nick

together... and a render or two ...

more betterer...

Here’s some updates. 90% complete now. Some of it may even be correct. and a quick render for good measure more to do on the side plates and everything needs finessing a lot, but basically cracked it I think.

@PHIL B yes got all those and more thanks. The issue arises when you get several drawings like that and no two are the same! I’m cracking on with a version now that’s nearly complete. More photos later!

Test print. Looks OK. heres the a comparison with the Tamiya version from a Brabham and offered up to the DFV. Adapter plate not done yet but the proportions look Ok to me. thanks for looking Nick

Wandering off topic perhaps, but I’ve been occupied with this for the last couple of days. Behold, the main casing of the venerable Hewland FG400 transaxle gearbox, hung off the back of many a DFV motor in the 60’s 70’s and beyond. and what a difficult thing to draw it turns out. I managed to find drawings with dimensions which is rare, although none of them depicted the castings accurately. there are around 5 or 6 Hewland boxes that are very similar, then each has several different side plate options,plus there aren’t that many reference photos to start with. In the end, I was working from just 2 or 3 images. Anyway, here’s where I’m up to.

Very sharp looking now. All the hard work has paid off. 😎👍 Nick

Hi all, been doing a bit more work on the DFV, some good, some not so much. the good: throttle slides when you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail. 3D printing is pretty good, but you can’t really pull off thin metal at this scale. so I got to thinking, what looks like thin metal? I know! Thin metal. so this .2mm Ali sheet, ideally I should have used PE for this, but I never quite cracked doing this in house. I do have my trusty CNC machine though which is also pretty good at 2 1/2 D, ie cutting out sheet parts. so I decided to CNC cut all the brackets and sheet metal out rather than trying to 3D print it. As an added bonus, I finally figured out how to use sheet metal mode in fusion 360 which has never worked before. So you draw something normally, say a folded bracket, and fusion should be able to flatten that out into a sheet for machining. I never made it work before, and it was cos of my bend radii on the original drawing it turns out. For example if it’s 2mm Ali (I'm drawing full-size here remember) then a 90° bend must have an inner and outer radius of x and x+2mm so for example if the outer radius is 4mm, then the inner MUST BE 2mm, ie the thickness of the metal. Obvious really, but it’s quite easy to not do this in a drawing, and it just won’t unfold a curve that doesn’t follow this rule I now know. anyway, more on this later. Anyhoo, im very pleased with how the throttles slides and tiny little horns for the return springs came out. they’re quite small! the bad: water/oil pumps this is a second, new engine. Now I’ve assembled a complete pump, it looks OK for shape, but needs much more work to add detail - casting numbers etc, this looks too smooth and toy-like IMHO. the blanking plate behind it got the CNC treatment too The ugly: I tried a different paint technique for the slightly rough black finish. Ugh, that was a fail then! far too coarse and Matt. Actually the finish on engine 1 wasn’t far off, I just need to remember how I did it now! I’ve also been messing about laser cutting stencils for the Ford/Cosworth logos. I want to paint them white first, then mask so they don’t get the texture the black finish has - nearly cracked that too. I’ll post some better pictures and fusion screen shots when I get everything working properly. I’ve ordered some thin optic fibres to represent the fuel lines more to scale as well as thinner wire for plug leads. Stand by!… in other news, I’ve got a very shiny Saturn 4 16K ultra arriving soon. The plan is, the new super-smooth prints I’m getting off my little Mars 5 ultra currently, should equate to a single build plate on the new Saturn (instead of 2 on the Mars) give or take. ELEGOO have finally realised their printers need heaters too, so I should be able to retire my heated cabinet which is a bonus. why do you care you may well be asking? I’m basically very lazy, so I’m much more likely to put a thing that is one print into production, than the same thing that is 2 prints. Just sayin. thanks for looking, and once again apologies for nasty fone-fotos. I’m certain old iPhone (12ish?) macro pictures were far better than the these latest ones.

Very little went to plan today. no matter. I did manage to get a very scruffy looking prototype made and fitted of the Lucas spark box finally. Some very nasty cellphone fotos as well there - sorry! must try harder. I've got a few parts to modify as the fit doesn't quite work everywhere, so I'll continue to finish this mule, then I'll make a full complete engine afresh, without all the handling, poking, drilling, filing etc, so it should look quite nice compared to this! The mystery exciting thing I keep alluding to is edging ever closer too! all will be revealed soon. Thanks for looking Nick

My throttle plates are wrong. Unusually the cylinder heads on a DFV aren’t handed, they just have different end plates. I had wrongly assumed the throttle plates used the same idea. I can see now I’ve studied them properly that’s not the case and they should be handed. Easy enough to fix anyway.

So I fired the trusty scanner up today too… and also got my paws on some actual drawings from Hewland themselves - luxury! As usual this is a surprisingly complex, lumpy, assymetrical beast when you start trying to draw it. There’s some tricky compound curves on the tail of the thing especially, Tamiya have got that wrong in the scan above. Not surprisingly in fairness, it’s tricky. Stay tuned, more to come!

Yes that’s the one. I think I may have the throttle plates wrong. They have a pair of square raised blocks that this bracket mounts to - I’ve made them symmetrical. As the heads are staggered, this means the bracket needs a stagger to fit and it doesn’t seem to have one as far as I can see. So back to the drawing board with the throttle plates. I make the spring clips from Ali (the dizzy cap has them already if you look carefully 👍🤓)

Been working on the later model Lucas electronic ignition unit today. Easy enough. Although the sheet metal bracket under it is proving rather more elusive!

Yes that’s a good catch. Clear vinyl tube is difficult to source, but I’ll look harder!

Some more progress. I have refined the fit between then the throttle plates and induction trumpets as well as changing the colours (black vs grey plates) to match a specific engine/car I am now focussing on. I’ve also plumbed most things in using the correct fittings now which I think is working quite well… I’ll be producing the ignition/coil unit next, then some more details work around the fuel system and throttles but I’m back on the horse now anyway! Nick

The overall impression of that is incredibly realistic - which is the name of game, long after all the trials and tribulations of the steps to get there are forgotten. Very well done my friend, outstanding result.

Can you hear me mother? It’s been a plenty long time, but the trusty DFV has finally been dusted off - for some fairly exciting reasons! More on this later hopefully later this week. Anyhoo, been doing some plumbing, still very much a WIP but here are the latest shots from today… ’

Great work. You must be single-handedly keeping Top-Studio afloat there! Looking fabulous though. You’ve given me some ideas for parts here I must admit. Banjos, hex fittings, jubilee clips etc. I’ve got some ideas for hybrid -printed+metal stuff, I’ll have a play when I get a minute.

Sorry that was hard to understand even when English is your first language! Rough and quick but I meant something like this...

Just wondering if the flexible convoluted tube would look better if you wound some fine wire around a former? OK it would be helical rather than convoluted, but you could get it much finer and it wouldn’t show at that scale. The convolutions on the model are about the same size as the fins on the wastegate and they are about half that on the real thing. Just sayin’ - you’ve gone this far! I may have a go at drawing it if I get chance. There’s some fairly chunky jubilee type clamps in play as well hmm. Looking very good though, I do like the paint.

I used to have a have an original Quattro back in the day. A white one, honestly it was a bit of a disappointment after all the hype. I do remember having a row with the bloke in motor world who insisted that I didn’t want 5 spark plugs - ‘no mate, it will be 4 or 6, no car has 5 plugs’ etc, etc… it used to go through quite a lot of them I recall - Bosch mechanical fuel injection, eww. a few steps up from steam. Bloody Hell I’m one of those old blokes now reminiscing about ancient technology when did that happen! Nick

Thanks for all the kind comments everyone! Nick

Mostly. There’s a bit of Eduard PE but the kit is pretty good in fairness. It is a resin engine though. I was going to CAD/3D print one but for a few quid an ‘old-school’ one was available so I didn’t bother.

Well, the guy that designed it is R J Mitchell, ring any bells? He also came up with this beauty also this one.

As it happens, it was a little experiment. I don’t usually do hard edged schemes (on account of being too lazy to do wiggly masking) but with this I scanned the plans, scaled up to full size and traced the camo scheme in illustrator. Then I saved as .svg and sent to my circut, I’ve plenty of masking film, so no problem there. Worked well, EXCEPT bloody Airfix drew the lower wing upper surfaces (outlined in red) at a different scale (to fit on the page) which I failed to notice until my stencils were too small when I came to apply them. Doh. apart from that, we like. Will be doing again.