Vic Balshaw
Major General
Going well there Grant. 
1/48 Classic Airframes Boeing P-12E (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter Grant Barr
- Start date
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- 1/48 boeing p-12e yellow wings
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fubar57
General
Fiddly but impressive
Crimea_River
Marshal
As always Grant, a pleasure to see what you've been up to
Snautzer01
Honourably banned
- 43,572
- Mar 26, 2007
What the gent above said.
- Thread starter
- #66
Grant Barr
Senior Airman
Think I might have duplicated the previous post - 
Moving on! The engine has now been fitted into the Townend ring. The horizontal alignment within the ring looks OK, it might be a bit more out the front than it should be, but I can live with it.
Next, I moved onto the fitting of the undercarriage and oh boy did that present some problems. As mentioned a couple of times already, there is no provision in the kit parts for forming positive joints in the majority of components. This means that items like the front undercarriage assembly are quite difficult to set into place and ensure that the correct angles are maintained. I thought the best approach would be to partially assemble the legs and associated struts and then fit them to the fuselage. Turns out that this was probably not the best solution…
The next couple of photos show the outcome of my chosen process.
There were three main issues that installing the pre-assembled struts posed.
First, and most obvious/troublesome was the fit of the main legs to the fuselage. To get the correct angles from the front and the side meant that their positioning on the fuselage was way out – needing a truckload of filler to get them looking anything like properly joined to the fuselage.
Second was the length of the V struts between the two main legs. When first fitted the strut lengths were much too long and pushed a large curve into the main axle bar when viewed from the front. I cut the V braces (as indicated with the red ovals) to shorten them a bit but as you can see, they are still just that little bit too long. Annoying but not worth trying to shorten a bit more and further weaken the framework structure.
Finally, and probably the bit that irritated me the most was that the instructions called for you to shorten the length of the rearward braces between the wing and main legs as needed. There is just no empirical way to work out the length you need for this, meaning endless tedious cutting and test fitting. Getting the length of these is critical to making sure the angle of the main legs when viewed from a side profile is correct. I scratched my head for ages trying to work out a way to avoid repeating the cut/test method but given I had already partly assembled the undercarriage I could find no other solution.
Moving on to the tail undercarriage presented yet another issue. My chosen aircraft has a tail skid arrangement and not a tailwheel. Weirdly the kit colour scheme options have one with a tail skid and one with a tail wheel but only a tailwheel is provided in the kit (a resin component). Nowhere in the kit instructions is a tail skid mentioned nor is there any guidance on what to do if you chose that version!
That left me with little chose other than to fabricate something from scratch. I did start to make something with styrene rod but worked out quickly that it just would not take the weight of the model (tiny amount that it was). I ended up fabricating a skid with a combination of brass rods and a chord section from some large styrene tube (suitably shaped). The outcome is okay but comparing it to the drawings and photos reveals the skid plate sits a little too far back. It took me ages to get this built so I have no intention of trying to fix it. The skid works and holds up the aircraft well so I will leave it be.
The other thing I realized when looking at the instructions for the tailwheel is that I have neglected to make some rear stabiliser struts (red exclamation mark). I'll whip something up from either shaped rod stock or shaped stretched sprue. I mentioned earlier that I was going to experiment with pre-shaping some sprue and then stretching it to see what happened. To my surprise it held the shaped profile well, so I may end up playing around with that to make the struts. We'll see how I go for time.
I've done still more work on bits and pieces but am yet to get photos prepared for them. I'll post this work in my next update.
Moving on! The engine has now been fitted into the Townend ring. The horizontal alignment within the ring looks OK, it might be a bit more out the front than it should be, but I can live with it.
Next, I moved onto the fitting of the undercarriage and oh boy did that present some problems. As mentioned a couple of times already, there is no provision in the kit parts for forming positive joints in the majority of components. This means that items like the front undercarriage assembly are quite difficult to set into place and ensure that the correct angles are maintained. I thought the best approach would be to partially assemble the legs and associated struts and then fit them to the fuselage. Turns out that this was probably not the best solution…
The next couple of photos show the outcome of my chosen process.
There were three main issues that installing the pre-assembled struts posed.
First, and most obvious/troublesome was the fit of the main legs to the fuselage. To get the correct angles from the front and the side meant that their positioning on the fuselage was way out – needing a truckload of filler to get them looking anything like properly joined to the fuselage.
Second was the length of the V struts between the two main legs. When first fitted the strut lengths were much too long and pushed a large curve into the main axle bar when viewed from the front. I cut the V braces (as indicated with the red ovals) to shorten them a bit but as you can see, they are still just that little bit too long. Annoying but not worth trying to shorten a bit more and further weaken the framework structure.
Finally, and probably the bit that irritated me the most was that the instructions called for you to shorten the length of the rearward braces between the wing and main legs as needed. There is just no empirical way to work out the length you need for this, meaning endless tedious cutting and test fitting. Getting the length of these is critical to making sure the angle of the main legs when viewed from a side profile is correct. I scratched my head for ages trying to work out a way to avoid repeating the cut/test method but given I had already partly assembled the undercarriage I could find no other solution.
Moving on to the tail undercarriage presented yet another issue. My chosen aircraft has a tail skid arrangement and not a tailwheel. Weirdly the kit colour scheme options have one with a tail skid and one with a tail wheel but only a tailwheel is provided in the kit (a resin component). Nowhere in the kit instructions is a tail skid mentioned nor is there any guidance on what to do if you chose that version!
That left me with little chose other than to fabricate something from scratch. I did start to make something with styrene rod but worked out quickly that it just would not take the weight of the model (tiny amount that it was). I ended up fabricating a skid with a combination of brass rods and a chord section from some large styrene tube (suitably shaped). The outcome is okay but comparing it to the drawings and photos reveals the skid plate sits a little too far back. It took me ages to get this built so I have no intention of trying to fix it. The skid works and holds up the aircraft well so I will leave it be.
The other thing I realized when looking at the instructions for the tailwheel is that I have neglected to make some rear stabiliser struts (red exclamation mark). I'll whip something up from either shaped rod stock or shaped stretched sprue. I mentioned earlier that I was going to experiment with pre-shaping some sprue and then stretching it to see what happened. To my surprise it held the shaped profile well, so I may end up playing around with that to make the struts. We'll see how I go for time.
I've done still more work on bits and pieces but am yet to get photos prepared for them. I'll post this work in my next update.
Vic Balshaw
Major General
Some good thinking and work Grant and if its any consolation, I would have approached the undercarriage struts the same way.
Lucky13
Forum Mascot
Phenomenal work!
