Sea Vixen FAW.1x2

[perdu]

And now, a name

 

An early day recce team sent in to the pub during the morning clean up revealed the name Mister Squirrel 

 

More research follows apace this afternoon 

👍🏻

[qn30jEkPz7]

5 minutes ago, perdu said:

And now, a name

 

An early day recce team sent in to the pub during the morning clean up revealed the name Mister Squirrel 

 

More research follows apace this afternoon 

👍🏻

Did you wake up feeling Tufty?

[perdu]

What an unusual question.

 

Me no understandee.

[perdu]

🤔.   😲.     😄😄😄😄😄

[71chally]

On 8/8/2020 at 8:53 PM, Pete in Lincs said:

I seem to remember that the Ram Air Turbine, once deployed, has to be manually retracted. But that is probably on a different Aircraft?

 

On 8/8/2020 at 10:41 PM, TheBaron said:

 

That I can't recollect reading Pete but I will check Buttler's thorough volume in the morning. There's also a couple of original Flight articles from the 50s and 60s I managed to download before the demise of their archive that might have something.

 

Only just noticed this dialogue,

 

Pete is correct, most emergency back-up systems operate one way only, mainly because they are only needed in an actual emergency, and it reduces the weight/complexity of having retraction systems.

Most RATS and ELRATs etc deploy when they sense a loss of pressure or power in the system that they are protecting, and can be deployed from the cockpit, they usually deploy into the airflow by sprung methods.  They are then manually stowed away after the aircraft has safely recovered on the ground.

Even on test-flights, if the RAT has been deployed as part of the test schedule, the aircraft will return with it still deployed.

Same for many airfield arrestor hook types, such as the Hunter or Lightning, the hook can only be deployed, it can't be raised again by the pilot.

 

My guess for the Vixens' apparently different sized RAT cover doors is that the 'larger' one overlaps the 'smaller' one to keep it closed.

The Sea Vixens RAT only protects the Blue hydraulic system, which is the essential flying controls, this why it wasn't needed in the recent hyd failure accident on XP924.

 

Not very relevant examples I'm afraid, but you can see the ELRAT deployed (inboard of the stb't undercarriage) on these 757s returning from test-flights

 

Boeing 757 -200 G-FCLI 16 Mar 16 by James Thomas, on Flickr

 

Boeing 757 -236 G-OOBH TUI by James Thomas, on Flickr

Edited August 15, 2020 by 71chally

[qn30jEkPz7]

On 13/08/2020 at 20:10, Aardvark said:

In vodka and snack at the same time?

I’ve a hazyish memory of making vodka jelly and vodka infused melon balls back in the mid 90s. That’s a young man’s game though  

 

p.s. @perdu Tufty Road safety club mascot 

[TheBaron]

Oktoberfest has broken out early in virtual form I see!

Serge, Bill, Alistair, Ian, Pete, CC, Giorgio, Adrian, Johnny, James - my apologies for not responding sooner: thanks for keeping things alive -  a busy complicated week just ate up all available hours (and same again starting Monday )

Twitter called it right by Thursday...

 

I have it on good authority that under new lockdown regs you'll have to crack a can of ale at home after scanning the QR code on the side of it in order to to remotely watch your pint settling on the bar at the local shebeen. Like Instagram, you can add 'cloudy' filters &etc., thus tinting the pint to taste. For an extra fee the pub will post you the contents of an old ashtray which you can scatter pot-pourri like on the coffee table in front of you in order to give your premises that special 'Midnight at the Docker's club' ambience....

 

3 hours ago, 71chally said:

Even on test-flights, if the RAT has been deployed as part of the test schedule, the aircraft will return with it still deployed.

Fascinating to see these still in operation - I had no idea of their continued use to such a degree James so a great posting - thanks!

I found this tucked away in one of the original Flight articles that kind of implies the one-way nature of the procedure in-flight:

 

This morning then was the first chance to get back to the coal (inter)face and I managed to finish tidying up the final detailing for the RAT installation. Somewhat pleased at progress I was disturbed however to find that I'd been periodically breaking out into 'Rat-a-tat-a-tat' to the tune of Chanson D'amour by The Manhattan Transfer.

 

Notwithstanding such levels of acoustic atrocity, first up for completion was the cornucopia-like pillar that the turbine head sits upon:

I had - as you can see - to take certain liberties with the thickness of the mounting plate at top and that arm protruding out rearwards that the arms of the doors link to as I don't want to drop below their 0.3mm thickness and risk print failure on so visually-obvious a part. Tucked into place beneath the windmill, these exaggerations don't seem to disturb the overall visuals for this area too badly:

With the doors and their arms in place on the finished item this region will look a lot busier in addition so they won't look so exposed. Mounting this into place will be done by taking the triangular base that forms part of the rotational mechanism and making this part of the airframe instead so that the RAT can be fixed into place with some 0.5mm brass rod as a locating pin fitted into the recesses shown:

For these interior details I was working mainly from manual drawings as the acute perspective of photographs in this area tends to give some false sensibilities about exact positioning. Photos led me astray in the earlier stages into building the axis around which the RAT rotates in line with the rear edge of the fuselage opening: when that looked far too truncated in my initial designs I realized that the axis of rotation is actually set further back under the fuselage (about 1.5mm further back at this scale) which turned out to be a blessing as it meant the delicate stuff too small to print is hidden away and I could simply build the triangular frame for the RAT pillar to sit on as part of the bay itself. The recesses that I've created to assist with this mounting process almost match the angle and direction of the actual damper strut that protrudes downward through that triangular frame, which is omitted here on the dual grounds of invisibility and the structural strength needed to build  a solid mount.

 

@71chally, @Pete in Lincs, @corsaircorp - in honour of your assistance in the matter of RAT operation, I added both (as you can see above)the down lock roller to the the rear of the RAT pillar and the corresponding hook for the down lock release to engage it when retracted deep in the bay innards:

You'll be there in spirit.... 😁

 

With that done, I then finished off detailing and placing the various hydraulic cylinders and doors to the bay - the latter components having some 0.4mm wide 'shelves' added to assist with the mounting:

The doors by (printing) necessity have to be of an over-scale thickness, but seen from above the level of detailing in the bay now looks acceptable:

 

There is of course a lot more plumbing and tubing on the real thing though to avoid an unmanageable Schwarzwald of supports accruing at the print stage, where visibly necessary these can be added from wire later.

A reverse-angle from below:

Missing of course (and still to be made from brass) are the hook/shaft combination, as well as the other shaft angling upwards from the hook mounting into the actuator above that you can see just peeking down from the roof.

 

I'm hopeful that a judicious combination of resin and brass in this way are an effective combination to deal with the joining together and detailing of complex structures in terms of balancing acceptable levels of accuracy with strength:

 

Last couple of views to finish with then:

 

 

The next phase is going to take a while. Avons and engine bays....

 

Have a good weekend all of you.

Bon nuit.

 

 

 

[Pete in Lincs]

34 minutes ago, TheBaron said:

but seen from above the level of detailing in the bay now looks acceptable:

I'll say! Consider thyself re-dubbed, King Rat!

[qn30jEkPz7]

3 hours ago, TheBaron said:

Oktoberfest has broken out early in virtual form I see!

We expect the curvaceous e-Vixen to be wearing a dirndl by the time of the next update

Edited August 15, 2020 by LostCosmonauts

[71chally]

6 hours ago, TheBaron said:

Somewhat pleased at progress I was disturbed however to find that I'd been periodically breaking out into 'Rat-a-tat-a-tat' to the tune of Chanson D'amour by The Manhattan Transfer.

...brilliant!  I was brought up on a musical cocktail of ManTra and The Doors, I think now looking back that it must have spoketh of the duality of mankind, or something.

 

Here the PNs entry for the RAT, items 4 & 7.

 

Screen Shot 2020-08-15 at 23.25.19 by James Thomas, on Flickr

 

 

Lovely moonshot Tony, and fabulous progress!

[giemme]

Lovely job on the RAT mounting,  Tony

I'm not clear, or I simply don't remember, what are you going to do with the turbine itself: are you going to print that too?

 

Ciao 

[TheBaron]

17 hours ago, Pete in Lincs said:

I'll say! Consider thyself re-dubbed, King Rat!

Brutal! A slap in the face for democRats everywhere!

13 hours ago, LostCosmonauts said:

We expect the curvaceous e-Vixen to be wearing a dirndl by the time of the next update

Typing 'Vixen dirndl' into Google search reveals a rich and fascinating world of fauna...

10 hours ago, 71chally said:

Here the PNs entry for the RAT, items 4 & 7.

52 minutes ago, giemme said:

what are you going to do with the turbine itself: are you going to print that too?

At this scale Giorgio, yes. I had originally thought to do something in brass for the blades themselves but in realizing the actual scale of the part I don't think that it would yield any further detailing effects that printing won't produce in this instance.

 

The larger blades for the Avons are another matter however and I'm keeping an open mind on this at present until we get further along the road, as it were. What I really need to do is get an idea of the diameter of the front set of blades, mock up a graphic in Illustrator, then print this out to scale out in order to get a clear idea of how many blades could potentially be depicted using PE.

[perdu]

Vixen dirndl Google?

 

 

Umm.

 

 

I doubt I'm strong enough to give that a bash.

 

[Pete in Lincs]

I tried. Took one for the troops. Mein Gott!

[perdu]

I'm sorry you had to do that Pete, thank you.

 

[Procopius]

On 8/7/2020 at 1:48 PM, TheBaron said:

We did get to rescue a hedgehog though!

Swoon!

[Ex-FAAWAFU]

Magnificent.  [The RAT, not the dirndl]

[hendie]

Vixens, hedgehogs, and rats.  This is turning  into a right menagerie of a build.

 

As long as you don't get the rat and the hedgehog mixed up at print time you should be okay - though the image of a surprised hedgehog suddenly popping up into the airstream could set you up for some prizes at Telford

 

 

 

 

FYI - Elegoo print plates are back in stock at Amazon in case you are interested.  I just ordered one - handy to  have as a spare just in case, or helps with quick changeovers when printing

 

 

 

[perdu]

1 hour ago, hendie said:

FYI - Elegoo print plates are back in stock at Amazon in case you are interested

I kid you not, it is a different world over there...

 

And in here too

 

The RAT, just how would you find a need to bespoil the Vixen's amazing lines by adding (or even it can be said extracting) the Vixen's RAT in a tiny 1/72 scale model?

 

Another world I say, another world.

[qn30jEkPz7]

On 16/08/2020 at 16:19, Pete in Lincs said:

I tried. Took one for the troops. Mein Gott!

Careful now. Too much of that and your eyesight will deteriorate forcing you to switch to 1/48. To progress further into 1/32 and 1/24 modelling are signs of irretrievable degeneracy 

[michaelc]

6 minutes ago, LostCosmonauts said:

Careful now. Too much of that and your eyesight will deteriorate forcing you to switch to 1/48. To progress further into 1/32 and 1/24 modelling are signs of irretrievable degeneracy 

reminds me of the cartoon; The new Airfix Spitfire 1A - three or four guys opening the box of the  1:1 scale 'model'.  Then there was James May's 'small' effort.

[Terry1954]

My wife came upon me having googled on 'Dirndl" and simply mumbled something about "you wish" ...........

 

Impressive RAT work Tony, to match all the other impressive bits of this impressive "new tech" build.

 

Terry

[TheBaron]

Welcome back to what of late has been reduced to a mere weekly update on matters of general interest...

 

As if the previous week hadn't been taxing enough, with the arrival of Storm Ellen to these shores on Wednesday a night of havoc ensued. About 1am I watched from the bedroom windows as the birches and poplars in the front garden were repeatedly pushed right over into living longbows by the blast.

 

An ominous battering above our heads presently announced that the house hadn't been spared.

 

Morning light surely enough revealed the roof to be damaged in several places and three trees down across the back garden. We didn't lose power though broadband was out for 36 hours. Luckily there's a local feller Brendan who's dead handy at fixing roofs so that got sorted yesterday evening, plus the trees have now been dragged aside and de-limbed in preparation for sawing up to help feed the stove over the winter. Garden's s a right state though, but we're luckier than many -  the roof got pulled right off the local postal depot during the storm, and that was a modern building!

 

One oddity between the series of storm fronts pushing over us yesterday was this phenomenon that  I'd never witnessed in such extreme form before:

Scudding wisps of low cloud forming and dissolving in front of your eyes within seconds as if timelapsed...

 

Despite such travails I did in fact manag to solve a significant obstacle that I'd been struggling with for some time on the aircraft - I'll come back to this in a moment after the postbag...

On 8/16/2020 at 11:13 AM, perdu said:

I doubt I'm strong enough to give that a bash.

🤣 A bon mot worthy of the great Ced himself Bill!

On 8/16/2020 at 4:19 PM, Pete in Lincs said:

I tried. Took one for the troops. Mein Gott!

Did you see the 'furry' one Pete?

Ain't subcultures great? 😸

On 8/17/2020 at 1:29 AM, Procopius said:

Swoon!

For you Edward:

The dear little fellow all healed and released into his home environment once more.

On 8/17/2020 at 7:02 AM, Ex-FAAWAFU said:

Magnificent.  [The RAT, not the dirndl]

That cries out to be the final line of a poem Crisp.

On 8/17/2020 at 2:28 PM, hendie said:

Vixens, hedgehogs, and rats.  This is turning  into a right menagerie of a build.

'My Forum and Other Animals'...?

On 8/17/2020 at 2:28 PM, hendie said:

the image of a surprised hedgehog suddenly popping up into the airstream could set you up for some prizes at Telford

(Brandishes rosette for the 'Secreted Mammal' class...)

On 8/17/2020 at 2:28 PM, hendie said:

 Elegoo print plates are back in stock at Amazon in case you are interested.  I just ordered one - handy to  have as a spare just in case, or helps with quick changeovers when printing

Sage advice as always Alan. Might have to wait a month or so til I find out how big a hit we're going to take regarding fees &etc. with out eldest starting college next month. I've selfishly selflessly tried to guide him towards a career in injection moulding but they will have such independent minds these days. 😁

On 8/17/2020 at 4:05 PM, perdu said:

The RAT, just how would you find a need to bespoil the Vixen's amazing lines by adding (or even it can be said extracting) the Vixen's RAT in a tiny 1/72 scale model?

Fear nought Bill - I decided a while back that due to the rather fetching New Romantic paint scheme of XJ481 during her Martel years, she'll be built entirely 'clean' (no doors/openings of any kind opened up) and posed in flight in order to avoid breaking up the lines of her paint scheme. By contrast, her sister ship will be letting it all hang out, as it were...

On 8/18/2020 at 9:22 AM, LostCosmonauts said:

Careful now. Too much of that and your eyesight will deteriorate forcing you to switch to 1/48. To progress further into 1/32 and 1/24 modelling are signs of irretrievable degeneracy 

On 8/18/2020 at 9:33 AM, michaelc said:

reminds me of the cartoon; The new Airfix Spitfire 1A - three or four guys opening the box of the  1:1 scale 'model'.  Then there was James May's 'small' effort.

😄

I recall seeing an image of an actual Sopwith Camel disassembled and packed in a crate for transit during WW1 and it being little different in appearance from a kit in a box.

On 8/18/2020 at 9:43 AM, Terry1954 said:

My wife came upon me having googled on 'Dirndl" and simply mumbled something about "you wish" ...........

I suppose just replying that 'the chaps on Britmodeller were all talking about them' would really have just made matters worse under the circumstances Terry...

On 8/18/2020 at 9:43 AM, Terry1954 said:

Impressive RAT work Tony, to match all the other impressive bits of this impressive "new tech" build.

You are too kind, as always!

(PS. Bought some photos of Furious in her 1918 guise from a seller on E-bay last but need to contact NMM to see what they have.)

 

Ok. So when last we spoke I'd finished off the RAT/arrestor bays and sundry gubbins, with attention now needing to switch to the main volumes of the two aircraft. To be more precise, there are in essence a number of decisions that need to be taken now due to their impact upon both subsequent detailing and the printed outputs themselves, with respect to forming a 'shell' for the fuselage and nose sections. Such a shell has to perform both structurally (to provide self-supporting strength) and visually (where openings and edges are visible to the viewer. From experience I'm working to 0.8mm as the baseline wall thickness to help preserve structural rigidity, and where such thickness would pose a visual problem at the edge of panel openings, windows &etc, this can be strategically thinned/chamfered around the perimeter to approximate scale thickness.

 

Having learned so much over the course of this build since it starting at Christmas, I now realize that I was in error to initially create such regions as the nose and fuselage as 'solid' objects - originally having done so due to inexperience and not knowing how to plan a build effectively to later grapple with the idea of producing volumes with thin walls. This had, quite frankly, become an increasing headache until realizing that at this point in the design cycle there was no escaping having to commit to a solution, however arduous. The one thing I didn't wish to do was to have to undo all the subsequent work since about March, but after several false starts in the background over the last month or so (there'd have been no point showing you a series of dead ends and saying 'look - a dead end! 😁) I realized there was a simple and effective way to deal with the problem.

 

1. 'unstitch' the original solid until it is now a series of disconnected surfaces.
2. hide all but the outside wall of the airframe.
3. stitch these together to produce a single surface
4. copy and shrink this down to form the inner wall, nesting it inside the first one.
5. stitch the resulting 'lip' between the two surfaces back together again and:

Voila:

 

You have a wall. The thickness of this rear edge is 0.8mm. Seen from the side:

You can see that it thickens towards the apex of the nose: on '481 this won't matter because the rear of the nose cone won't be open and we'll slicing the nose diagonally and replacing the tip with the trials gear. On '708, I can cut out the required profile and slope this back into the thicker section unobtrusively without compromising rigidity.

 

'481s nose above wasn't too hard to do modify like this (once I'd successfully worked out a methodology) but that of '708 was a nightmare due to the fact that I'd already built the nose well and Microcell bay into the original solid loft! All my attempts to repeat the same process on this airframe foundered upon the complicated inner geometry of these interior details, until I I theorized 'why not just  (temporarily) cut them out of the mix' - like so?

Being careful to ensure that the region included both the nosewheel bay and that of the Microcell launcher in their entirety, I set this excised section to one side and began work repeating the method with a borrowed 'skin' from '481 - ending up with a broadly similar result:

Similar that is, except for having to cut openings in the underside for the nosewheel well and Microcell bays-  horribly complicated jobs with all of the compound curvatures involved:

You can see above that it also made sense to separate the radome from the fuselage at this stage, due to this being open in the final display. From here it was just a case of adding back the initial region cut out from the original solid:

I'm not unduly worried that at present this interferes with the floor of the cockpit - as can be seen more clearly from the rear:

 - and likewise at the front in respect of the AI 18 electronics:

Both of these aspects can be turned to advantage in terms of providing good solid supports within this part of the aircraft and can easily have sections cut away from them as and when required in order to accommodate the subsequent interior fittings

 

I'm not sorry to have gotten past this problem now - it's been preying on my mind for some time and no amount of focus on detailing was going to make it go away. I need to turn my attention to the rear fuslage next to see if the same methodology will work out there also.

 

Thanks for looking in as always and be careful with your bits that go over the hedge last:

 

Tony

 

 

 

 

[Spookytooth]

Sorry to hear about your roof woes Tony.

But at least you got it sorted out, and plenty of timber to burn during the dark months.

 

The Vixen is coming along very nicely indeed.

 

Simon.

[bbudde]

As above Tony. Sorry to hear that and it seems that the some of the storm runners arrived here today as it is very windy. The good thing is, that it's fresh, cool air from the North Atlantic and now very enjoiable outside. Time now to ventilate my flat to get more comfortable conditions than yesterday. Nice work on the Cad's btw.

Cheers