May 31 2020
The Argus is nearing completion. Landing gear was installed. Not an easy task. The nose gear attachment point appears to be for a MkII. It gets completely covered by the radome once it is installed. More challenging, the radome doesn’t have an opening for the nose gear. So a square hole was carefully created in the radome and the nose gear temporarily installed with white glue. The main gear wasn’t much easier to install. There were locating holes in each wheel bay, but they were misshaped and incompletely cast. I could have used three hands to simplify installation but eventually the main gear was installed. The plane was flipped over and set done on its landing gear, and it promptly squatted on its tail!
Early in the build, I had carefully dry fit everything together to figure out how much weight i needed to keep the plane from squatting. I then added a little extra for safety and joined the fuselage together. Somewhere in the build, one of the weights had come loose. So I gave the model a good shake, heard the loose weight rattle into the nose, and tried putting the plane back on its gear. The nose wheel came down, but stayed just above the surface. A little carful bending of the main gear, tried again, this time the nose wheel touched! Now it was on all its wheels, but it was clearly nose high. Looking from the front, it was also apparent one wingtip was higher than the other.
There was little I could do on the nose wheel. I couldn’t make the wheel bay deeper, and I couldn’t trim any length from the end because of the way the wheel braces came together. The only option was to cut the gear leg, trim out a piece, and glue it back together. I then added a small plug to the main gear that was low, and reinstalled everything. the nose was still a little high but I wasn’t going to trim any more length. The gear doors were painted and installed.
The Argus was known for leaking engine oil. I wanted to show this but couldn’t find any good picture. I finally found a picture that gave a good idea. I started by spraying a thin line of dark grey where the oil and exhaust where carried but the airflow. I then added oil stains by carefully painting an black oil paint along the same path. Finally, I used a weathering stain to represent fresh oil.
Argus were kept really clean. None of the pictures showed any amount of weathering other than the oil stains. I therefore decided i wouldnt do any further weathering.
The props had previously been painted. I realized that the cast metal shafts were way too thick to attached to the engines. So I cut the cast shift, drilled a small hole, and glued in a new shaft made from brass wire. The props were then carefully glued to the engines.
Next up will be the final clear coat and then add the clear nose.
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