Hi,

I didn't realise just how small this build is until I looked at pic 4 with the razor blade in the shot - just makes it even more amazing



May.

Stunning work, credit to you.

Mark

Thanks again to Mark and May for those kind words!
I haven't done much this week, partly due to the heat and humidity again but mostly because I just couldn't get into it. This Wednesday we lost our dear 'House Ferret' Sammy 2. He was just over eight years old but adrenal disease, multiple tumours and finally the beginning of heart failure persuaded our vet to say it was time. We'll never forget his funny antics!

So here's a section I did a couple of weeks ago... The Cockpit Coaming.

First off then we have the very technical wood veneer shaping jig, as shown in all its glory in Photo 23. This is quite simply a Poundshop Vitamin C tube! This, by sheer coincidence just happens to be the same diameter as the circular part of the fuselage and, if you cut the tube in half and then slice the top half down its length as shown in that photo, the ‘half tube’ will clip quite securely over the full tube as illustrated in Photo 24. This is where the ‘How not to’ part comes in! My very first entry into the wooden ship building hobby was the Constructo ‘Grimsby’ – described as an ‘English Frigate’ she is actually far too small to be a Frigate at only twelve guns, but she is ‘Frigate Built’ in that she has a single gun deck. In actual fact she would probably be described as a ‘Gun Brig’. The point is however, she was single plank construction – meaning none of this double layer of thin planks milarky, just one layer of blooming thick hardwood planks, about 2mm thick according to the left over spares of which I still have a great deal! Grimsby came with two massive A1 sheets of plans (drawings) which were a great help as the written instructions amounted to two A4 pages of text! As a complete beginner I was therefore forced to look for additional information regarding the bending of those planks. This was long before the internet or even the excellent range of Period Ship Handbooks by Keith Julier and the little book of helpful tips (about twenty pages long and quite expensive back then) which I can’t quite put my hands on at the moment (I know exactly where it is but there’s a ton of heavy moveables in the way) which I eventually got hold of, supplied details of the steaming process, hot iron gizmos and soaking techniques. The one I finally went with however was a particularly nasty one but ideally suited to that thick wood – soaking in neat Ammonia! Not something I would recommend now, but I did have my workroom out at the back of the garage back then – a lot more ventilation than I have now!
Photo 25 shows the ammonia process under way, this time in a sealed glass container. And it worked! As you can see in the photo, the veneer is actually bending under its own power as the wood became softer and softer. After a few hours I removed the veneer, dabbed off the excess ammonia with paper towels, stuck it between the Vitamin C tubes with a couple of rubber bands to secure them together and then quickly vacated the attic workroom until the following day!
The next evening I removed the veneer from the jig and it was still in the proper curved position. Great! The only problem was, instead of the White Beech veneer I put in the ammonia, my ‘plywood’ cockpit cover was now Jacobean Oak! In the Grimsby’s case, her hull planks were already a dark mahogany-type colour and the ammonia made no difference to it. I had no idea the stuff did this to light coloured wood though, so back to a less eye watering method it was!
Method number two was the traditional steaming technique. Fortunately Mum has this nifty little steam cleaner (for ovens, curtains or whatever) with a nice bendy spout to direct the steam where you want it when the trigger is pressed. I set the thing on, marked out another piece of veneer and squirted a jet of steam at it while holding the wood in sprung tweezers. I couldn’t believe how quick it was – the veneer curled up into a cylinder in about two seconds flat. This was where I discovered that the veneer curls towards the steam, not away from it and since I was holding the wood with the pencilled markings towards me, it naturally coiled the wrong way. Simply reversing the veneer and giving it another squirt of steam reversed this instantly. I then had to carefully unwrap the veneer cylinder, place it in between the tubes as before and then wait for it to cool down. The result is shown in Photo 26 – a nicely curved piece of veneer maintaining its shape.
The next task was to remove the waste wood from the cockpit opening. This was done with a needle shaped diamond dust tool, visible in Photo 27, making dozens of tiny holes around the pencil lines, the veneer being held in place on the other half of the plastic tube for support. Then using the sharply pointed knife blade used for cutting the paper and card, the holes were very carefully pierced through (again with the veneer held on the tube) until the waste piece could be removed completely as in Photo 28. I’ll be using another new blade for the next round of paper and card pieces however, the last couple of holes to be joined up actually broke a tiny piece of the blade tip off! The edges of the cockpit were then given a series of very gentle light sandings to remove the majority of the roughness. It didn’t need to be completely smooth as a ‘leather’ padding will be added to cover up the edges later on. The veneer is being test fitted in Photo 29 together with another pencil line to show the forward edge of the wood. At this point the veneer was finally glued down onto the cardboard fuselage, the extra wood over the sides would be far easier to trim away with the rest of it glued down securely – that veneer is far too delicate to try slicing pieces off with no support under it. The sides have been shaved away down to the card in Photo 30 and that forward pencil line which now looks like a huge channel is the result of the extra thin Exacto Razor Saw. I couldn’t go right through with it though, I had to finish off with a safety razor blade to avoid cutting into the cardboard sides.
With the veneer now shaved and sanded back to the sides, the next task was to change it from being a white beech, to a highly varnished plywood. The first stage was to give it a coat of Pine wood stain (does exactly what it says on the tin) although to be fair, this is Blackfriars spirit based wood stain and was probably made and bought years before that catch phrase came out! (Photo 31). The following evening I gave the wood a second coat of stain and then, the next day the first of three coats of clear gloss varnish as seen in Photo 32. Note, the varnish doesn’t extend to the very front of the veneer, but stops short, level with the cockpit cut out. The reason for that is the aluminium ‘bonnet’ overlaps the plywood back to that point so I will be gently sanding down the stained veneer to get the metal panel to fit as tightly down as possible.
In the next instalment, the aluminium top panel is fitted on, the cowling gets a new firewall, No.2 gets a new ‘leather’ cockpit padding and both Pups get their up-graded windshields.

Until then, Happy Modelling to you All.


Robin.

Nice update Robin and sorry to hear about Sammy 2.

Al

Hi Robin.
Looking great.
Ian

Grateful thanks to May, Al, Mark, Ian and Phil for those kind comments and sympathy! We do miss old Sammy 2's antics, he was so intelligent too! For his best trick he learnt how to switch on our Robby Roomba robot vacuum cleaner. Almost every evening he would climb on top of it, furiously scratch away at the green power light until the robot switched on, reversing back off its charging dock and then sit on its back, riding around the room looking like a ferrety Davros!

Ok then!
Photo 33 illustrates the new firewall for the front of the cowling. This was simply the same pattern as the card original, only cut out in the aluminium sheet. The two rows of three ‘rivets’ mark the positions of the bolts which secured this sheet to the front of the fuselage frame in the original machine. The final aluminium parts to be added to the front were the two oval inspection hatches on the side plates, one of which can be seen curving around the bottom in Photo 34. On some of the licence produced Pups, these hatches were rectangular instead. Just inside the engine firewall there were a pair of little pumps, one on each side of the fixed crankshaft. One was an oil pump for the castor oil system and the other was an air pump to pressurise the fuel tank (or at least keep it pressurised after take off!) These access panels seem to line up with those pumps. To the left of the panel is another smaller access panel. This one was equipped with a key-type release rather than the multiple bolts on the larger panels so it was obviously designed to be accessed more often. I’m not exactly sure what this is but I’ve come across references to an oil flow regulator valve “not accessible to the pilot” so perhaps that’s what this is for.
With this section of the nose completed (and she’s really getting ‘nose heavy’ compared to No.1 now, it was time to complete the plywood coaming with the addition of the leather padding around the cockpit opening. The leather padding was made out of my old DecraLed lead strip, this time, instead of the flat strip, I used the thicker ‘D’ section strip which is shown on the far left in Photo 35. In actual fact this strip is a ‘double D’, consisting of two joined D section strips. Only one is needed for this job and even that one is trimmed down from the sides. The big piece of lead strip is what was left over from slicing off the other half and reducing that piece down to what you can see just to its right. The actual padding is shown in the centre of the photo with the two tools used in its construction beside it. These were, a blunt ended modelling tool, (part of a set of stainless steel tools which I think are actually designed for modelling wax figures) and above it my poor man’s Pounce Wheel – a circular saw blade from the rotary tool set. I tried to get a real wheel for this project but after ordering one all I got was an email from the model shop to say they had run out of stock! Anyhow, the blunt tool was used to gently fold the sides of the lead strip so that it ‘rolled over’ the edges of the plywood section and the saw blade was rolled along the lead to produce the ‘stitched’ effect. The finished strip is shown glued down in Photo 36. Once stuck, it was given a couple of coats of my latest Vallejo Model Colour Acrylic Paint acquisition (the local Antics now stocks it!) 70.940 SADDLE BROWN. Using the paper original for the cockpit area I marked in the four positions for the wire struts to be added later – two are for the inter wing struts and two for the metal tripod which holds the Lewis Gun (the third leg of that tripod is the single hole just forward of the panel in the aluminium ‘bonnet’. These are in the process of drilling out in Photo 37.
Unfortunately I’d already made the windshield in that photo but never mind, No 1 and 2’s windshields and the Lewis mount for No 1 are the subjects of the next instalment!

Until then, Happy Modelling to you All!


Robin.

Beautiful work Robin

Al

Nice update Robin. Looked great.

Chris

Hi Robin,

Yet another beautifully presented diary instalment, incredible work



May.

Grateful thanks as always to Alan, Al, Mark, Chris, Kev, May and Phil!
There is so much available these days in third party add-ons and enhancements that 'making something from nothing' is no longer the absolute necessity it once was - though to be honest, it still gives me the greatest pleasure when doing it goes right! At the moment I'm deep into designing the scratch built Le Rhone engine for No.2 - its not all going right I can tell you, but its getting there bit by bit (and a lot of ruddy bits it is too!)
Phil, thank you so much for that offer, if you can find that spare wheel I'd be very grateful, just let me know what you'd like for it!
Here we go then...



Photo 38 shows that set of leather/paper punches that I mentioned before. These are incredibly useful for these paper models, cutting out perfect circles is probably the most difficult part of the whole procedure and, providing they are the correct diameter of course, these make it so much easier! This is what I could have done with when I was cutting out the home made instrument decals – too late now, but they’ll be there for the next one thank goodness! The smallest one on the left is just 1mm diameter with each subsequent one going up in 0.5mm increments to 3mm on the right. These come as a set (Ebay of course) but you can get bigger ones individually. I’ve found them up to 17mm but apparently they do go up to 32mm. They are supposed to remove the ‘contents’ of the hole which is then waste, although in my case, it’s the removed bit which I actually need so a quick prod down the waste chute with a piece of wire and out pops the disk. This is the ‘Type B’ punch (identified by the reduced diameter tip) the Type A is more bullet shaped but, according to the blurb, doesn’t last so long (no idea why though). In front of the group are three paper disks and two aluminium ones – the metal ones were punched out of the aluminium bonnet and were then glued back in the other way up to create the two fuel and oil filler caps – simples! In Photo 39 we have the two versions of the pilot’s windscreen – on the left the printed paper one and on the right an acetate ‘glass’ together with the printed bottom frames (inside and out). As this is one of the suggested upgrades mentioned in the instructions I can feel justified including it in the basic model. Instead of that thin acetate however, what I actually used was the corner of a suitably curved clear acetate package – I think this one was for some Dremel type tools, probably the polishing mops I bought for Frederick’s armour! I simply placed a small length of sellotape over the paper windscreen, stuck it down over the corner of the package and then cut around it with scissors. You can see the resulting ‘glass’ with the two paper frames glued to the bottom in Photo 40. The windscreen is shown glued to the fuselage in Photo 41. This is where the instructions show it fitted but on reflection I might have needed a slightly more curved piece of acetate to bring the corners back more. Never mind, it looks quite good on the model and the one for No.2 is better still.
For No.2, I went a slightly different route. The same acetate from the Dremel packaging was used again but instead of the curvature in the plastic box itself, I cut out a flat section of acetate, heated it over a candle flame and used a pair of rounded pliers held in the vice as a shaper to form the softened plastic into a more rounded shape as shown in Photo 42. The same paper windscreen was sellotaped onto this piece and used as a template again to cut out the new windscreen. This time however, instead of the paper window frames I made new ones out of thin strips of the sheet aluminium. The outer frame is shown being glued in place in Photo 43, this shot is difficult to see in perspective, although it looks as if we are looking at the top of the windscreen, its actually the bottom which is uppermost and closest to the camera.
The new windscreen complete with both outer and inner frames is shown in position in Photo 44, as you can see, this one is set further back on the edge of the aluminium casing and joins up to the leather cockpit padding. If you look closely in the bottom left of this photo you can see those punched out filler caps mentioned earlier. To finish off this installment, I made up the basic version of the tripod mounting for the Lewis Gun. Photo 45 shows the page in the instruction book with 1:1 scale diagrams for all the metal wire or rods used in the build. Most of them are for the undercarriage and inter wing struts which come later, but these shown here along with the brass wire components modeled from them are for that tripod. In actual fact, the real tripod is made from flat aerodynamic metal struts so as you can probably imagine, lots more work to be done on No.2’s! The bare brass is shown glued in place in Photo 46, I used a good super glue to secure the wires together after the ends were fitted into the holes (getting both parts into alignment was fiddly!) and then glued in the holes as well. It was at this point I suddenly wished I should have painted the front leg before gluing it in as it virtually rests against that acetate windscreen! Fortunately the careful paintwork went ok and in the final Photo 47, the tripod has been painted in Humbrol Steel Metal Cote. Although in this picture it looks like I’d missed a bit under the far leg, (that’s what I thought too when I took the photo) in actual fact it’s just the slight sheen on the metal cote reflecting the light coloured wood of the cockpit!
In the next installment, the more complicated tripod for No.2 is created requiring the construction of a new and very useful tool, the original of which I came across when looking for some ‘raw materials’ from a well known supplier. I had intended to build it when I got to the undercarriage and wing struts, but when I discovered the tripod’s true form it was needed earlier than expected!
Until then, Happy Modelling to you All!


Robin.