This blog has been a while in creation. The title started as mid-November, changing to late November, and then start of December. Just as I was getting ready to publish, I received an error message saving the last picture. When the blog refreshed, all the text was gone. So I have quickly tried to rewrite the words around the pictures that remained. Apologies in advance if it the result feels like it was written with frustration and/or a hurry.
I made a quick trip to Ottawa, over the weekend of November 18, to attend Nicholas' iron ring ceremony. Unfortunately the room was laid out poorly, so it was almost impossible to see, and equally hard to hear. But I was able to present Nicholas with his iron ring and that made the entire trip worthwhile. I am so proud of him, and what he has accomplished.
The ceremony was on the Saturyday. Nicholas and I spent Sunday at the National Air and Space museum. I have been to the museum a couple times before, but this time we took in a reserve hanger tour. The reserve hanger is almost overwhelming in the number of planes tightly packed into it. The hanger tour was 2 hours and could easily have been 2 hours more. Lots of reference pictures were taken.
Nicholas was busy on the Monday so I visiting 4 hobby shops and did a little Christmas shopping before meeting up with him for a late dinner.
With the term almost over, he has been looking for permanent work. He had turned up a few potential jobs but really hadn't been having much success. His Syncrude mentor, from his summer job this year, passed Nicholas' name to a Sherwood Park consultant, with a strong recommendation. That resulted in a phone call out of the blue in October, then two interviews, and finally a job offer. Nicholas really liked the potential work, but also wanted to be closer to his Ontario based girlfriend, so he regretfully turned the offer down. A week later they called back and said "let's talk". They worked out a compromise arrangement that would give him more flexibility to visit Jill, so he accepted the job offer. Congratulations Nicholas on your first "real" job!
With Nicholas coming back west to work, he has decided to spend Christmas with Jill in Ontario. He plans to come home on December 28th to begin getting ready to start work January 8 in Sherwood Park. It will be a busy time as he looks to find a place to stay, find a car, furniture and all the other things needed to work in a new city.
Daniel continues to spend all his spare time working on the F1 cars. The team has made considerable progress, with the body frame ready and the battery packs completed. On top of all that he is now a much better welder than I ever. The car is on track for a April public debut. Daniel finishes his last Co-op term on December 23 and will then come home for Christmas.
Christine's architectural studies continue to go well but the workload is incredible. She is putting in very long hours to get things done. They are doing final projects now, with formal presentations next week. That is when her 3D printer died with 6 models to go. Fortunately she worked out an arrangement with a friend, with a high speed printer, to print the models for her. And Amazon delivered a replacement printer in 2 days, so she has resumed printing as well. She has shown us her final projects as they have progressed and they look amazing. Examples of one of the models, without the base and associated details, is shown above. Christine finishes classes the end of the coming week. I expect she will sleep for a couple days before she heads home for Christmas.
Marie has been power quilting with the quilting ladies. She attended a three day session in town over the November 11 weekend, an out of town quilting retreat the weekend of November 25th, as well as several sessions at people's homes. She decided to hold a three day quilting session at our house while I was in Ottawa, and they went at it for 3 days straight. The out of town session was over Black Friday, so the truckload of ladies hit the sales at the quilting stores in Sherwood Park and Spruce Grove. Marie came home with more fabric and a new sewing machine.
When she isn't quilting, Marie has been decorating the house for Christmas. It has been a lot of effort, and it really looks fantastic. Unfortunately, my efforts decorating outside were sufficient and I have been told that I have to wrap gifts.
I have been focussing on painting the house. Both upstairs bathrooms are now done, as well as both of the boys' bedrooms. That leaves our bedroom as the only room left upstairs. I will also need to do some touch-up repairs downstairs, in the family room and the basement bathroom. With a bit of luck I can have it done by Christmas. After Christmas the focus will shift to packing stuff and decluttering in preparation to put the house up for sale come spring.
Modelling
I have been waiting for sunny weather to take pictures of the now 3 finished models. However, we aren't getting direct sun into the kitchen area, where I have been taking pictures, so I am going to have to figure something else out.
Khee Kha Pacemaker
Most of my modelling time has been focused on the Dora Wings Pacemaker, but the Khee Kha model has made progress. All the parts, except for the wind struts, are now cut out and sanded to final thickness. For those not familiar with this process, I have included three pictures to explain.
Photo 1 - The upper and lower pieces of the horizontal stabilizer have been rough cut to shape. The plastic is a little over 1 mm thick.
Photo 2 - The parts have been sanded to final shape and thickness. A piece of the base sheet has been shown to the left for reference.
Photo 3 - The finished horizontal and vertical stabiliers
The wings have been glued together and taped to the fuselage to test fit. A brass wind spar is in place to support the wings but more thought is required as to how best to keep everything aligned when glue is finally applied.
It took some time to figure out the tail assembly, which is very different than on other airplanes. So yes, those large gaps are supposed to be there. Both the vertical and horizontal stabilizers only makes contact with the fuselage at the very front edge. The rear is supported by a vertical bar. This was apparently done to facilitate easier in field adjustments and repairs.
We have an airplane! A dry fit of all the components to test fit and assembly.
Next up will be to clean up the front windshield, mask all the clear parts, and then begin the task of joining the parts. As much as I would prefer, I don't think I can paint the fuselage, wings and tail pieces separately, then joint them after painting. And there is still the small matter of figuring out how to scrachbuild landing gear and skis.
Dora Wings Pacemaker
The Dora Wings Pacemaker has proven to be a two steps forward, one step back kind of build.
Fit of the wings to fuselage was not great along the top edge. The bottom was glued in place, then the gap along the top was filled with Perfect Plastic Putty. This is a non-sturctural chaulk based filller than can be blended and removed with a wet Q-tip. Perfect for situations where you don't want to do a lot of sanding. Not so good if you need a strong joint.
Early Pacemakes used "bulldog" style landing gear, while later models used "simple" style gear. The RCAF planes used the simple style, so the appropriate wing struts were prepared. The instructions actually mix the types up, and show them reveresed front to back, so some care is needed to get the right ones in the right spots. The fuselage joints were drilled and pinned to provide strenght, and to allow the struts to be added after painting. The chosen colour scheme has the registration letters under the struts, and I can't see any way to do that with the struts in place. A test fit of the struts shows decent joints.
With the plane making decent progress, it was time to turn attention to the floats. I bought a set of beautifully cast resign Edo 4650 floats from KHee Kha. There are no commercially available struts to connect the floats, or to connect the floats to the plane, so scrathbuilding is definitely requried. I wondered about trying to print struts but was worried about them sagging under load over time. Lars, the owner of Khee Kha, makes struts by cutting them out of 0.04" thick styrene sheet, the scrapping them into shape with the edge of a knife blade. I did something similar to replace a landing gear strut on the Fokker Trimotor, so had proved the concept.
First up was the struts that connected the floats together. The RCAF used an unique arrangement, with the rear strut elevated into a V shape. Initial thoughts were to simply bend the strut, but it wasn't possible to get a sharp enough joint. Next effort was using two pieces, jointed at the center. This proved much easier to adjust, both vertically and for length, but left a weaker joint.
With the interconnecting structs sorted, it was time to work in the struts between the plane and the floats. The real floats use a W shaped seried of struts, but pictures seem to suggest the rear leg is thinner, and a round bar vs an airfoil shape. Instead, the struts were initially cut from 0.04" styrene as N shapes. I intended to sand the struts to shape, but it proved nearly impossible. The struts were simply too flexible and it was nearly impossible to brace them sufficiently for sanding. I resorted to scraping and was amazed at how well it worked. It was considerably faster and gave much more control over how and were material was removed.
It was necessary to cut the rear portion of the n-shape off. This portion is in a differnt plane, and it wasn't possible to simple bend it into place. It was therefore pinned, joined with CA, and set into the correct plane. Two decent struts were achieved after a couple hours effort.
I was looking over the decals for CF-AKI, the planned colour scheme for the Khee Kha plane, when I noticed a pair of Edo 4650 floats laying beside the decals. That was clearly impossible as the single set of Edo 4650 floats I had were already being used for the Dora WIngs plane. It didnt take long to realize I had incorrectly used the Edo 5300 floats, which are too big, and intended for a Fokker Super Universal. If you are still reading at this point, yes that difference matters. Earlier I had wondered why the floats had seemed too large, but paid no attention to it. Now I knew why. The recently made strutus didn't fit the correct floats, so new ones were needed. Two steps forward, one step back.
For whatever reasons this set of struts took more effort than the previous set. Six tries were needed before I had an acceptable pair of struts.
Test fitting the various struts made it very apparent that a jig was necessary to put everything together. The floats have V-shaped bottoms and will absolutely not sit flat. A simple cardboard affair was created using an old kit box and hot glue.
The Khee Kha instructuctions include drawings of a float equiped plane, which do not match the RCAF colour profile drawings in the Kestrel Publications book. Comparing both against photos suggested the colour profile was more accurate, so the jig was set up to accordingly. You can see the difference on the left side of the photo, where the farthest centerline marking matches the Khee Kha drawings. Yes, the floats are lined up to the wrong centerline.
Initial dry fits suggested the rear V-joint was strong enough but later fitting determined it wasn't. After much thought, a separate brass rod was added between the floats, under the v-shaped strut. Not strictly accurate but it greatly strenghtend the joint.
It became immediately apparent, when test fitting the plane to the dry fit struts, that the struts were too short. And not be a little. They were at least 5 mm too short. Drawings were dutifully rechecked and measurements confirmed correct. The patterns were rechecked and found to be 5 mm short. Arghh! Two steps forward and one step back.
The patterns were redrawn to the correct dimensions and new, longer struts were fabricated. Practice does not make perfect, at least when building struts, and it took 4 attempts to get an acceptable pair of struts.
Testing the new long struts to the plane determined the wider float stance simply looked wrong. The jig was adjusted and the floats set to the narrower stance, which looked much more pleasing, at least to my eye.
With the floats finally in a decent state, it was time to start painting the plane. Yellow is a difficult colour to paint, as it takes multiple layers to get decent coverage. A white primer was used in an effort to reduce the number of yellow coats. With the white in place, the roundels were sprayed and masked.
Four yellow coats were required to get good colour saturation. Each layer needed to be sanded lightly to remove the abundant dust motes that kept getting trapped. I also needed to sand patches of rough paint under the wings and horizontal stabilizers. The roughness is created by turbulence when the paint spray hits a 90 degree angle, like the underside of the wing to fuselage. Atomized paint gets caught in the turbulence and begins to dry, then is deposited onto the wet paint below, where it begins to build up rather than lay smooth. The solution is to mask part of the 90 degree joint, paint the other part, then remask and repaint the remaining side. This has always seemed like a lot of work to me, but ultimately so proved all the sanding needed to smooth the rough paint. I hadn't experienced paint roughness to this extent before, and the proximity of the windows increased the difficultly to sand out. I will take this as a lesson for future builds.
With the yellow complete, the code letters were masked and sprayed. I have had problems with the paint peeling when the masks were removed a few times but not anywhere as much as I did when removing the registration lettering masks. I think this time it might have been an issue with the flat acrylic colour used for the markings not adhering well to the shiny enamel used to paint the plane. When the mask was removed, some of the paint may have adhered better to the mask than the paint. Registration letters were fixed by local masking and respraying. Roundels were repaired by touching up with a brush.
Completion of the registration letters allowed the wing struts to be installed. These were glued in place with white glue to avoid damaging the paint. Minor gaps at the fuselage joint were filled with white glue and then a local respray with yellow.
It is hard to tell in the above picture but the closest roundel isn't round. It is fatter at the front of the wing than at the back. I was initially going to leave it but couldn't. The three photos below show the repair.
Photo 1 - The uncorrected roundel - too thick at the front edge of the wing vs the rear.
Photo 2 - Mask in place and white primer lightly sprayed to the offending area.
Photo 3 - The completed repair. I think it looks better.
Look closely at the 2nd photo above, The mask was cut as a circle on my Cameo cutter. It is theoretically perfectly round. Yet you can see that the rear of the mask, towards the back of the wing, extends beyond the blue edge of the painted roundel. What gives? At this point I have two thoughts.
Start by assuming the mask is actually round, and the originally roundel masks were round when cut. This would mean the mask is distorted somehow between the time it is cut and the time it is removed. The most probable way to happen would be during removal from the backing to placement on the plane. Better use of transfer tape could help prevent any distortion that may be happening.
The more likely cause is that three nested circles aren't centered. There were drawn by snapping to a grid, with the belieft this would result in all three centered to a common point. I had watched a Youtube video last week, and the creator used a center command to align multiple shapes. That was new to me, and I had to look it up. Turns out my machine does indeed have a center command. More telling all three circles moved when the center command was applied to the original file. This seems to indicate the circles were off center, which would explain why the blue was thicker at the front than at the back. Again, something to apply to the next masks.
So the plane is moving forward. It certainly isn't my best work but it is still an enjoyable build and I am happy with it. Next up, after a clear coat is applied to protect the plane, will be to paint the floats and then attach them to the plane.
Well, that's it for another blog. This second version took me a couple hours to rewrite, so I haven't proof read it. Wix, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't seem to come with a spell checker. Hopefully I haven't misspelled anyones name or missed out part of their stories. Take care. I will try to get some pictures of the finished planes for an update before Christmas. Take care and stay safe.
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