Many thanks to Al, Mark, Tony and Phil! The more I try to fit in there, the more cramped I realise those old cockpits were!(and yet more advanced than I ever realised!)
All I can say for now is I'm just glad that the diary is lagging behind the build by a couple of weeks - I haven't done much at all last week, not because I don't want to but because for the last ten days or so I haven't had a working camera to record it with!
My dear old Konica Z10 had a fit when I slapped his bottom to clear a jammed LCD screen (which was recommended on the web I might add, and has worked fine on a couple of occasions). What I forgot however (or it didn't mention that) was to remove the SD card first! The camera cleared the jam ok but had a fit and rendered the memory card unusable, its ok on the pc but the last seventeen pics have been corrupted - and they were all the ones I'd taken on fitting out the cockpit!!
Anyhow, I've still got a few of them from before the corrupted group to carry on with next week so I'll have to include a few more 'finished' views than normal (its really annoying though! ) I've bought a new SD card now and the camera is working fine again (as is the Konica Z20 I snapped up on ebay for £32 'just in case')
Onwards...

Carrying on with the rudder pedal bar, there are four attachment points for the control wires, two to control the rudder, and the other pair are attached to the tail skid which is actually steerable! (I have to admit, I never knew that thing was so complicated – I always thought it just ‘stuck out the back’, in actual fact it formed an integral part of steering the aircraft around on the ground!) The first pair of holes is being drilled in, in Photo 22, the other pair are further out and also have a metal re-enforcing band as first seen in Photo 24 alongside the traditional penny. Photo 23 shows the metal ring bolts being formed, the same wire strands again, curved into a loop which is gripped in the pin vice, a section of brass rod is threaded through the loop and the vice is simply turned repeatedly to form the ring and its tail. After drilling all four holes, the twisted eye bolts were trimmed to size and super glued into the wooden pedal, the inner two horizontally, and the outer pair vertically. The metal re-enforcing band was then formed out of some of the thin eye ointment tubing as shown in Photo 24.
Before the pedal can be fitted in however, I first had to add the control wires which connect the control column to the elevators. For this I decided to have a go at a new modelling medium – Uschi ‘Rig that thing’ Elastic thread. I first came across this stuff when I was looking up rigging biplanes on Youtube! The first one I found was called EZ Line, an American product which comes in a 100 foot reel which is two and a half inches across. This was first produced for the model railway hobby to represent power lines etc and I duly sent off for a spool of the line called ‘Rope’. I thought ‘rope’ was probably Yank for ‘thread’, unfortunately rope meant rope! The line was nice and stretchy, but it was also brown – for rope of course! This meant it was not quite right to simulate the steel control and bracing wires (although a later addition to my wiring up toolkit meant it may have been all right after all!) Anyway, I then came across this video on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJGTPovCcg8
produced by Uschi himself showing how to use his stretchy thread so I sent off for one of them as well. The Uschi thread is actually half as long again at 150 feet but instead of the big plastic spool like the EZ Line, this comes on a tiny metal bobbin only 2cm across, in fact it’s a sewing machine bobbin (to cut down costs) even so, this thread is still around the £10 mark. For my model, the control cables will be done in the Fine Size (Item Code 4006 at 0.003mm diameter) and the later bracing wires will be in Standard Size (Item Code 4005 at 0.005mm diameter).
Photo 25 shows the very first application of this new (for me) accessory. This is the first part of the starboard elevator control wire. A length of the fine thread was cut, twice the length to reach from the column to the rear most wooden frame as seen in Photo 26. A tiny drop of super glue was applied to the control column, just up from the base and the thread was attached at about the mid point. The forward section of the thread was then taken around the right hand aluminium pulley and wedged in place with a short length of Victory Sapele veneer (you can just make it out in the corner of the cockpit front), this was just to keep the almost invisible thread out of the way whilst I secured the rear part! The other half of the thread was then run back under the pilot’s seat supports and then taken back to the previously mentioned wooden frame member where it was secured in place, wedged into a fine razor cut slit in the card fuselage side. This is the point on the outside of the fuselage where the control wires emerge on their way to the elevator. Once that was in place the veneer wedge was removed and the front half of the thread was brought back around the pulley, following the other wire under the seat and back to the same slit as shown in Photo 27. The next task was to repeat the whole process on the port side, illustrated by the white lines in Photo 28. This side however is a little more complicated! At the moment, there is no port side fuselage panel in which to ‘slot’ those threads so the two ends are simply placed inside a scrap of masking tape so they don’t get lost (or accidentally glued in the wrong location!) In the rest of the photos, when you see a pair of cables going nowhere in particular – that’s those two again! Now it gets very finicky, not to mention complicated. In Photo 29 we go back to the rudder pedal again, this time fitted out with its four separate elastic threads. The two outer ones go to the rudder whilst the inner pair run back to the steering mechanism of the tail skid. In the case of this model however, they all run back to the rear bulkhead, which you can see in the earlier photos. The rudder cables are secured in razor slits at the top of the bulkhead and the two skid wires are glued into a pair of wire ring bolts placed into two drilled holes lower down.
The rudder pedal has been glued in place in Photo 30, and the four threads are temporarily out of the way, placed over the top of the front bulkhead. As soon as I began to try and pass the threads under the seat supports it became obvious that I was running out of room to do each one ‘by hand’ – the thread is great at stretching, but it sure doesn’t appreciate being ‘pushed’ into tight spots! The answer was very simple in the end and is illustrated in Photo 31 – I just glued each thread to a temporary ‘needle’ made from a short length of the wire strand and then I could ‘thread’ that needle under the supports and out the other side carrying the elastic thread with it. In the final Photo 32, we have all eight control wires in place under the seat supports, six of them fixed in place and the other two still dangling away waiting for the missing left side panel.
In the next instalment, the stretchy threads become a lot more wire-like and the scratch building begins on the cockpit controls.

Until then Happy Modelling to you All!


Robin.

Robin

This looks absolutely fantastic - I have to keep remembering its paper that you are working with.

Never seen anything as detailed as this - you certainly know your stuff that is for sure.

Interesting seeing your comments about the ezline product as I have the following site book marked and was about to buy some but seeing your recommendation of the uschi product may have to re-think that one

http://www.modellingtools.co.uk/ez-line-31-c.asp

Hope the build continues to go well.

Many thanks for those kind words Tony and Mark, greatly appreciated! I'm really enjoying this build and learning some very useful new skills with the resin casting as you'll see soon. After the week and a half slow down due to no camera, I'm back on schedule again.
The one problem that can be come across with these paper/card kits can be seen in the first photo above - a slightly 'rough' edge to the front bulkhead. This is caused by repeated test fittings of the various add ons which should be expected I suppose as the kit is designed to be built 'once only' if you see what I mean.
Fortunately I'm about three weeks ahead of the diary in the build and the missing side panel fitted on with no problems at all - just the seat belts to finish before I can fit in my scratch built resin chair and begin the outer skin. I was really pleased with the finished cockpit do-dahs (RNAS speak for complicated aviation instruments!)
The Uschi thread is the more realistic of the two, Tony, although its more expensive at the outset, as you get 150' of it as opposed to 100' of EZ there's probably not that much difference. The one advantage of Uschi however is that the thread is truly circular in diameter where as the EZ is actually a flat ribbon in cross section. To be honest, in this scale you can't even tell that, but when I was researching it some have said on other sites that it is noticeable in the thicker sizes. This Uschi thread is proving very good and (so far) easy to apply. With the chrome pen its excellent!
More soon!

Robin.

Your usual top class work I see Robin, looking fabulous and a pleasure to follow.....

Regards

Alan

Grateful thanks again to Tony, Alan and Al! Yesterday, Saturday 20th May was a milestone - I finally fitted the last (but one) piece into the cockpit of No.2. (The last piece hasn't been mentioned yet so I'm keeping that a surprise!) When I say fitted, shoehorned is more like it! I had to complete the new resin chair and seat belts before I could fit the pressure pump, and once the chair was in the pump wouldn't fit!
Sorted out now though and I'm really pleased with the final look of the cockpit after all the tribulations.
So here's how it began...
Beginning with Photo 42, we have the assembled Fuel Tank Pressurisation Pump. The various sections of the tubing were slid together and fixed in place with a drop of thin super glue. The final component for the cockpit (apart from the seat and seat belt which comes later) is the actual instrument panel complete with the various dials and other useful bits! Photo 43 shows another Pup’s instrument panel, this was the closest I could find to my aircraft’s layout – as mentioned before, there are a multitude of different types of panel depending on which company built the thing! There are a couple of extra dials ‘up top’ on this one which don’t appear on mine, one of them is I think the pressure gauge attached to that same pump which on mine is possibly on the port cockpit frame close to the Pulsator (whether I have enough room to fit that one in remains to be seen!) What the other one is I’ve no idea. On the top left is the Tachometer or Rev Counter. This one has been mounted in straight but many were fitted in pointing about 45 degrees to the right. This was a very simple and brilliant idea. On some of these tilted dials you can see a red mark at the twelve o’clock position. This marked the engine revs at cruising speed so with the dial tilted over, instead of the pilot having to constantly check his revs, all he had to do was to glance over and ensure the pointer was at twelve o’clock – much less concentration required! In the centre of the panel is the Magnetic Compass, mounted on a set of gimbals allowing the compass dial to be vertical whatever the attitude of the aircraft might be. At the top right is the Altimeter, which measures the height of the aircraft above the ground. In this era, the altimeter was in fact a simple barometer which measures air pressure with a dial showing feet instead of millibars of pressure. Usually, the barometer/altimeter could be set to zero when on the airfield to allow for that location being above sea level. Below the Altimeter is the Speedometer or Air Speed Indicator. This again is a form of barometer but this time it is measuring the difference in air pressure between ‘ambient’ air pressure (eg, inside the instrument) and the air pressure inside a tube mounted on the main wing strut (the Pitot Tube). The faster the Pup is flying, the greater the difference between the two pressures and the more the dial pointer moves. The scale is calibrated in miles per hour. To the left of these two dials is a small clock although in some aircraft there would be a clip-in fitting to take the pilot’s personal Hunter type watch instead of a permanent time piece. In the bottom centre is the Tiltometer. This is a very basic Artificial Horizon which in this case is a simple spirit level – when the bubble is in the middle, you’re flying level (wing tip to wing tip)! Incidentally, there was another form of Tiltometer which worked the opposite way round, instead of a bubble floating to the top of the curve, the curve was upside down with a heavy ball bearing which would roll to the bottom. If you pop back to the photos of the real Pup cockpit an installment or two before, you can see that that particular Pup has played safe with both versions on the panel! The last two controls found on my Pup are the two brass switches on the bottom left. These are the leading and trailing Magneto Switches used to prime the engine for firing up, (what the pilot switches on when "Contact" is called out). Because the aircraft industry was still in its infancy, these were actually brass Edwardian style electric light switches as found in the ‘posher’ houses of the time! The final instrument seen on this panel isn’t found on my Pup, what looks like a thermometer is actually the Petrol Gauge – the higher up the glass tube the yellowy liquid appears, the more fuel you had left! Mine must have a gauge somewhere - I’m just not sure where!
Ok then, on to the actual construction of the new ‘3D’ panel. The first task was to cut out the kit panel and use that to mark out a duplicate in 1mm plasticard. This will allow the replacement panel to fit exactly into the space occupied by the kit’s 1mm card backed original. Then, again using the kit piece as a guide I used a tiny drill bit in the pin vice to drill a hole through the paper panel and into the plasticard one beneath to mark the centres of each of the dial instruments as illustrated in Photo 44. A big jump then to Photo 45, which shows the completed panel against the paper version. The panel at the top is the rear face of the instruments – this is another optional add on part courtesy of the designer although it can’t be seen in the final model! The large grey dials are slices of model kit sprue whilst the yellowy clock dial is a slice of resin sprue from one of my earlier casting experiments. The ‘compass’ is built up from a slice of sprue cut in half for the actual instrument in the centre around which is set an ultra thin slice of aluminium tube. To prevent the tubing from collapsing under the knife blade I had to gently press the blade down with a solid wooden core inside the tube. Even then there was a little deformation of the tiny resulting ring and this was cured by passing the ring over a metal punch and sliding it down the expanding cone of the punch until it regained a circular shape again. Finally, a set of four slices from the Plastruct rod formed the gimbals. In hindsight however, they should have been ‘sticking out’ from the panel, and not flat on it. As you will see later, I remedied this for the final version and I may produce another master mould later on. The Tiltometer at the bottom was formed from a short piece of copper wire, curved over a suitable cylinder and hammered flat on the mini anvil before cutting it to size. Finally, the pair of Magneto switches were made by first stretching some sprue and then bringing the filament close to the candle flame to create a ‘bulb’ at the end. This was then cut off leaving just enough of the thin filament to create the switch lever. Two counter-sunk holes were drilled at the switches' location and the bulbs simply dropped into the depressions and fixed with a drop of liquid Poly glue.
The Master Panel is shown slotted into Pup No 1 to test the fit in Photo 46 whilst Photo 47 is a ‘group photo’ of all the cockpit items. As mentioned earlier, this was taken after I’d made the silicon rubber mould and as you can see, the lever knob, the pump handle and the tiltometer all got pulled off the components during removal from the mould – all easily stuck back on though.
Photo 48 shows the construction of the first experimental mould. This one was designed for resin ‘injection’ as illustrated by the cut down syringe on the left. This mould was a bit ‘over ambitious’ I’m afraid. What I should have done was a separate mould for the panel and another one for the rest of the instruments (with the instruments hanging down under the sprue not stuck on top of it). In actual fact I’d designed the mould with that in mind but got carried away trying to fit everything in and completely forgot that part! The walls of the mould are composed of good old Lego bricks bought on ebay (I’ve got hundreds of the ruddy things somewhere, but could I find them!) The blue base is a form of Plasticene called Scolaquip Colour Clay available from DWR Plastics, the on-line company I bought my resin supplies from, (others are available of course). The circular and polygonal holes are there to allow the eventual two halves of the mould to fix together. The circles were a paint brush handle and the polygons were the ‘universal holder’ part of my drill bits collection. Photo 49 is one of the early casting attempts. In fact, the very first one was even better than this with everything except the very top right corner of the instrument panel reproduced. The subsequent castings however were more like this one which is why I eventually settled for a separate panel mould. As you can see, not too bad but some problems with trapped air bubbles which is why the components should have faced down not up – any air bubbles should (theoretically) rise up into the sprue leaving the parts better formed. Anyway, eventually I had enough useable parts to construct a trial set of instruments as seen in Photo 50. This was just a trial set though and the actual ones I eventually used were better finished than these!
In the next instalment, fitting my resin throttle and pulsator (with some alterations) into the cockpit.

Until then, Happy Modelling to you All!

Robin.

Another interesting update Robin, looking forward to the next one already

Al

Excellent work.

Mark

Robin

Looks awesome.

I do not think you could get any closer to the real thing than you have with this one.

just looks amazing all that wood and wire kind of scary thinking that they used to fly these regards Phil

Thanks again to Tony, Alan, Phil and Ron for their very encouraging words! Cramming as much as I can into this one is really rewarding, especially when you think how cheap these paper models are to buy! Those pilots were the bravest of the brave in my estimation - flying on a wing and a prayer, sitting in a wicker chair firing machine guns at each other and no parachute either (Official War Office policy was to deny parachutes to encourage pilots to bring their badly damaged machines back to base. The aircraft was considered more valuable than the life of the pilot. (Of course, those making the decisions were never going to sit in one!)
You're right there Ron, fortunately it doesn't mean more work (at least not on the instrument panel!) As you can see in the photos below, the instrument layout of the Sopwith Pup was not exactly standard! Each of these is a Pup cockpit and each one is slightly different! You have to be very wary during research on WW1 aircraft. Very few actually survived to the present and many of those seen flying today are actually reproductions. The problem is, build a Pup today and you have to include all the modern safety regulations to get it passed to fly. The top left photo (copyright James Fahey) is possibly one of these as the instruments seem like modern versions of the originals. The other three I suspect are genuine but again all are different. As for those two extra dials, one I'm almost certain is the Fuel tank pressure gauge, used to check the result of pumping up the air pressure with the big brass pump (coming soon, mine is a separate dial fixed on the port side fuselage frame) The only other original WW1 era dial I've managed to find is an Air Temperature Gauge so I suspect that's what the other one is. Not sure if my cockpit has one of those, there were also subtle differences between the RFC Pups and my own RNAS ones. I did find another repro Pup with three extra dials - one for Battery Charge, one for Oil Pressure and the last for Oil Temperature - again modern regulations, the original Pups had none of those! What is the same on all four photos however is that tubular curved metal support - I haven't got one of those in mine, these are all Vickers Machine Gun armed, mine has a diddy Lewis!
And lastly, look for the low tech seat belt in the next installment - they're banned in modern aircraft too!

Till next time!

Robin.