic!

Hi BBB, You are right, I think I probably could ‘work around’ this issue but - as I have said before on these very pages, one of the advantages with scratchbuilding is that you can generally ‘throw out and start again’. I think that I will exercise that option in this case. I think that will be more likely to result in an outcome I’m happy with.

Twit! For a while there I was quite happy with how this project was rocking along. Since sorting out the dihedral I've had a remarkably smooth ride with this project, but we all knew that wasn't going to last. Sooner or later I was inevitably going to make a twit mistake and here it is folks, it's in this post! First up though a simple bit of tidying up. Note how after joining the two halves the floor of the fuselage has a big unwanted step in it. That's easily fixed with a few swipes of a chisel, although the floor is so thin now that one has to be a bit careful with any work on or near it. Still, this was the result and it looks O.K. Now comes the 'twit bit'. While thinking about exactly how to make the cockpit I came to the decision that regardless of how I was going to build the cockpit the front bit of the fuselage - the bit between the engine and the poor hapless student pilot - would have to be in place. So I set about scoring the base of the front bit of the fuselage and the top of the floor of the cockpit, stuck some PVA on both surfaces... …lined 'em up at 90 degrees... ...clamped them together and let it sit. Sweet! 24 hours later I had this, and thought I was pretty clever. I was thinking - building a cockpit is just like packing a suitcase; put all the big bits in place first and then just stick all of the details around the big bits - easy! But then I realised! Have you spotted the problem yet? I'll give you a hint - Douglas Bader is the only man in the RAF who could fly this aircraft right now. There's a dirty great solid block of wood right where the student pilot's feet need to go. Oh dear! On the photo below the roughly drawn square on the floor is the position of the front cockpit's seat. So there's less leg-room in this aeroplane than on a Jet-star 737 - and that's saying something! Hmmmm… What to do... What to do? Not much choice really. After 24 hours the PVA is rock hard so I can't lever the block off without risking breaking the very thin floor. Must resort to chisels I think... Yeah - it's kinda working. Kinda… The Huon pine smell is back again. On reflection I think it smells a little bit like cheap flyspray, sort of acrid and greasy at the same time, so I'm guessing that the pong is to keep insects away. Here's the result of the emergency cavity digging. I don't want to go much further in case I weaken the entire block's grip on the jarrah. From above it looks like this. Peering in through the cockpit opening I can just about imagine getting away with this. During the submarine build I did a fair bit of 'creating the illusion of depth' using paints to make false shade and so forth. I might have to do something similar here. Not ideal, but perhaps not a bad recovery. So now I'm ready to dry fit the side walls. Note that I've added a new panel on the side of these and filled and sanded a fair bit to get the profile of each sidewall roughly right - there's still plenty of cleaning up to go though. So let's just drop these bits into position and... OMG! What a mess - how did I manage to get the geometry that far wrong?!?! Seriously that gap is a show-stopper - I'm not going to accept that even with my propensity for bodging with filler. Oh well there you go. Some twitty mistakes for you to have a giggle at. Don't worry I'm sure I'll get things under control again - but those carefully vac-formed sidewalls are for the bin! Better luck next week. Best Regards, Steve the Twit!

Omaka Airshow - Blenheim NZ - Easter 2017. Enjoy!

Excellent! I love to see work from the next Generation!

That brings back memories... This was the first 1/48 scale kit I ever built and once I finished it I immediately went out and bought the Hasegawa Bf109 E3 (also in 1/48). From then on it was 1/48 all the way for me. I was converted. Have moved to scratchbuilding recently and now want to do ‘any subject any scale’ but this is nice to see anyway!