It doesn't feel like much has happened since the last post.
Got our first true snow, so the shovels had to come out.
Put the winter tires on the bike, but we haven't had enough snow yet for the studs
I restarted baseboard painting, and have almost finished all the baseboards and doors in the 2nd floor hallway. What's becoming apparent is that the hallway walls are in terrible shape and will need to be patched and repainted.
Marie came back from her last Calgary trip with a terrible cold. Turns out it was covid. It's her first known incident of covid. It is taking a while but she is slowly getting better.
Ember is proving to be an escape artist. She has gotten out twice over the last 10 days. Thankfully, she hasn't gone far and was quickly found both times. She is so tiny she squeezes thru holes under the fence that the other dogs ignore. I think I have now found her most recent escape route so fingers crossed she stays inside the yard. She still likes to torment the dogs on both sides of us so she really needs to be supervised when she is outside.
CF-104 Starfighter
No pictures yet. It has been cloudy a lot so haven't had the bright light needed for good pictures.
Fokker Trimotor
All finished. Just need to take pictures. That may take a while given how long it is taking to get pictures of the Starfighter.
English Electric Lightning
I have been spending my time on the Pacemakers, so this hasn't progressed much. It's now just about finished. All that's left is to apply some decals to the canopy frames, and install the missles.
Dora Wings Pacemaker
I stumbled across a book by Kestrel Publications while searching for info on RCAF Pacemakers. $15 for the digital download. What a bargain! It's 85 pages contains pictures, drawings, colour profiles and a detailed breakdown of modifications made by the RCAF. It even includes a couple pictures of the cockpit and interior! They have quite a list of similar publications that look equally useful for a modeller.
The interior has been painted, windows installed, and everything is ready to close up. The colours have been selected partly from photos and partly a guess. It can be hard to interpret black and white pictures. Other than pure black and pure white, colour can be a huge guess. Things like the type of film and lighting can have a huge effect. For example, orthographic film makes a yellow plane look much darker, almost like a deep blue. For example, the plane in the picturebelow is overall yellow. The outside of the roundel is bright blue, while the roundel center is bright red. The orthographic film causes the colours to look different than we expect.
Three hands would have been useful to glue the fuselage together. The bottom joint was relatively good, but gap filling CA was still used to get a smooth joint. The roof needed clamps to get a tight joint, but the fit still wasn't good. The roof edges were slightly narrower then the fuselage sides, so filler was used to fill gaps.
Four hands would have been useful the glue up the engine cover. Khee Kha provides the cover as a single piece resin casting. Dora decided to provide it as four separate pieces. The joining surfaces probably looked fine on a CAD screen but didn't translate well into reality, basically becoming four butt joints with no way to hold things together. The only option was to apply liquid cement to one surface, quickly bring two pieces together (because I don't have 4 hands, just 2) and hold them until the glue set. A half hour later and the cover was together.
The wings experienced another "looked good in CAD" moment. Each wing is split into a top and bottom half, but the bottom half is bedded into cutouts at the wing tips and flap areas. I suspect this is done to provide thinner trailing edges. But try as I might, it left a visible joint where none existed on the real plane. Out came the filler.
Studying the Khee Kha drawings didn't help me understand how the vertical and horizontal stabilizers fit. The Dora Wings instructions were even less help. They used an exploded assembly diagram that showed the parts floating in space, with dotted lines intended to show where things fit. The only positive connection on the parts was a tab at the toe of the vertical stabilizer. All the other locating pins were little more than suggestions in the plastic. The tab on the vertical stabilizer needed thinning before it would fit into the slot in the fuselage. Getting everything in place left a substantial gap at the base of the vertical stablizer. It didn't look right but it matched photos of the real plane.
Rooting around in the box, I found two rudders. One was the smaller style used on earlier Pacemakers. The other "bonus" rudder isn't mentioned in the instructions but is the taller version used on RCAF planes. The rudder will be left off for now to simplify painting of the red, white and blue full height fin flash.
Also visible in the picture are the brass pins I added to support the wings. The kit only has two tiny little bumps on each wing, essentially creating a butt joint. The brass pins will simplify attaching the wings and strengthen the joint.
The upper and lower wing halves didn't align well at the wing root, creating a large step. The bottom half stuck out a good 0.5 mm more than the top, causing a large gap with the fuselage. Heavy sanding took care of the step and gave a much better joint with the fuselage.
An online build of the kit suggested the wings were set two low on the fuselage, creating an excessive fuselage hunchback above the wing. It is very hard to tell if any adjustment is necessary but pictures clearly show the hunched fuselage.
The colour profile copied above is from the Kestrel book, and is the scheme selected for the RCAF plane. I intend to make masks and paint the large registration numbers on the top and underside of the wings. This will need to be done before the under wing struts are added, which would block access for positioning the masks. The wing struts are more butt joints, with no positive attachments to the fuselage. I think I will need to glue the wings in place, fill the wing to fuselage joint, then paint the wing including registration numbers and roundels. The four wing struts can then be glued in place and the joints filled at the fuselage, before finally painting the fuselage. That's not complicated at all.
Khee Kha Pacemaker
I noted last blog that the instructions warn this is not a weekend kit. It is both pleasant to work on a kit that takes time versus a challenge to rush things to see results. Spending two hours dry fitting and adjusting parts will eventually yield benefit but it does little to appease a desire to see results.
I pinned the two fuselage halves together to sand them. The intent was this would result in two perfectly symmetrical halves. It mostly worked, but one side of the front ended up a little thinner than the other side. A little extra filler will likely be needed to fix it.
The instructions suggest it is critical to verify fit, especially the nose, before committing to glue. I understand the reasoning but it is proving almost impossible to get the four sides together in any kind of alignment. More hands would be helpful. The instructions, and an online build I found, suggest using rubber bands to hold things together. Perhaps I am coordination challenged but there was no way I could make rubber bands work. Pieces would slip out of place while I was trying to get the bands in place, or the bands would pull things together too much and screw up alignment. I finally resorted to taping the pieces together.
The above picture is more a proof of concept to prove things were going in the right direction. Fitting up the parts was a simple but very slow, repetitive process. Tape it all together, test fit the resin nose, mark adjustments with a pencil, then take it all apart and sand some more. A lot of tape was sacrificed before a decent fit was achieved.
The kit provided parts for the interior . Each piece needed to be cut out, sanded and then glued together. The joystick was made from sprue sanded to shape, drilled and then mounted on a piece of brass wire. A couple hours work and I had a reasonable representation.
Interior colours are more guess than anything. Bellanca apparently favoured tans and browns so I went with that.
It might not look like much but the picture above represents a tremendous about of time and effort. The initial glue up of the fuselage went well. Gap filling CA was used on the fuselage joints along the top and bottom. The resin engine cover didn't quite sit right when test fit. Despite pinning the fuselage halves and sanding them together, each side was just different enough to cause misalignment of the engine cover. It was nothing too serious and sanding sticks soon sorted things out.
Now for the part of the kit that scares me. The engine cover was tape in place to begin fitting the windscreen. The windscreen was vac formed from a small square of clear plastic, and needed to be carefully cut out. It was cut slightly oversize to allow test fits, and multiple adjustments, to be made using sanding sticks. Que the ominous music. Initially, the windscreen clearly didn't fit, being too tall and too narrow. First thought was the fuselage roof was too wide, so the roof seams were carefully popped, the roof separated, and the width reduced appropriately. The roof was then glued back in place. The windscreen was now the same width as the fuselage but still didn't fit. The build review pictures didn't give any clues, but picture on the Khee Kha website gave some direction. I had assumed that the front of the roof was even with the fuselage sides. The website picture showed the sides came about a 1 mm father forward than the roof, and the windscreen fit in between the fuselage sides. The roof was carefully removed for a second time and the front edge shortened. After putting everything back together, the windscreen almost fit. Notching the top corners to fit around the fuselage sides, and careful sanding along the windscreen bottom, improved fit even more. Now, with what seems to be a reasonable windscreen fit, it is time to adjust the side windows.
That's it for another blog. Might be a while before the next blog. I am headed to Ottawa on the 17th for Nicholas' iron ring ceremony. Until then, stay warm and safe everyone!
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