Mirage IIIO 1/32, Scratchbuild

[Bandsaw Steve]

Control Surfaces

 

For various reasons I chose to make the control surfaces on this jet separately from the wing. Having discovered the delights of making wings from MDF I think that next time I will make the control surfaces as an integral part of the wing. Anyway, never mind, time to carry on with the ailerons and flaps and pitch-dampers and so forth.

 

Here we have two very roughly hewn slices of 3mm MDF sheet loosely stuck together in such a fashion that they can be easily separated when the time comes and with a paper cut-out of the required shape stuck on top. If you have followed this whole thread you will have seen this kind of thing before.

  

 

Cut out the required shape with a scroll-saw.

 

Then cut that single length into two halves to check that they fit as required.  Note that they still look very 'blocky'  & 'planky' at this point. This will not do. ☹️

 

Paint a thin coat of 'do not exceed' red paint along the trailing edge. No photos, but I'm sure you understand the idea that if a continuous trace of this red paint remains after the carving and sanding process you have preserved the required original shape of the part, at least in plan view. 

 

Now after splitting the port and starboard halves back into their 'upper and lower' segments mark out the contours that are required to make the control surface taper to a nice thin trailing edge and - just like we did with the wings - cut a slice on each contour down to whatever is judged to be the correct depth.

 

Peel away most of the unwanted MDF with a razor blade.

 

Leaving something like this.  Ah!!! In this view we can see the red line! 

 

Now we take some blue paint (well whatever colour you like actually, just don't use red again) and slop it all over the inside surface of the upper and inner halves that are to be rejoined.

 

Glue the upper and lower halves together again.

 

Now we have a red 'do not exceed line' that protects the plan view shape and a blue 'centre-line' that shows you exactly the target that you are trying to file and sand down to. This helps making more precise work. In the photo above the topmost piece has been sanded down to a fairly fine trailing edge while the lower one shows you what I started with. Even from this distance, if you look closely at the lower one you can just make out the blue 'target line'; while wearing an optivisor it's easily visible.

 

Soon we have two fairly respectable looking control surfaces.  The only problem is that they are 100% flat.  There's no droop on the wing-tips.  This must be fixed!

 

Cut a series of 'easing slots' from the front of the control surface to the rear but leaving the trailing edge intact and continuous.

 

 

Now the wingtip bends down easily.

 

Slather super-glue all over it and hit that with 'zip kicker' to freeze the parts in place quickly.

 

Looks about right!

Now slather automotive bog filler all over the end of the piece, let it set firm and sand and file and sand and file until the shape of the curve is just right and the whole thing is nice and smooth.

 

Voila!  Droopy control surfaces!

 

Et-Viola! (These Mirages are French you see)...  🇫🇷

 

And now the final 'where we are up to view' for 2022.

 

This might be the last posting for a while from me as all three of my threads are bang up to date now and Christmas and New-Year family duties are likely to put a dampener on any modelling activities.

 

Have a great Christmas one and all and a really good new year.

 

Stay safe everyone and I'll see you again in 2023  when - perhaps - I'll get this stupid thing finished!

 

Seasons Greetings,

Bandsaw Steve

 

 

 

 

[wellsprop]

Very impressive! 

[RichieW]

That is brilliant, so precise and a perfect illustration of why i think jet shapes are so much more complex than WW1 biplane!

 

Have a great Christmas break, catch you next year.

 

Richie

[Flying Badger]

Such amazing work. Makes it look so simple even the likes of me think we could manage to do something similar (spoiler alert... we can't really!😬) 

 

Happy Christmas, looking forward to the next instalment.

Edited December 19, 2022 by Flying Badger

[SteveMc]

Fascinating watching this evolve and take shape. 
Have a great Xmas. Hope it’s warmer on your side of the big island than over on our side.

[Biggles87]

Looking good.

Best wishes for Christmas and the New Year.

 

John

[Gondor44]

Looking very Mirage like now.

 

Gondor

[k5054nz]

Have a wonderful festive season Steve, the Miracle is looking incredible and I'm very excited to see what progress the new year brings.

[ArnoldAmbrose]

Gidday Steve, any progress on this? You've only got six short months until WASMEx. 🙂 Regards, Jeff.

[Bandsaw Steve]

Back to Reality

 

I'm back following a five week holiday in New Zealand (which comes highly recommended I must say) but for now it's time to get back to reality.

 

Apart from paid work, mortgages, family stuff and all that jazz, I still have these three jobs on the go:

• The PZH 2000, which will be finished in time for WASMEx. (just six short months to go as Jeff has helpfully pointed out above). 😬
• The SS Xantho, which needs to be completely restarted, this time with correct hull contours and at 1:72 scale.
• and this one, the Mirage III, which was the one I was itching to get back to after my prolonged break.

Here's where I left it. Most of the big components complete but mostly naked; not skinned in lithoplate yet.

 

Let's press on.

 

The skinning of the fuselage continues, but to my surprise even this very slightly compounded curve over the top of the fuselage was too much for non-annealed 'out of the box' lithoplate sheet to handle. It had to be annealed to take the taper towards the front of the air-intake.

 

Here I'm applying flame from a creme-brule burner to a piece of lithoplate to anneal it. I know that the annealing is working because the sheet has gone all limp and is now sagging down to the ground.

The trick with this is to make the aluminium sag without wrinkling up.  I took a few tries to get it right.  Sometime I'm going to put a whole sheet in a BBQ and cook it for a while to see if I can do a whole lot at once.

 

Once the lithoplate is annealed there's no spring left in it and it's a lot more workable.  Attach the template tape to it and cut out the required shape. Then use spray-on adhesive (in this case Selley's 'kwick-grip') to secure the sheet in place.

 

 

Press the sheet down with your fingers to get it to match the curves correctly and then apply more tape to hold it all in place while the glue sets.

 

With luck it should leave something like this.  For the records, lithoplate is easy to sand and smooth off any surface imperfections. If it gets dirty or covered in glue it can be readily cleaned with white spirits.

Now I turned my attention to the control surfaces.

I had to use annealed lithoplate for the outer third of the control surfaces since the outboard part has some strange compound curves. 

 

The inboard surfaces are nice and flat though so I just used non-annealed sheet lithoplate which is a joy to use. 

 

Here it's pretty clear which has been annealed and which has not.  Note the that one of the great things about this skinning models in this way is that really tidy panel lines and other surface details can be scribed onto aluminium. In this regard it gives a much better result than wood.  Another advantage of skinning is that it can add  lot of strength to otherwise fragile parts.  The 'easing' slots that I cut in the outermost ends of the control surfaces yielded a nice shape but were showing signs of cracking. Now that they are skinned the wingtips are secure.  

 

I drilled a series of holes in the trailing edge of the wing and the matching face of the control surfaces. Into these holes I inserted some short lengths of carbon-fibre so that, when the time comes, the control surfaces can be securely attached. In the photo below the port wing shows the carbon-fibre rods sticking out while the starboard wing shows the control surfaces temporarily attached.

 

And here's where we are up to now.  The control surfaces exhibit a slight but pleasing droop.

 

 

I might carry on with a bit more skinning for a while but the evil day is approaching when I can ignore that cockpit no more... 😱

 

Bandsaw Steve. 

 

 

 

[AdrianMF]

Awesome! Good to see it back. You know how much I worry about projects with long gaps

 

Regards,

Adrian

[SteveMc]

Looking very nice. Good to see progress resumed.

[Romeo Alpha Yankee]

Looks great Steve, just a word about the very inboard surface, it is the pitch damper and does not usually droop as much as the inboard elevon. Look like you have them as one joined piece.

 

 

 

[Bandsaw Steve]

1 hour ago, Romeo Alpha Yankee said:

Looks great Steve, just a word about the very inboard surface, it is the pitch damper and does not usually droop as much as the inboard elevon. Look like you have them as one joined piece.

 

 

 

Noted!

 

Thanks for the guidance. I’m going to have a crack at offsetting the different surfaces as suggested. Wish me luck!

[Warwolf]

This is insane! 

[Corsairfoxfouruncle]

8 hours ago, Romeo Alpha Yankee said:

Looks great Steve, just a word about the very inboard surface, it is the pitch damper and does not usually droop as much as the inboard elevon. Look like you have them as one joined piece.

 

 

 

Great photo, the last Mirage almost looks like Earth and faded grey from the angles of both the sun and photographer. Unless there was and actual scheme as such that Im unaware of. I have the Caracal RAAF Mirage decals and they dont indicate any like this. Of course its not the only indicator. Though you would think if the scheme existed they might have mentioned/covered it. 

[CaracalModels]

23 minutes ago, Corsairfoxfouruncle said:

Great photo, the last Mirage almost looks like Earth and faded grey from the angles of both the sun and photographer. Unless there was and actual scheme as such that Im unaware of. I have the Caracal RAAF Mirage decals and they dont indicate any like this. Of course its not the only indicator. Though you would think if the scheme existed they might have mentioned/covered it. 

 

There were many other schemes and one-off oddities. I am not by any means a RAAF Mirage expert - but Messiers Mason & Dottram (the authors of the Mirage IIIO book) are; and this scheme may be mentioned somewhere in the book. The decal sheets were completely based on the info in the book and the extensive photo collection of the Oz defense ministry.

[Corsairfoxfouruncle]

2 minutes ago, CaracalModels said:

 

There were many other schemes and one-off oddities. I am not by any means a RAAF Mirage expert - but Messiers Mason & Dottram (the authors of the Mirage IIIO book) are; and this scheme may be mentioned somewhere in the book. The decal sheets were completely based on the info in the book and the extensive photo collection of the Oz defense ministry.

Never meant you were, though to be honest your decals and schemes do tend to cover quite a broad spectrum. Particularly those of one off ‘s and standard schemes. 

[RichieW]

Welcome back Steve, a 5 week trip to NZ sounds good to me. The skinning is getting there panel by panel and looking really promising. Go on, jump into the cockpit and get detailing. You know you want to really!

 

Richie

[Bandsaw Steve]

8 hours ago, Warwolf said:

This is insane! 

Says the man with ‘rubber-penguin-disguised-as-chicken’ for an icon! 🤔🤣

[Bandsaw Steve]

2 hours ago, CaracalModels said:

 

There were many other schemes and one-off oddities. I am not by any means a RAAF Mirage expert - but Messiers Mason & Dottram (the authors of the Mirage IIIO book) are; and this scheme may be mentioned somewhere in the book. The decal sheets were completely based on the info in the book and the extensive photo collection of the Oz defense ministry.

Indeed.

I’ve had a brief look through that book and the variety of schemes on Australian Mirages is quite surprising. It seems that for some reason the Mirage teams were very open to trying new colour schemes and camouflage concepts. The F111 fleet seems to have been quite conservative by comparison, while the F18 fleet was -as far as I know- universally grey. 😐

[Andwil]

Weird.  The brown looks all wrinkled to me, could it be a form of masking for a camo re-spray?

 

AW

[stevehnz]

15 hours ago, Romeo Alpha Yankee said:

Looks great Steve, just a word about the very inboard surface, it is the pitch damper and does not usually droop as much as the inboard elevon. Look like you have them as one joined piece.

 

 

 

Where was this ray, for a moment I thought it looked like Wigram but the hills are in the wrong place for that I think?

On 2/6/2023 at 2:51 AM, Bandsaw Steve said:

I'm back following a five week holiday in New Zealand (which comes highly recommended I must say)

Sooo, you missed Nelson this time eh, eh? Pity, still looking forward to a natter & a coldie one of these days.  

Steve.

[Romeo Alpha Yankee]

1 hour ago, stevehnz said:

Where was this ray, for a moment I thought it looked like Wigram but the hills are in the wrong place for that I think?

Sooo, you missed Nelson this time eh, eh? Pity, still looking forward to a natter & a coldie one of these days.  

Steve.

This was a photo I took on the Townsville flight line back in  late 1984, we were on the HE bombing phase of a conversion or instructor course. The grey jet was painted with water based paint to help it blend into the terrain during the air/ground phase and help it hide from the 'red air' component. We had used this paint mix earlier in the year on PB84 where the brown went over the grey on the Camo jets.

[stevehnz]

1 hour ago, Romeo Alpha Yankee said:

where the brown went over the grey on the Camo jets.

Ooooh, a Mirage III0 in TLS, that'd look good, got any pictures?

Steve.