I've not yet given up on this plane...no no no.
Drawing from the painful lessons learned from the last design, I decided to drag the old designs to the recycle bin and start from scratch.
This time, I'll try to keep things as simple as possible.
One of the things that gave me the most trouble in the past design was when I kinda forced the fuselage to have a weird bulge at the wing roots. That bulge would have served two purposes:
- To hold the wheel wells.
- As an anchor point for the wings.
Well, the idea worked pretty good. But it was a big pain in the neck (and fingers) to assemble the fuselage. I thought it was not worth the effort.
Anyway, so here it is...attempt number 2!
For my second attempt, I've experimented using B-Spline patches once again. It took a lot of trial and error before I ended up with a satisfactory shape. When I finally got satisfied with the overall shape, I hit the FREEZE button to produce the good old wireframe.
Looks nice! But that would probably produce a million pieces in Pepakura!
Time to use the KNIFE tool to remove excess segments. Then to use the BOOLEAN tool create the wing roots, faring, tail, canopy, etc.
After a bit of cutting and boolean'ing... I got the image above.
Next up, the wheel wells and landing gear.