Back to Basics

Basics it is. Excuse the workbench it is sort of tidy. My next project lies waiting.

Its a ploy! You're pretending to be doing something with a model, when you really plan to publish a recipe for Wheat Bisk based cupcakes.

Brian wrote: Its a ploy! You're pretending to be doing something with a model, when you really plan to publish a recipe for Wheat Bisk based cupcakes.

No cupcakes it's not. Wing top n bottoms cut out and .......um that's it so far. :lol: Got to hang it out for two months at least.

Since my last posting I've hit another snag. My building board has become distinctly concave. No longer is it pristine and very flat, it is most decidedly concave and extremely convex if I turn it over. It was quite expensive when I got it from SMC some years ago, I think its a SIG product, I was impressed by how easy it was to pin things while building. Now I'm stumped. For the past week or so (time just goes by and the numbers change and nothing happens) I've had a load of lead weights on a big piece of straight timber, all perched on the board (convex side up) in the faint hope that it'll pull it straight. In the "Good Old Days" I used to build on a drawing board which was so old it had an Air Ministry stamp and a reference number on the back which dated the board to 1941. Sadly I became interested in foam wing cutting, and the drawing board was sacrificed on the altar of "progress", and was converted into a base for a foam cutter. I wondered whether "ironing" the bent board with a steam iron would invite it to straighten itself out. Its all very frustrating. Wish I still had my trusty old drawing board. However, it isn't all bad, my wife has kindly ditched meusli (which comes in floppy bags) for breakfast , and with no fuss at all has gone over to Corn Flakes. In a couple of weeks or so, I'll have enough thin card from the boxes for the Kadet's templates.

Seems that the weather had something to do with the building board being less than flat. I don't know if the weights did the job, or perhaps it was a combination of weight and humidity. Whatever it was, the board was flat enough to start the Kadet build this morning. The original has 3/32" balsa sheet covered fuselage, the side sheets are pre-printed with the positions of spacers longerons etc. The longerons are quite robust (1/4" square hard balsa) so I'll ditch the cladding and perhaps add some diagonal bracing instead. The photos are of the main fuselage structure, a couple of scanned formers, and finally a shot of the tail end. I'd been building the model without even beginning to think of altering the structure (apart from the sheeting), when I look at the tail end I wondered why the designer hadn't carried the tail plane support to the end of the fuselage profile and similarly with the lower longeron. All I did was slavishly cut the 1/4" balsa sheet to finish the end of the fuselage. Anyway, its too late now as the parts for the second side are all shaped ready to assemble. For the eagle eyed among you, I'd like to point out that the dark lines along some of the joints are not gaps, they are only the remains of the original marking out. I've started to use an old roller ball pen and the ink line is a bit generous.
I had just two small snags today. The scanner and the printer normally get along quite well, today the print was smaller than the original scan. Going back to the old set-up using Windows 7 put things to rights. The other thing that didn't go quite to plan was that I couldn't find the photos on my camera, that was caused by finger trouble on my part. I'm too lazy (and mean) to change the onboard battery that keeps date and time when the main battery is being changed. This means that date and time have to be reset every time the battery is swapped around. The camera had turned itself into a time machine and hid today's shots in 01-01-2002, never thought about it before but the camera is now eighteen years old, and I still haven't read the manual, only the quick start guide.

The second side of the Kadet was completed yesterday evening. Today the two halves were parted with a razor saw. The right hand side of the fuselage is pinned and the first former is in place. The second former is glued and pinned and will be fitted tomorrow. I cut the templates for the firewall and first former, somehow they didn't look quite right. At first I thought it was due to misalignment of the drawing "tiles", but I found that the centre lines of the formers were 1/32" out. I hope you understand that I'm using good old fashioned Imperial dimensions. The drawing of the Kadet is American and there isn't a millimetre in sight! It was so nice to make a part that was 5 11/16" high and 3 7/16" wide.