Grateful thanks again to Mark, Tony, Alan, Mr T and Phil!

The deadline is approaching fast and there's still much to do - somehow I just can't resist adding in far more than I intended (never learn!) Anyway, finally the two models are beginning to look like actual aircraft (well, No.1 is anyway!)
The tail unit begins with the main components as shown in
Photo 1. In the centre we have the one-piece tail plane, above that is the tail fin and the rudder and below are the port and starboard elevators. All of these parts are the external skin sections, and they are all glued over a thicker internal ‘skeleton’. The first part of this is shown in
Photo 2, Part 82, which is first glued onto the 1mm backing card before cutting out also has a thin strip of paper glued along the top with a corresponding strip also glued underneath as well. Not so easily seen here is a central forward end of a rib, which is used to wrap the tail plane skin around at the front edge. The skin also has a thin strip at the rear which is bent up at right angles, the bend lines are just visible in Photo 1 if you look closely! Before gluing the skin in place, the 1mm card inner has to be carefully sanded down at the outer edges (marked by a little drawing on one side). As you can make out in
Photo 3 which shows the skin being glued down, there is a slight overlap at the outer edges, sanding down the card at this point allows the paper skin to bend up into the card where the skins are then glued together, creating the feather edge to the tail plane. The tail plane is glued together in
Photo 4, laying alongside the rear fuselage. You can just make out the faint pencil lines I drew on the underside of the tail plane whilst holding the piece in place. I used these as a guide to apply the
Roket Card Glue to the inside of these lines and to the raised sides of the fuselage skins. The tail plane is only fully glued to the fuselage at the extreme rear, (the area right above the tail skid). The tail plane is shown fixed in place in
Photo 5, note that I also punched tiny holes through the tail plane with a small sewing needle before attaching it on the fuselage to take the
Uschi Rigging Thread later on. With the tail plane fixed on it was time to concentrate on the tail-fin and rudder. The component parts are shown again in
Photo 6, this time with the inner card parts as well. You can see that little ‘sand off’ symbol on these parts too, this time the tail-fin is sanded along the upper edge whilst the rudder is sanded all the way around. The rudder skin is seen cut out with the inner piece all sanded around in
Photo 7 – note the pair of tiny cut outs in the paper skin, these marry up with the cut out slot in the card inner and will take the control horns for the rudder wires later. Again the paper skin overlaps the inner card and the sanding down allows for the thin feather edge. The tail-fin is in the process of being glued together in
Photo 8. Unlike most later aircraft after the war, the fin is not actually joined to the fuselage! It sits on two aluminium tubes which are in turn bolted into the fuselage frame. On No.1 these are provided by a pair of brass rods as shown here – No.2 however will be using some ‘proper’ aluminium tubing. In actual fact, the instructions have the rear longer rod glued onto the card projections at the rear of the fuselage and a shorter rod simply resting on the top of the fuselage up front. I decided to break with the directions here though and had a longer rod up front with a corresponding hole drilled into the card fuselage framework to provide a stronger bond. As you might just make out in this pic, the rear rod is flat at the bottom but the forward one is chamfered to make pushing it through the card fuselage a little easier. The pair of Elevators parts are shown in
Photo 9, just like the rudder, the elevator card inners are also sanded off right around the edge, so that when they are glued together as in
Photo 10, the slight overlap of the skin bends up around the sanded part to give that feather joint again. The glued elevators are shown together with the parts for the control horns in
Photo 11. The edges of the elevators have already been touched in to remove the white paper edges –
Vallejo Oxford Blue, and a mix of
Vallejo Red and
Citadel Blazing Orange for the red stripes. The white stripes being ‘um white, didn’t need any touch up! The control horns are simply folded over and glued, once dry the horns are cut out and inserted into the slots in the elevators with a tiny drop of Roket Card Glue to secure them in place. Once dry again, they were also touched in with the Oxford Blue. The elevators are joined to the tailplane via two microscopic hinges, the instructions say to form these from wire rod – I found it far easier however to cut these tiny pieces from stretched sprue, trying to get a clean flat end to such a small piece of wire would be next to impossible! You can just make out the sprue hinges on the left side of the tailplane in
Photo 12. Note the four holes pierced through the tailplane in this shot, as mentioned earlier these will take the elastic rigging thread later which joins the tailplane to the tailfin. Before fixing the elevators in place I first needed to drill a tiny hole through their rear edge in line with the horn in order to thread a length of the Uschi Rigging through, as shown in
Photo 13.. This will provide the upper and lower control wires for the elevators which emerges from the top and upper side of the fuselage, passes to the horn and back through the elevator to the other end of the horn. The tiny size of the Uschi bobbin with its 150 feet of thread can be clearly seen here! The elevators are in the process of being glued on to those hinges in
Photo 14, the round supports holding them in place are the MDF disks which were removed from my new
Citadel Paint Rack – one hundred and twenty of the ruddy things to be exact – but they’ve come in extremely handy since for playing a supporting role as I’m gluing separate parts together. (The rack wasn’t made by Citadel though – I got a far cheaper one designed for that size of paint pot on Ebay!) Now, because I began the rigging thread from the back edge of the elevators with both threads then going forward, I ended up with a slight problem of how to attach the ends of the threads where they ‘emerge’ from the fuselage. No.2 doesn’t have this problem because the threads start there (on the fuselage) and work back to the various turnbuckles, ie, its not a single straight run! After trying repeatedly to glue the ends of the threads in the tiny holes made in the fuselage card I had to give up on that method. I’m only giving the thread the bare minimum of stretch to avoid stressing the card formers but that was enough to keep springing the thread off the glue joint – even super glue wouldn’t hold it quickly enough although it seems when super gluing the thread to the brass turnbuckle tubes its almost instant! Its just not quick enough on a thread to paper joint.

In the end I came up with a solution which involves super gluing the end of the thread to a short length of the 0.2mm wire, bending the wire into a ‘V’ shaped hook and then inserting the end into the fuselage and securing with a drop of Roket card glue. I still had to physically hold each one in place for a few minutes for the glue to grip but once it had gone sticky the wire hook would then hold it in place. The hook for the lower port elevator cable is shown in
Photo 15 (it looks like the upper one is already in on this shot) and that one and the starboard upper cable are being glued in place in
Photo 16. With the elevator cables all in place I then proceeded with the tailplane bracing wires. In actual fact I
should have then done the rudder controls – but I learnt my lesson on this more basic version and did it in the right order on the far more complicated No.2! The bracing wires begin on the lower fuselage just forward of the tail skid as shown in
Photo 17. This is simply a case of making a small hole in the fuselage card with a tiny drill followed by a needle and then adding a miniscule drop of card glue and ‘poking’ the end of the thread into the glued hole. Once it was holding, another small drop of glue was added to lock it in. After a few minutes the thread is secure and can be threaded down through the pre-drilled holes in the tailplane seen earlier. I then applied a spring tweezer to the end of the thread (now dangling underneath the tailplane out of shot) and the tension on that was enough to keep the thread taut whilst another drop of glue was added in the hole to fix it in place. Once that was dry, the model was turned right way up again, the thread was passed through the tailfin and a clamp used to grip the end, keeping it taut again so a drop of glue could be applied to both sides of the fin as shown in
Photo 18. Finally, the thread was put back through the tailplane hole and glued under tension as before. The last task was to cut the thread just short of the return to the fuselage hole and carefully glue it into place. This time I had no choice but to glue the thread straight into the hole – no opportunity for hooks here but, fortunately being a shorter run of stretched thread the card glue was able to hold it in place (actually,
I had to do the holding – for a good five minutes or so but eventually the card glue did fix it down securely). And again, finally, the last
Photo 19 illustrates the rudder being glued into place on the tailfin. Just out of shot are those helpful MDF disks holding up the sprung tweezer, which is, in turn holding up the rudder. After it was glued in position I suddenly realised all those bracing wires were in the way of adding the rudder’s control cables – hence the altered procedure on No.2!
In the next instalment, adding the same bits on for No.2 with a few changes and a whole lot more work!
Until then, Happy Modelling to you All!
Robin.
Plymouth57 attached the following image(s):
First wooden ship:
The Grimsby 12 Gun 'Frigate' by Constructo Second:
Bounty DelPrado Part Works Third:
HMS Victory DelPrado Part Works 1/100 scale
Diorama of the Battle of the Brandywine from the American Revolutionary War Diorama of the Battle of New Falkland (unfinished sci-fi), Great War Centenary Diorama of the Messines Ridge Assault
Index for the Victory diary is on page 1