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Time for another scratchbuild. Most de Havilland aficionados would be familiar with the DH104 Dove and DH114 Heron. Quoting Geoff Goodall: "At the end of World War Two, the Australian associate of the parent De Havilland company, De Havilland Aircraft Pty Ltd at Sydney NSW (referred to as DHA) was completing wartime RAAF Mosquito orders and looking for a new design to build for the post-war civil market. The general concept was a single-pilot utility transport for 8 passengers as a replacement for the many DH.84 Dragon biplanes in use in Australia. It was to be of simple rugged construction with fixed undercarriage suitable for Outback operations on rough airstrips, with low-powered 145hp DH Gipsy Major 10 Mk.2 engines, which were in plentiful supply. The new aircraft was the DHA-3 Drover....." (source: https://www.goodall.com.au/australian-aviation/drover/drover.htm for much much more....) Below is a photo (credit: Geoff Goodall) - which bears more than a passing similarity to the Dove, and is of a similar size - but with an extra engine. Actually the Drover had very little in common with the Dove other than stressed skin construction concept. Much more on this at the URL provided above... From a modelling perspective - whilst the Dove has been well served (certainly of late) in 1/72 - the Drover less so. There's a number of modelling articles where people have converted a Dove to a Drover, and older articles converting the Airfix Heron to a Drover (and the Airfix Heron to a Dove) - basically major cut and shut surgery. But I wanted a 1/48 model (my preferred scale) and so we turn to scratchbuilding. First problem was getting decent plans - the best I could find was some 'thumbnail plans' - not sure of source but might well be Jane's or similar. These don't respond well to enlargement (the pen lines scale out at about 6" thick), and there were aspects of these drawings just didn't look 'right'. I know Air Britain has a publication on the Drover with drawings from Juanita Franzi which are sure to be great - but it'll take me a while to source that locally (or pay o/s postage!!), and there's a model to be started! Luckily there's a number of airframes in Australia - including a mostly complete Drover, and a fuselage at Queensland Air Museum in Caloundra. So it was a museum visit, and out with a camera, tape measure, pen and paper. The scribblings below was the result of the visit - the drawing at left the enlarged thumbnail plans I was starting with.. Anyway - after translating all this lot to 1/48 - here's what the fuselage plan looks like - top view, side view and cross sections. This was my main concern with the thumbnail plans and there's certainly some differences... So - let's cut some plastic! The fuselage has compound curves all over the place - which is going to require vacforming. And vacforming means I need a 'buck' of the fuselage. My technique here is to first build up a skeleton of side view, top view and cross sections - which we'll later fill in with 'car bog'. You'll see this happen over subsequent posts. Below is the skeleton being built up. I've cut the side view as a single piece (0.75mm styrene) and am adding the cross-sections out of 0.5mm styrene - half on the port side, the other half on the starboard side - with a 0.75mm sliver removed to allow for thickness of the side view piece.... Little triangles of styrene help provide structure and keep things at right angles. And here's what it looks like with all the pieces of the skeleton in place. It'll need some time to dry before I fill it in. So let's move to the flying surfaces - a few hours work required to get the component parts as you see them below. - wing top surfaces (0.75mm styrene), bottom surfaces (1.0mm styrene) and the empennage pieces (all 0.75mm styrene). - All the trailing edges have had their inner surfaces sanded to a fine taper with wet & dry sandpaper. - I've also built up a tapered spar (basically an I-beam), and a tapered leading edge (laminated 1.5mm styrene) And in about 15 minutes - all the trailing edges are glued and clamped. Main spar is tacked in place, and temporary spars have been used for empennage. This now needs time to properly dry as the process of glueing the leading edge is going to put a bit of stress on this glue joint (done it before - it works fine). That'll do for the first post. Next steps. - start backfilling the vacform buck with car bog. - glue the leading edges of the flying surfaces.

Aircraft In Miniature Ltd. (http://www.aim72.co.uk/index.html) has announced 1/48th and 1/72nd de Havilland Australia DHA-3 Drover Mk.1 & .3 resin kits in 2014. Source: http://www.aim72.co.uk/page5.html V.P.