Avro 504K, 1/32, Scratchbuild

[Bandsaw Steve]

Great post Marklo. Those photos make a pretty convincing case as to how this should be done. I haven’t actually started work on the cockpit yet so not committed to any particular approach yet. All suggestions welcome. 👍

[hendie]

make sure the driver faces towards the twirly thing on the front?

 

Small diameter brass rod and some soldering wouldn't go amiss in making up the framing and give you a robust framework to work with - I did something similar at the start of my Lysander build

[Martian]

Its starting to look the part!

 

Martian 👽

[TheBaron]

On 9/9/2018 at 2:25 PM, Bandsaw Steve said:

. Basically this is a ruler with numbered little holes in it every 0.25 mm.

Why was I not told of these.

Another scandal....

 

Enjoying this immensely Steve - a veritable compendium of craftspersonship!

[Marklo]

Actually if the interior is steel tube then I'd go with Hendie and fabricate a frame from soldered brass rod.  Pretty much the way Pheonix is handline the fuselage on his Gunbus build. 

 

Actually truth be told this appeals so much to my inner Engineer that I want to try something like that myself, probably not for the gamecock, as it's interior looks to be wood and wire,  but I do have a Fury I want to build and that would suit perfectly.

Edited September 14, 2018 by Marklo

[pheonix]

6 hours ago, Marklo said:

Actually if the interior is steel tube then I'd go with Hendie and fabricate a frame from soldered brass rod.  Pretty much the way Pheonix is handline the fuselage on his Gunbus build. 

 

 

Naturally I fully agree with Marklo on this point: soldering is not nearly as difficult as I had feared that it might be and the result is very strong.

 

P

[hendie]

I'd definitely ask you to consider it - it is remarkably strong when done and can provide lots of nice detail - here's the gubbinses from my Lysander build before it got swallowed up never to be seen again

 

 

 

apologies for thread drift

[Bandsaw Steve]

Very nice indeed. 

Was that made using a soldering iron or a soldering torch. I.e low or high temperature soldering?

[hendie]

Steve, that was done using standard soldering iron and normal temperature solder.  I only managed to find a decent low temp solder after I had done all that

 

If I remember correctly most of it was done with 0.8 mm brass rod.... not wire (It's no good for these types of jobs)

 

*edited* to replace 'sure' with wire.  Darn spill chucker on phones

Edited September 15, 2018 by hendie

[Head in the clouds.]

I have done a little soldering and I find it one of the more pleasurable aspects of modelling, for me the biggest challenge is coming up with weird and wonderful ways to hold it all in place while it is soldered.

Your Avro is just begging for some Alchemy of this type Steve.

 

Gary

 

[DMC]

Hi Steve, 

 

This link might prove useful:

 

https://davidneat.wordpress.com/tag/how-to-solder-safely/

 

Or maybe you already know as much.  Good book by the way.

 

Cheers

 

Dennis

 

[Bandsaw Steve]

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!

 

[hendie]

2 hours ago, Bandsaw Steve said:

For a while there I was quite happy with how this project was rocking along.

 

so were we!

 

2 hours ago, Bandsaw Steve said:

Here's the result of the emergency cavity digging. 

 

well, that looks remarkably pre-planned.  I won't tell if you don't

 

2 hours ago, Bandsaw Steve said:

OMG! What a mess - how did I manage to get the geometry that far wrong?!?! 

 

Quite obviously you didn't pay enough attention during math classes at school

 

 

[pheonix]

Nice to see that some other modellers were also lacking attention in their maths classes..... or like me just seem to be able to make a mess without really trying!

 

You are certainly making more rapid progress than I am - and apart from the gap on the side of the fuselage (easily remedied by the way), this is going along swimmingly.

 

Looking forward to next week's update and solution to your problem.

 

P

[Ted]

As painful as they must be, those little foibles make your build all the more interesting to watch. Especially your clever solutions.

[bigbadbadge]

Hi Steve 

Great recovery on the leg room. What a shame about the side panels angle . I am rubbish at maths myself.   Could you not correct with some plasticard stock or are you replacing them both?

Still looks amazing fella. 

All the best 

Chris 

[Courageous]

I second Hendie's observation.

 

On a serious note, I would've launched that bit of wood (and plastic) on a trajectory towards the bin. You're made of better stuff so you'll fix it good.

 

Stuart

[Martian]

Don't worry, I've made far dafter mistakes than that.

 

Martian 👽

[Bandsaw Steve]

5 hours ago, bigbadbadge said:

Could you not correct with some plasticard stock or are you replacing them both?

 

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.

[Redshift]

A wise man once said "measure twice, cut once", but he clearly wasn't a modeller. I manage to measure occasionally, cut often and repent at leisure.

[Bandsaw Steve]

1 hour ago, Redshift said:

A wise man once said "measure twice, cut once", 

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! 

[Head in the clouds.]

That is a first class recovery on the footwell of the cockpit Steve considering once it was fixed it limited your hand/chisel movement.

Ah, measure twice and cut once, even now we get it wrong and at work it is common to be 100mm out, you think you have measured 16 but in fact it is 15. One guy measured some window openings for the glass, 7 openings in total and each one was ....yep, 100mm out, oh how we laughed, and laughed and laughed.

[TheBaron]

A super series of recoveries Steve - of which we know by now that you're well able of fixing, no matter how stark the task.

 

In your spare time you must get round to doing something sorting out world peace and the banking industry.

[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

 

[Redshift]

Ooh, shiney much better than plastic. I like the use of veneer for the ribbing too. Its coming along rather nicely