1/48 Wellington Mk. III of 425 Squadron - "Starting to Finish"

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Perfect, thank-you. I've since gleaned that from watching this video so now understand how the construction is done.


All seems to confirm that the spar sections should line up. Still trying to figure out why it ain't.
 
Crimea_River said:
Is the entire wheel well correctly located?
Click to expand...

Hi Andy, in answer to this question, no, it isn't. Looking at the view of the model's lower wing surface and nacelle, the undercarriage legs appear to be too far rearward, which explains the discrepancy between the spar on the wing and the representation in the undercarriage bay. Take a look at this image, which confirms that the distance between the location of the undercarriage leg and the wing leading edge is not as great as the model suggests, which means that the model's spar location on the wing is probably accurate. The leg can just be seen at left, follow the line of rivets up to the wing and compare that with the model and the discrepancy in distance between the two can be seen.

DSC_1247

Here, the location of the spar can be seen in relation to the undercarriage leg, which confirms that the model leg is too far rearward.

DSC_1250
 
You know Grant, I had just returned from the bench to investigate that possibility before coming online and came to the same conclusion. I will investigate this a bit more to confirm and quantify the discrepancy and then report back. If that's the case, and given that I intend to rebuild the bay anyway, then this should be a relatively easy fix. Thanks for the input - good observation.
 
It shouldn't require too much surgery if that is the right observation. You do have your work cut out for you though - pun not really intended, but certainly justified!
 
So, the results of a quick bit of grade 3 math follows. I took a cut from the best scale plan I could find on the net and scaled the key dimensions as shown here:



Then, I did the same on the model and came up with these dimensions:



As you can see, this exercise suggests that the spar is pretty close to the correct position on the model (30% of the chord) but the forward edge of the wheel bay should be moved forward by about 3mm (1/8"). While allowing for inaccuracies on the scale drawing and errors in my process, I'll now look at Terry and Grant's photos again closely to determine exactly where I should cut the plastic and get on with it. Given that I'm looking for a forward move of the spar of between 5 and 6mm, I'll need to do a bit of tweaking of where the cut line will be and maybe cheat a bit on the space between the u/c struts and the spar. This will also mean that I will need to weld some plastic to the u/c doors if the back edge of the bay stays in place. Also TBC.

I'll be back when the patient is being prepped for surgery.
 
Thanks gentlemen. Well, after a bit more checking, I was able to resolve that the spar was out of position by about 4mm rather than 6 so I decided that 4mm was the amount that I would move the well forward. With my go-by still assembled, I marked and cut out the starboard well (left below). I'm thinking that the extreme aft end of the well opening should also be moved forward a tad but not by 4mm.



Looking into the maw of the well from the front, I'm faced with the challenge of how to close in the airfoil-shaped caverns but I'm formulating a plan....



In the above pics, I've already gone and thinned the walls a bit by carefully removing the excess plastic with my Dremel tool and sanding the resulting ridges back a bit to smooth them but but there's more to do before I start adding detail bits.

On the engine side, I elected to close in the large opening to represent a bulkhead at that location. It will look better having this than a wide open space.



I plan to do more tonight and so should have more to show tomorrow if I don't freeze in the meantime. It's -23C outside right now.
 
Thanks guys. Nothing achieved. Spent a lot of time deciphering the well details from pictures and marking locations. I tried, unsuccessfully, to produce a couple of ribs for the spars but these have been binned. I'll show something when I have something.
 
The house was taken over today by a bunch of women making cookies and so I stole away to the basement workshop. I finally figured out the well details and got started. The key feature is the spar truss and so I started from there. After marking the location of the spar on the inside, the first step was to create a large rib feature through which the spar would pass. The ribs were only glued to the bottom half with CA so that I could continue to remove the upper half and dry fit everything to make sure it all hangs together.



My suspicions were correct that the spar provided with the kit would now be too narrow. In the below pic, it's just the locating pins that barely reach the edges of the ribs. The other issue with the kit unit is that it's perfectly square whereas, in reality, the spar had a visible taper.



The solution was to snip off the tubular chord sections and replace them with my own using round styrene bits. Below you can see that the spar chords are now tapered and line up with the open wing sections. Also seen are a couple of strips added along the upper half to parallel the removeable panels for the oil tank.



In this rather blurry picture you can see how the spar has now been boxed in with some added styrene sheet cut to shape.



That's all for today. I'm going to grab some cookies now as compensation.
 
Excellent, Andy, great work on your solution thus far. It does look like the nacelles are closed off from the wings so you could probably blank off the wing hollows. This is the left hand nacelle looking inboard and you can clearly see the interior structure where the wing butts into the nacelle. Note detail on the undercarriage doors as well.

Port ucarriage bay
 
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