[Lex]

Fuselage and firewall

The rear fuselage section was mostly issue-free. What is shown here is as of yet a dry-fit and no mismatch was encountered.

On the front section, I located the panel line corresponding to the engine firewall (is that what it's called?). Halinski's kit probably divides parts along that line but not on this model, so I ended up slicing along this panel line and retaining only the rear half. From that point forward I decided to remove the top, left, and right panels around the engine while keeping the bottom panel. This setup reduced the dangers of unrecoverable fitting issues between the aircraft and engine, as neither of which was designed with the other in mind.

Alin's Merlin engine is designed to fit Halinski's Spitfire Vb. While being of the same aircraft, different designers naturally have different sources of references (and accuracy) when designing their models. The issue became apparent in here that right behind the firewall, Inwald has a roughly oval-shaped former, while the firewall that came with the Merlin engine (and presumably the former on Halinski's model as well) is more of a rounded square shape. As the firewall will be exposed, I opted to use the latter as authority here, trimmed the bulkhead behind it to the same shape, and coaxed the fuselage skin to fit the new shape. Fortunately nothing went wrong in this process. Although this same area would later be another source of grief.

Vertical fin

I think the geometry here is not perfect, as the Spitfire has a very smooth transition from fuselage to vertical tail, unlike what is presented here. Unfortunately there is no room to modify the shape in this instance, and I also botched the leading edge of the fin. Thinking that it will be a great idea to put a former inside the edge for extra strength, I instead sagged the leading edge. Lesson was taken and the horizontal fins later did not suffer from similar issues.

The rudder was also not an easy thing to make. It is designed as a sheet of thin paper covering a wedge-shaped internal support made of regular card. Great concept in principle, but difficult to pull off, especially around edges. I would rather have preferred a rudder made entirely from card. As evident from his own photo, Inwald himself has of course mastered the art of building it this way.