1/48 Westland Wasp HAS1 Op Corporate *** FINISHED ***

[perdu]

Fun with undercarriage  🤪

 

Yup!

 

Your interpretation is the same as I used with mine, make sure the swing arms are in line with each other from above (or below!)  and terminate nearer the front and back of the sponson and it will be good

 

Keep the arms parallel as two pairs of double wishbones and it will work out nicely

 

That photo of 606 shows a great example of the blades staying stiff with the only droop being in the arms doesn't it?

 

Lovely.

[Planebuilder62]

Gents

Here are some pictures of the Wasp undercarriage at Westo Super Mare lst year, hope they help.

 

 

 

 

[Chewbacca]

9 hours ago, Planebuilder62 said:

Gents

Here are some pictures of the Wasp undercarriage at Westo Super Mare lst year, hope they help.

 

Thanks 👍.  Nice close ups that confirm what I had surmised and also show exactly how the lashing points attach so that's doubly helpful.  Haven't worked out yet how I'm going to make those.

[corsaircorp]

Ooooh that's a good idea !!

May I join the fray... 

Really good improvements Scratchbuilding on here !!

Sincerely.

CC

[The Spadgent]

😖ooooooosh. Terrible news about the knock off.  Great save though, she’s looking great!

 

ps. Just managed to snag one on eBay for the same price I sold mine for😦🥳😬. (Same  era boxing too ) looks like I have some fun ahead. 🙌

 

Johnny

[Murdo]

Excellent recovery! Well done mate, she's really coming on well.

[Bell209]

6 hours ago, Chewbacca said:

Nice close ups that confirm what I had surmised and also show exactly how the lashing points attach so that's doubly helpful.  Haven't worked out yet how I'm going to make those.

I stripped some wire out of a piece of electrical cable and wound it around a piece of stretched sprue. Seemed to work well enough.

[Chewbacca]

Thanks everyone for your kind words.

 

Glad to have you onboard CC

 

On 23/06/2020 at 02:13, Bell209 said:

I stripped some wire out of a piece of electrical cable and wound it around a piece of stretched sprue. Seemed to work well enough.

Seems a sensible way of doing this - thanks.  I've got some really fine multi-core telephone wire that will probably suffice for that.

 

Here's the fwd undercarriage complete with a modified spring/damper section from Evergreen and brass rod.  Unfortunately I had almost gotten to this point before I saw Planebuilder's excellent close ups above which clearly show a distinct taper on the upright and a much smaller cross section at the top where the upper wishbone joins.  Too late to do anything about that now though.

 

 

This is one of the aft sponsons showing the original holes filled with rod and sanded back, the new holes drilled, the bracing struts added and the small extra structure that almost looks like a step created from scrap PE.  The holes are still too close together as they should be at the extremity of the sponsons but here they align with the lower wishbones.  To get it 100% accurate would have meant scratchbuilding those as well and I opted for the increased strength of the original parts for this.  Surprisingly, once the fwd undercarriage was put together, it felt remarkably strong.

 

 

 

 

[CJP]

You are doing some great scratch building on this model Chewbacca - starting to look very nice

CJP

[Chewbacca]

Thanks.  it continues (I hope).

 

Rear UC now complete (or thereabouts; still got to add the lashing points) and therefore I started to look at the support for the clamshell flot bags

 

I did buy some Evergreen 60 thou H section for this a couple of years ago but I'll be blowed if I can find it anywhere.  A quick internet search found that I can get some replacement direct from Evergreen for $3.79 for 4 strips direct from the manufacturers...but only in the US.  They won't ship overseas.  My LMS doesn't open until next weekend and I'm not paying £6.99 + £4.99 postage for something that's only $3.79 so this prompted me to look again at the model and how I might replicate this.  Actually 60 thou would be fractionally too big anyway.  Therefore let's do it a different way instead.

 

Stage 1.  Attach 3 small feet cut from 30 thou Evergreen to the centre of the canopy and the top of the windows to hold the frame clear of the canopy.

 

Stage 2.  Wrap a strip of 30 thou Evergreen box section around the cockpit starting just above the after of the two fwd upper wishbones.

 

 

Stage 3.  When that's dry, cut a 1.2 mm wide strip of 10 thou Evergreen sheet.  Glue that to the top of the 30 thou box section ensuring there's a small amount showing both sides.

 

Stage 4.  Get almost to the far side, realise you've cut it about 10 mm too short. Practice your early Anglo-Saxon and then realise that to remove it from the bottom of the other side would cause too much damage.  Cut if off in the middle of the canopy, use the offcut to cut a second section  (and a third because the second was fractionally too wide), and start attaching from the middle.

 

Stage 5.  When everything's fully dry (tomorrow), carefully sand the central join (if you look carefully at the photo below you can just see the join).  Then look at the support bars themselves

 

 

 

Edited June 25, 2020 by Chewbacca
Spooling urrers

[Terry1954]

That clamshell support looks the biz Ralph, and I wouldn't mind betting that 60 thou H section may in any case have been too thick to contour the way it needs to be done, and indeed the way you have done it. I reckon your way was actually easier in the long run!

 

Great stuff.

 

Terry

 

 

[hendie]

had to laugh at your adventure - been there done that so  many times.

 

Really nice scratch work on the beam though.  

[Chewbacca]

Thanks Terry & Hendie.  Managed to squeeze in a day off work so have progressed the flot gear.  I was slightly nervous about fitting the clamshells for the pure reason that the shells themselves are reasonably weighty and the heaviest gauge Evergreen I would be able to get away with was 20 thou.  I did look at wire but that was prone to bend even more and although I considered using off-cuts from some stainless steel pins in the garage, I couldn't face the prospect of nibbling the odd 0.5 mm off here and there to make them fit.

 

I needn't have worried.  By the time that all of the support struts were in place, 3 at the front and 4 at the rear, it's actually pretty sturdy.  I'm hoping I won't have to do it but I reckon I could turn it upside down on the clamshells when spraying the underside.  If anything, I think the starboard clamshell is fractionally too low by about 1-1.5 mm but it looks mostly okay so I'm not going to worry too much about that.

 

Now waiting for it all to thoroughly dry while I tackle the next part, which is...the winch.  Which nestles in nicely behind the starboard clamshell 😲.  Why, of why did I not fit that before the flot gear?  I think there is a term for it mainly used in the US called a "rookie error"; guess this is a "Wookie error".

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks for watching

Edited June 26, 2020 by Chewbacca

[Chewbacca]

Winch completed and fitted plus a lot of the smaller ancillaries from scrap PE, and brass rod etc.  The pitot tube is a length of 20 thou Evergreen, carefully drilled with my smallest micro drill and a 0.2 mm hypodermic needle inserted.  Still got the blades to chamfer and fit to the head, the wheels to clean up and add and the antennas to make but thought I'd do a final dry fit of the main components before taking it all to the spray booth for primer.  Which has made me realise that I've forgotten to add the step on the port side!

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks for watching

[Terry1954]

Looking really superb Ralph. Every inch a budding Wasp!

 

Terry

[hendie]

cracking detail in there.   the transmission deck looks fabulous

[Bell209]

Coming along beautifully - nothing like the original offering! Like me, you should complete this just in time for the new 1:48 offering...

[Chewbacca]

15 hours ago, Bell209 said:

Coming along beautifully - nothing like the original offering! Like me, you should complete this just in time for the new 1:48 offering...

Thanks Rob.  To be honest, I don't really care now if the new one does come out.  This has proven problematic but I've really enjoyed it.  It comes back to a point I made about 3/4 pages ago, I love taking the old clunky kits - often Airfix 1/600 ships - then throwing away most of the parts, modifying and detailing what's left and scratchbuilding the rest.  That said, I do think my next build might be an Atlantic Models 1/350 ship that comes with almost all of the bits you need in the box and goes together reasonably well.   I've got a choice of 5 in the stash (PUMA, ARROW, NEWCASTLE, BOXEr and BRAVE) but have never done a whole resin kit before so that too will be a learning experience

 

Thought before I head out to the garage and the spray shop I'd better get the rest of the bits ready for primer so that I could do it all in one go and so started with the rotor blades.  If I were an absolute purist, I would be thinning them right down as they are slightly too thick but more importantly have an aerofoil profile that would generate almost zero lift.  But the thought of trying to profile 4 blades equally filled me with trepidation rapidly followed by the realisation that I could very quickly be scratchbuilding 4 new ones from styrene strip or plasticard.  Instead, I smoothed them down, got rid of the flash and thinned them a little but if I'm honest, you can barely tell I've taken very much off at all.

 

I took a small file to the mating edges and took about 10 thou off the outside of the hub plus a similar amount off the inside of the blades to give the characteristic flapping hinge droop discussed above in #94 and #96.  2 are pretty close with a 4.5 mm droop at the tip compared to the centre of the hub (shoud be 3.9 if my calculations were correct) whereas the other 2, (fortunately on the diagonals) are slightly too high with about 7 mm droop.  Bizarrely it is the larger droop that looks right but in fairness none look out of place and if you spin the main rotor shaft in your fingers and follow the tips of the blades, the tracking isn't at all far out so I'm going to accept that. 

 

I was concerned through that the blade to hub join would be weak as they rely on effectively butt joins, so to overcome that I prepped each join as described above, flooded it with Tamiya extra thin and then clamped it all together.  Once it was dry enough to handle, I then progressively drilled out a hole through both parts until it was an interference fit on some 30 A fuse wire.  Once the wire would just about pass through, I held it in place flush with the bottom of the join and with a pair of sprue cutters carefully cut it flush on top.  Took the pin out and took another 0.5 mm off, then with slow acting CA in the hole, slowly pushed the pin through until it was just below the surface top and bottom.  When that was dry - about 3-4 mins - I moved onto the next blade.  When all 4 were complete, I filled the resultant holes with Vallejo putty, then wiped flush with the back of a wet blade before leaving it overnight to dry.

 

This morning I smoothed it all back then cut 8 tiny strips of PE from a scrap frame, each approx 2.5 mm x 1 mm, then attached these either side of the hub/blade with fast acting CA to represent the spectacle locking pins followed by16 lengths of 20 thou Evergreen rod cut about 0.5 mm long and glued on top, 2 per pin, to represent pins that hold each blade in place.  You can see the sequence in the photos below which show the final blade (bottom left) being attached.

 

Hole drilled:

 

Pin passed

 

Putty added

 

Rotor head ready for primer

Edited June 29, 2020 by Chewbacca

[hendie]

excellent scratching on that rotor head.  I do love me a good piece of intricate rotor machinery

[Ex-FAAWAFU]

Ralph, you are really motoring on with this; excellent stuff.  After your comments about the tracking, what you need is an old-fashioned tracking ground run with a bloke holding the flag up to hit coloured chalk on the blade tips...

[perdu]

I really love the rotor head and blade pins.

 

I am not volunteering to stand with the flag for the ground run though.

 

You can't trust polystyrene to hold, no need for any of us to ask why is there?

[Terry1954]

Love that rotor head Ralph. Top class stuff going on here.

 

Terry

[John_W]

A question for the Wasp experts.

at the start of their life, the Wasp and the Scout were fited with the cylindrical bulges in the rear doors to allow a stretcher to be carried. 

The Scout was latter fitted with fully bulged rear doors. Was this modification ever used on the Wasp?

[The Spadgent]

Beautiful work. 🤝

Johnny

[Chewbacca]

 Thanks everyone for your kind words.

On 30/06/2020 at 07:03, Ex-FAAWAFU said:

Ralph, you are really motoring on with this; excellent stuff.  After your comments about the tracking, what you need is an old-fashioned tracking ground run with a bloke holding the flag up to hit coloured chalk on the blade tips...

Never a job I especially fancied!  Your comment did get me thinking though that perhaps I should have motorised the rotors.  There would certainly have been enough room under the MRGB to hide a motor through the tail rotor may have been more challenging!  Perhaps that's a task to look at for one of the Lynx that are in the stash...

22 hours ago, John_W said:

A question for the Wasp experts.

at the start of their life, the Wasp and the Scout were fited with the cylindrical bulges in the rear doors to allow a stretcher to be carried. 

The Scout was latter fitted with fully bulged rear doors. Was this modification ever used on the Wasp?

Certainly wouldn't have called myself an expert but I've never seen a Wasp with those doors.  In fact I'd even forgotten that the Scouts were fitted with them until about a week ago when I found a photo of one on the PPRuNe website while looking for images of the winch.  I do recall when en-route to the Falklands in 1982 being used as a "casualty" in an exercise in which I was strapped to a lightweight stretcher and put laterally across the floor in the back with both cabin doors removed and my head out of the starboard door.  I was looking straight up at the rotor disc and to this day I still remember the Aircrewman's dulcet tones, "Don't worry Sir, if we ditch I'll inflate your lifejacket for you!"

 

Primer coat sprayed.  It actually revealed only a couple of very small areas hear the blade fold mechanisms where extra work was needed so that has been sanded back and rectified ready for top coat this evening.

 

 

 

I have started to worry slightly about the decals.  The kit ones look to be pretty poor and I have no confidence that they will work.  But I can find very little in the way of aftermarket "modern" non-low visibility Fleet Ar Arm decals in 1/48.  So far, the only option I have found is this: https://www.hannants.co.uk/product/FCM48050?result-token=tfnRF which might provide the roundels and Royal Navy for the tail cone and I can probably cobble together some of the stencils from it but I have no idea if Wasp and Lynx markings were the same size in the early 1980s.  I could print some of them, as I will do for the red crosses, but unfortunately so many of the markings are white and I don't have an ALPS printer.  In particular, this very grainy scan of a photo of Wilbur that I took in 1982 near West Falkland:

 

seems to show a second small white Royal Navy logo underneath the transmission deck as per this:

 

  

I was hoping someone might still do plain white lettering in various sizes but all I can find is black.  If anyone has any ideas I'm open to them.

 

Thanks for watching