This weekend marks one year since my father passed away. I miss him.
You may have noticed that the blog updates have been getting less and less frequent. Part of this is due to less modelling getting done. Painting the house last year, and now packing in preparation for a move, as taken up a lot of "free" time. But my father's passing is also part of it. The blog was originally created as a way to share my modelling projects with him. It was fun for both of us, and I enjoyed hearing and/or seeing his reaction to the latest post. Motivation was high and progress was good. I miss that interaction and am sure it has impacted both my modelling and the blog. Modelling remains enjoyable, and time at the workbench is both relaxing and fun. But I recently have found that my motivation sometimes lags.
Packing is moving along at a good pace. A major milestone was achieved this week when I managed to empty out the under stairs crawl space. The "storage" under the railway is now also empty.
Thru the years, I have maintained a database of my model collection, both built and unbuilt. Packing stuff up has been a chance to review my collections of trains and planes, and to update the database. I am rather embarrassed at both the sometimes large gaps in my database, and the embarrassingly large amount of stuff I have collected. I will have to do some thinning once the move is finished, everything is unpacked, and I have more time to re-evaluate what hobbies I want to focus on.
The other packing activity has been document and record management. I have stored various records, such as old tax returns and investment records, in file cabinets or under the stairs. They became buried and semi forgotten as the model collection built up around them. With the models out, it was time to do something about them. Nine garbage bags and four 4 ft3 boxes were filled with shredded documents. It was also time to move out the boxes of old magazines. I thought I had been doing a better job of magazine management, having been regularly recycling magazines over the years. It obviously wasn't enough. Several thousand magazines were regretfully sent to recycling, as there really is no practical alternative to deal with them, and I wasn't going to move them to Calgary.
Otherwise, not much seems to have happened over the last month. Nicholas is settling into to his new job, and things are going well. Christine is back to school, and heavily into the next round of projects. And Daniel is back for his final term and spending all his spare time on the F1 project car.
Dora Wings Pacemaker
The Dora Wings Pacemaker has been neglected, partly due to good progress on the Khee Kha plane, and partly from fear of joining the floats to the fuselage. With the Khee Kha kit finished, it was time to get on with it.
The floats were added one joint at a time. CA was added to the first joint, then the joint was allowed to cure for 30 minutes. Weight was placed on the top of the plane to hold the joint in place while the glue dried. Each of the remaining three joints were then done in the same manner.
She's up on her feet and rigged out! More importantly, she's mostly straight and level.
Two layers of rigging were completed using EZ Line. The first was an X between the floats. The second was an X between the fuselage and the floats. Static proved an unexpected, but constant problem, with the rigging line alternatively attracted to the wrong places, or repelled from the desired places. The process was an exercise in patience but possible with the tiny eyelets previously added to the floats.
This particular plane had an unusual rear float bracing structure. With the main braces in place, it was time to finish the rear braces. First, before they became inaccessible, steps were formed from brass wire and installed under both side doors. Brass wire was also used to form the diagonal braces from the rear float strut to the rear fuselage. The finer V brace, from the top of the rear interconnecting float brace, to the underside of the fuselage, was formed from two pieces of stretched sprue. Canopy glue was used to hold these in place as it has good "grab" and sufficient initial strength to hold small pieces in place without needing any help.
Time to add the final bits and pieces, including the engine, prop and pitot. Pictures show the plane generally didn't have water rudders installed, so these were left off. It also doesn't appear to have had a red prop warning stripe on the floats so this was left off. Finally, the kit includes photo etched parts for the control horns and cables. These looked overally finicky to install, and terribly fragile, so were also left off. Other than a final flat coat, and removal of the clear part masks, the plane is done!
Khee Kha Pacemaker
With all painting and decals complete, the masking was removed from the windows and the cowl.
The attempt to paint the window frames silver was a partial success at best. I don't think I want to leave them as is. But I also don't know how to fix them. This will need some thought and experimentation.
I couldn't resist a test assembly of the painted parts. It looks pretty good, if you ignore the still to be repaired silver windows frames.
The second window frame attempt was made using Bare Metail Foil. The first problem was trying to cut the frames using my cutting machine. The foil doesn't cut well, and is prone to peeling as the blade tries to navigate the cuts. Removing the cut pieces from the backing, without folding or creasing the foil was very difficult to impossible. Similar to my experience on the Fokker Trimotor, I couldn't get the foil to stick. The result looked better than the attempt to paint the frames, but I still wasn't happy with it.
The third attempt to fix the window frames was made using Cricut silver vinyl found while wandering Staples. It took four attempts to figure out the proper cutting depth, but once sorted, the results were so much better. The vinyl is much tougher, holds its shape better, and sticks better. Rather embarrassingly, the problem now is that it highlights the window openings aren't actually square.
Photo 1 - Bare metal foil window frames looks just ok
Photo 2 - Vinyl frames added to the rectangular windows. Much better.
Photo 3 - The close up isn't very forgiving but the silver vinyl is so much better
Hard to see and even harder to photograph. The wing strut outer cross bracing was very gently built from stretched sprue.
The plane is now complete. I am very happy with how it has turned out. The engine and prop have been installed. Exhaust extensions were fabricated from stretched sprue and carefully threaded through the openings between the cylinders. The bracing cable between the vertical and horizontal stabilizers, and the underside struts on the horizontal stabilizers, has also been added. A pitot was fabricated out of stretched sprue and inserted into a hole drilled into the wing. The only thing left is to design and print skis. I have been experimenting with Shapr3D, on my iPad, so we will see what happens.
I don't believe it happened in real life, but here's a picture of AKI sitting next to the big Fokker GASC.
What's next on the bench? I have saved 5 kits from packing to tide me over. More on that in the next blog.
Take care and stay safe.
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