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Showing results for tags 'balsa'.
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Hello All, I've had a set of plans and a hankering to build a Fairey Long Range Monoplane for a long time now (since 1997), and a testing group build on another forum gave me the excuse to get going. There are no injection or resin kits of this, and the only vac-form I know of was produced in 1985. So it's a scratchbuild job! I dug out my balsa stocks and had a look. I didn't want to carve a one-foot-something tapered wing out of half inch balsa, so I started messing around with a composite structure: The idea was to have a curved upper surface of soft 1/16 balsa wood. More support needed! Shaping was done by plane first and then sandpaper. There wasn't too much to take off - mostly shaping the tips, LE and TE. Dihedral was added with a saw cut. I painted the balsa with Ronseal wood hardener (designed for rotting window sills, which is where I know it from) and then sprayed with Halfords filler primer, which is a jaunty shade of orange. Fuselage was six slices of 1/8" balsa, with the beginnings of a cockpit cut out, stuck together into halves which in turn were tacked together (hopefully I will be able to get them apart again) and roughly shaped with a razor plane. When the black line round the middle gets smaller, that tells me I am sanding down near the profile. I made tail surfaces out of 1/8" balsa, and sealed them with superglue. I used a plastic bag over my finger to spread the glue around - it saves a lot of finger scrubbing later! After some sanding and filling, I could put a coat of regular grey primer on the wing. I still need to touch up a few dings before it's ready to detail. So next up is to finish the fuselage, and then the basic shapes are done. Then I can resume regular modelling! Thanks for looking, Adrian- 125 replies
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G'day all Little bit miffed, I thought I had started posting this early in the year, can't find any trace of it. Long story short . . I bought this Guillows Supermarine Spitfire kit a few years ago from a gent in the US who claimed it was purchased some 30 odd years prior. So earlier this year I decided to give it a go [haven't done a flying model in 25 years], opened the box and to my horror was covered in a thick layer of white powder and my first thought given this was an international purchase was, "Bugger! Anthrax". Fortunately that proved to not be the case . . . not unless these days anthrax comes in a saw dust scented variety . . I can only deduce that the balsa had degenerated over the years [being knocked about probably didn't help]. A quick inspection proved that some of the panels were too weak to work with so I had to re-cut them. Anyway assembly was rather quick Now unfortunately I don't have any of the photos I originally took for the steps past this point [seem to have misplaced the files] Another long story short, I was determined to make this a flying model, unfortunately that didn't happen. The rubber band motor was not strong enough to make it vibrate let alone travel across the table. And given that I had well glued the cowling into place with enough lead to balance the CofG properly, I figured it was too late to motorise it. So, I decided to fill in the formers with soft balsa offcuts, fill in the gaps with wood putty and sand smooth. As you can see, nicely balanced . . on the corner of my monitor My concept now is to stain and polish it before I add decals and additional features . . this should leave a clear distinction between wood and plastic, plus the original kits skeleton is highly visible. Part of the additions is to include a proper undercarriage complete with extended landing gear. Still have a bit of work to do, the plastic components that come with the kit leave a lot to be desired in terms of detail. I have been researching what the different radiator and cooling tubes look like and along with the prop decided on doing a mark V [ish] model. Currently awaiting the arrival of some ebay aquired enhancements to arrive.
