F/FSport L
by david mitchell You can reach David Mitchellat 230 Walnut St. NW, Washington, District of Columbia 20012, or via e-mail at
davedge@me.com
ast month, we looked at a couple of ways to approach building fuselage sides that might, with a little luck, improve your chances of making those sides identical—or nearly so. There are times when perfection is the enemy of the good; yet it seems to me that there is never harm in trying different techniques that might actually make you a more effi- cient builder, once you get the hang of them. There are a hundred ways or more to skin the cat. That said, old dogs remember old tricks; everyone is going to have their go-to meth- ods. And yet...what about the times that you can’t really decide which method is best, even after all these years of modeling? When I can’t sleep at night, I think about the vari- ous odd tasks we are presented with as balsa modelers, and focus on the ones that are the most problematic. That usually does the trick; how long can you possibly obsess over the best way to cut stringer slots, after all? Well, quite a long time it seems; not sur- prising, as there is nothing quite so attractive as a prettily done stringer array on a curva- ceous fuselage, and nothing quite so distract- ing as one where the stringers are all ahoo, fair curves be damned. Designers, ever suck- ers for a challenge, will do their best to pre- position notches in their formers to perfec- tion, but are often disappointed in the results and must resort in the end to refitting and filling gaps. The more diligent of them, qual- ity kit makers, will frame up test build after test build until they finally have the pesky things hammered out. Though time-consum- ing, it’s a noble pursuit, as anyone who has ever built a well-laid out kit will attest. There are other ways to approach the task, though. Reasoning that many builders “scal- lop” away the former material between stringers anyway (so that the former does not disrupt the smooth surface of the tissue), some designers and scratchbuilders only lay
PHOTO: BRUCE CLARK
Bruce Clark’s pretty Andreason Peanut, built from the Peck Polymers kit. Bruce shows how using a combination of ink-jet printing and dry pigment chalking, you can tackle light-on dark color schemes.
out the notches for the beginning and end formers of a given section, with all of the for- mers in-between reduced in height by the thickness of the stringers. No notches are cut in these in-between formers; the stringers are set at the ends, arranged evenly and fair the length of their run, and spot-glued in place to the in-between formers. One minor disadvantage of this method is that you will need to fill in at any areas where you need a stop point for the tissue covering. Another approach is to notch for nothing other than perhaps the center-line stringer, until the full-depth formers have been framed up on the basic fuselage support PHOTO: DAVID MITCHELL
structure (box or keel) and the center-line stringers have been run. From that point on, you can lay out the remaining stringer slot positions in place. I like to take a strip of 1⁄2 inch or 3⁄4 inch wide masking tape and use it like a flexible ruler, setting the line of each stringer and marking along its edge with a thin tipped Sharpie marker. If the fuselage isn’t complicated, a piece of cardboard or poster board may serve you just as well. Once you have the stringer positions marked out, how are you going to cut them? One neat way is to take a piece of hard scrap balsa or basswood the width of your stringer material, cut a straight edge on it, and glue
PHOTO: BRUCE CLARK
Close up of the fin (above) on Bruce Clark’s Pietenpol Air Camper peanut. Note how neatly the outline wraps the edges, and the fine lettering. Inkjet-on- tissue makes possible virtually unlimited marking detail. More high tech tooling from the Mitchell workshop (at right). Sanding stringer notches is one way to do it, but certainly not the onlyway.
24 MAY 2013
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68