Many thanks indeed to Al, Stevie, Mr T and Kev! Some of these paper and card model kits are truly amazing for how they turn out - one of the most intricate ones I've seen on Ebay is for a German Panzer in Afrika Korps colours - full internals including a fully detailed engine! (Maybe one day!)

And for this installment - another exercise in penny pinching!

The really handy little tool I mentioned in the last installment is called “The Strutter” and is manufactured by Albion Alloys, one of the largest suppliers of metal tubing and rods etc to the modelling industry. A very informative short video of the Strutter in action can be seen on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o10w7aVmIk
Essentially, the Strutter is a ‘souped up’ set of vice jaw plates designed to allow the modeller to transform the circular profiled brass tubing into a streamlined form to represent and replace kit parts for the struts in old biplanes. Even at £28, its probably still a good investment, but true to my ‘shoestring’ modelling bent, I thought I’d have a go at a home made version.
Photo 48 shows the result of my experiment. The whole thing cost me £5 for a short length of steel angle off Ebay, the rest of the construction, the wood, screws, aluminium tubing and epoxy glue I already possessed. The hardest job was actually cutting the steel angle to size – I first tried my little junior hacksaw with a blade I was sure was for metal. It cut about a sixteenth of an inch before the blade was transformed into a flat strip of metal. I’m not sure that it was a metal blade now! Fortunately I then re-discovered my angle grinder (one of two I had, my brother borrowed the other last year for his Landrover – apparently he will someday replace it for a non burned out one!) I also had the cut off stand for the grinder and once secured together they made very short work of cutting the steel to size. The wooden parts are there simply to raise the steel up a little as the angle was wider than the drop on the moving vice jaw as seen in Photo 49. This is the work vice for my Pillar Drill and it was far easier to raise the steel angle than to trim it down lengthwise to fit! The aluminium tubes protruding from one side of the metal are there to hold the brass tube being ‘strutted’ in position, as you’ll see on that video. I drilled the locating holes so that the work piece would be below the level of the top of the vice jaws, getting the maximum pressing force from the vice. The aluminium tubes were secured with epoxy glue and the corresponding guide hole in the other steel angle was slightly larger, allowing the two angles to slide together over the tubing. The whole set up is shown in the start position in Photo 50. The only suitable screws I could find were countersunk heads, and I’ll probably replace them later with domed heads just to neaten it up a bit. To make the Lewis Gun tripod for No.2 I had to get a pack of 0.8mm diameter micro-tubing, again from Albion Alloys. The diminutive size of this can be seen up against the steel rule in Photo 51. The first try at using the new gizmo is shown in Photo 52, in the video the tubing is shown supported on a thicker brass rod but for this tiny diameter I used a single strand of that electrical wire with the free ends bent around the aluminium tubes. The end result is seen in Photo 53 with the untouched round tube on the right and the first attempt on the left. I applied a little too much pressure on this one and made it too flat but the second try was just right and the ‘aerodynamic strut’ is seen in the centre. Using the original wire diagrams in the instruction book again, I cut the micro tubing to length (the front strut was cut slightly over length to allow for the angled ends to be filed back). Before pressing the ‘V’ legs, I threaded through a length of 0.3mm copper wire, this will provide the locating ‘lugs’ for gluing into the fuselage. Of course, if I’d planned this ahead properly I could have drilled 0.3mm holes instead of those whacking great 0.5mm ones! The two tripod sections are shown in Photo 54 along with the ‘torpedo’ shaped top support. This was originally made from a piece of ancient plastic rod but was very brittle and I later found a better source by nicking a missile from an unmade 1/144 scale jet kit! The copper wire in the ‘V’ legs wasn’t going anywhere but all three struts received a drop of thin super glue to secure the wires inside. Photo 55 shows that little missile. This plastic was much nicer to drill and file and you can see the tiny hole for the copper wire on the front leg and the filed down slot for the ‘V’ to fit into behind it. The nose of the missile was then cut off just behind the slot and the whole assembly dry fitted into the fuselage before drops of super glue on a cocktail stick fixed the tripod together as illustrated in Photo 56. Once set I was then able to remove the tripod for painting with the Metal Cote Steel and then re-attached and super glued in position. There is a little triangular plate on the ends of the ‘V’ legs and that will hide the oversized holes later on. The final Photo 57 shows the finished up-graded tripod minus those little plates, now just awaiting its Lewis Gun. Actually, I was a little understating when I said the RNAS Pups carried up to three Lewis magazines, I’ve since found out they actually carried eight! (God knows where the pilot sat!)

In the next instalment I’ll be building the basic paper version of No.1’s 80Hp Le Rhone C engine. (No.2’s is still getting bits added on!)

Until then, Happy Modelling to you All!


Robin.

Your work is incredible Robin!

Regards,
Phil W.

This is one first class build, excellent work Robin.

Mark

Many thanks indeed to Kev, Phil, Dave, Mark and Alan, gratefully received again!
A dinky little model engine is a work of art sometimes Kev, my own attempt is coming along nicely at the moment, I still have to work out those pesky copper tube doo-dahs but overall I'm very pleased with the way its going. Its probably taking a little longer than it should because I'm also trying to design it to be resin cast-able for future models (nothing like saving some work the second time around!)

Ok then, before starting the basic version, here’s a look at the real thing in Photo 1. This is the Le Rhone 9C 80 horsepower rotary engine. This was a French design produced by the ‘Gnome’ Company whose main factory was ‘Gnome et Rhone’ and so their engines were known as Le Rhones in British service. These engines were used in many of the early aircraft, they were built under licence in Britain, Belgium, Sweden and Imperial Russia and, ironically, before the war began, in Germany too, made by the Oberursel Company. Imperial Germany saw no reason to cease production once hostilities began and so both Allied and Central Powers aircraft were flown against each other using the same engines! I’m not sure if the Germans carried on paying royalties to the French company throughout the war – stranger things have happened though! The later Le Rhone 9J was an improved 110 horsepower version used on the Sopwith Triplanes and Camels. When an intact Triplane fell into German hands they reverse engineered the engine and produced that one for their own machines as well. Again ironically, the most famous of the German aircraft, the Red Baron’s Fokker Triplane was a re-designed reverse engineered Sopwith ‘Tripe’ powered by the ‘bootlegged’ German copy of the captured Tripe’s engine! Those copper tubes which I always thought were part of the exhaust system, are in fact the exact opposite – they are the intakes for the fuel/air mixture pumped into the cylinders!
Photos 2 and 3 show the main elements of the cylindrical ‘hub’ of the engine. The two big ones are the front and back of the hub, whilst the smaller one sits on the rear face. As you’ll see later on, when I get to grips on the scratch built ‘super-duper’, there’s a lot more to them than this! All three of these discs were first glued onto the 1mm card and then were cut out using the ‘nipping’ method. First a series of straight cuts with the safety razor produced the octagons shown in Photo 3 and then each corner was further nipped off producing a more circular finish each time. Finally, medium grade sandpaper was used to finish off the edges into as round a circle as I could manage. Photo 4 shows the long strip of paper which forms the side of the hub, joining the two discs together. The white circles mark the position of the nine cylinders coming later. (There is still some sanding to come on the discs in this shot!) The first job is to glue the ends of the strip together to form the collar for the discs. This was quite easy to do as long as you happen to have a large round paintbrush whose handle is the same diameter as the collar! This is shown with the strip being glued around it in Photo 5. The easiest method of gluing the first of the two discs in place was to dry fit it, sanding down the disc until it would just fit into the collar and then gently pushing it down until it was flush with the bottom edge as shown in Photo 6 and the other side up in Photo 7. Once it was in place I then applied the Roket glue around the inside of the collar up against the disc, locking them both together as illustrated in Photo 8. The second disc was a little harder to fit in – since you can’t apply the glue afterwards on this one the disc has to be sanded down a little more to allow the disc to fit in with a layer of glue around the edge of the collar. And also, as that glue has much more ‘grab’ than normal PVA, the fitting has to be as quick as possible before the glue stops any further movement. With a fairly loose fit after the sanding I managed to get the second disc in as seen in Photo 9. The smaller back disc is also in place here and this is where I nearly suffered a catastrophe! After I took this picture I decided that the little disc was about a tenth of a mm out of centre and decided to try and slide it over a touch. Unfortunately by this time the glue had already stiffened up and my attempt to move that piece caused the whole thing to concertina down to resemble a very battered top hat! After all that work I was determined to try and rescue the assembly rather than do it all again and I eventually came up with the ‘resuscitation tool’ as seen in Photo 10. Basically a length of 1mm brass rod, bent to the shape shown with the end ground down smooth. With this I was able to insert the short bit through the central hole and carefully prod and poke at the crumpled collar, gradually pushing it back into shape as seen here. Very little of that hub collar is seen after the cylinders go on and I’m relieved to say none of the damage is evident now that it’s completed! We now come to those self same cylinders – nine of them in total. As shown in Photo 11, Part 36 is a small tube with a wavy bottom edge which when glued into the tube shape accommodates the curve of the engine hub. The darker striped rectangles on the left are Part 36a, which is a slightly larger tube which fits over the other one.
In order to make the tube construction easier, I found a nice thick brass rod, which was increased in diameter by adding masking tape as shown in Photo 12. The thickened section is exactly the same diameter as the finished tube so the procedure was to coil the paper around the brass rod to impart the curl and then to move it down to the taped section for gluing as illustrated in Photo 13. Once that was dry I could then glue the larger piece over the paper tube as shown in Photo 14, ensuring that the ends started and finished at the same join as the first tube. Thanks to the clever planning of the kit designer, the join is at the back of the cylinder after it is glued to the hub as you can see (or rather, can’t see) with the first cylinder glued on in Photo 15. Much later in Photo 16 we have all nine of the cylinders in place and no signs at all of that disastrous crumpling from earlier!
In the next instalment the cylinder heads are fixed on together with the copper intakes and push rods but for the final photo here, we have the much easier method of cutting out those cylinder heads – by chance they were the same size as one of the larger heads on my old leather punch tool and the final Photo 17 shows the trial punching on a set of re-print heads. If you look closely at the cylinder at the twelve o’clock position you can just make out a disc of thin plasticard – that was the first trial punch to check for the size required!

Until next time, Happy Modelling to you All!


Robin.

Great work, you make it look so simple.

Mark

Hi Robin,
For some bizarre reason I've missed your last couple of up dates, thought you'd been quiet anyway I have now caught up with your diary which just gets better and better with each update, incredible work



May.

Many thanks again to May and Phil for those kind words! Unfortunately, I have been quiet this week! My work space up in the loft is limited in size at the best of times and as it is a combined work and storage area for all my modelling supplies and tools, I've found that with this build taking in so many different disciplines, (paper and card, silicone rubber mould making and resin casting to name a few etc etc,) that the available space has been diminishing week by week. The modellers curse (never throw anything away 'cos it WILL be useful one day) doesn't exactly help either!
My next door neighbours have just thrown out a fitted wardrobe and before they could whisk it off to the tip I thought RIGHT! time to do something about this! So this week I've been doing just that. One of the MDF doors is now an extra workbench making the workspace an 'L' shape with one of the chipboard sides cut down into supports. I'm now in the process of removing the two feet of tools and materials which I had to pile up on the original worktop and re-distributing it around to give me more elbow room! Normal transmission will be resumed next week!
Fortunately, I am a couple of weeks ahead of the diary so here's one I made earlier!

The scratch build super dooper Le Rhone 9C engine.

As we saw in the last couple of installments, the Le Rhone 9C has a total of nine cylinders, (the later 9J, the 110Hp version does as well but with slight differences). Anyhow, it made sense to begin the great experiment by constructing the first cylinder as a Master copy from which to create a casting mould so I can reproduce as many as I need (rather than hand building all nine!) Photo 1 shows the smaller of the two aluminium tubes receiving a series of inscribed rings to simulate the ridges on the real cylinders. As I have no ‘proper’ metal working tools these were created by simply holding a less than razor sharp scalpel type knife blade up to the tube as it spins on the mini lathe. As you can see, the rings do not go all the way to the end, this is because the larger tube (as seen in Photo 2) slides over the smaller one to create the stepped cylinder. The bigger tube of course is ridged all the way to the end before being sawn off the rest of the tube, leaving the two component parts shown in Photo 3, and fitted together in Photo 4. The top of the cylinder is a two level affair, which is created out of two punched out disks of thin plasticard. One is left flat whilst the other has a series of ridges scored into it, again with a blunted blade. After taking this picture I suddenly realised it would have been much easier to score the lines on the plasticard first and then punch out the disk! Ah well! The two disks are shown in Photo 5 with the scored disk cut to shape in Photo 6. The real cylinder head is seen in Photo 7 where you can see that ridged top section along with the rocker assembly, the pull rod and the sparkplug. These were built up in a simplified fashion with tiny pieces of plasticard, a cut down bit of previously cast resin (scrap from earlier bits and pieces) and stretched sprue. The final effect before gluing in place is illustrated in Photo 8 alongside the traditional penny. Before beginning to create the silicone rubber mould I thought long and hard about the protruding rocker arm – coming to the conclusion that it probably wouldn’t be able to cast very well (a magnet for air bubbles) and was more of a liability to the rest of the casting. In the end I cut it off again and decided to mould the cylinder without it – adding the arms on with individual scratch built ones afterwards. The cast version is seen still in the mould in Photo 9 – that dimple in the side, is where the sparkplug should have protruded out – another air bubble problem. They will also be added in separately later on. The original master is shown alongside the copy in Photo 10, the ‘cheapie’ ridges have come out quite well after all. Whilst I started the casting process for the rest of the nine cylinders, it was time to begin modelling the central hub of the engine onto which the nine will be fitted. Photo 11 shows the first of the two resin ‘plugs’ created to make the hub by turning the resin with the lathe tools. The plugs were created by adding the mixed resin to an empty plastic syringe body and then sticking a brass rod down the front and pushing the plug back out. Unfortunately, in trying to save resin I made the one shown in Photo 11 too short, I turned a lovely hub front only to find out when the lathe was turned off (sorry, switched off) that the plug had moved off centre and the hub was lop sided! I made the second plug longer so the chuck jaws could hold it steady and the better result is shown in Photo 12, there is an outer rim, inside of which a series of bolts will be fitted and the centre is a sloped conical shape coming to a point in the centre. (This will later be drilled out for the propellor boss shaft).
In the next installment, the hub is completed (and then re-engineered) and the trial engine is put together (minus the rear flange arrangement which I still have to create).

Until then, Happy Modelling to you All!

Robin.

Robin

Fantastic detail you are adding into your model.

The engine parts look top notch they really do.

Nice to hear you have been able to recycle that wardrobe into something that helps you.

Hi Robin,

Another beautifully described entry, fantastic work

May.