Polikarpov Po-2, Kartonowa Kolekcja 3-4/2008, 1:33 scale

[nighthawk78]

Excellent looking cockpit, keep it coming.
NH78

[Leif Ohlsson]

Oh, you're good, working so well with those small details! - L.

[Royaloakmin]

Good work, Chris.

[ccoyle]

Thank you, gentlemen!

The copilot/bombardier's instrument panel has fewer instruments than the pilot's and thus goes together more quickly.


And here is the completed fuselage substructure. The laser-cut formers have thus far gone together very well and look they will (hopefully!) only need perhaps some minor trimming and/or sanding to make a good fit for the skins.



Leif has sent me his files for the winter camo. The files have to be reduced to get the parts printed at 1/33 scale. I test-printed an elevator in gray scale to compare the reduced part to its kit counterpart. The test part had some slight variation around the outboard end of the elevator where the part needs some bending to form the elevator edge. Not sure if the discrepancy is enough to affect the fit of the skin to its formers. Since I have the laser-cut former set, I'm thinking I will use the original printed formers to build a trial structure (elevator or aileron) using a winter camo skin. Better to check it out now, me thinks, before I print everything out and start slathering on glue. Before I do all that, though, I need to change the color cartridge in my printer and see whether the thing will print a satisfactory full-color part.

Cheers!

[ccoyle]

I thought my wife had purchased new color cartridges for our printer, but turns out she hadn't, so I had to order them on-line. They should be here tomorrow. In the meantime, I turned my attention to building up the wing and stabilizer substructures. I would have preferred that the formers interlock, but they don't. Instead, the formers are glued down onto a card template. I guess that will work.


Cheers!

[yaelb]

Wonderful work. I will keep following this build.

Theo

[Erik Zwaan]

Wow, very neat piece of art. Interesting plane. Look forward to your next update!

Erik

[ccoyle]

Thanks, Eric & Theo!

Well, I am happier about the wing substructures now. There are additional joiner strips that get glued down over the tops of the formers. The resulting structure is pretty strong. Whew!

[ccoyle]

Decisions, decisions -- winter or summer camo?


Well, since an overwhelming majority of those who voted (two of two) chose winter, I decided to see what I could do with Leif's files. I didn't actually build the aforementioned test structure. Instead, I cut out the winter camo fuselage skin and carefully compared it to the kit's summer camo skin (the files must be printed at 48.4848% to get 1/33 scale parts). The two parts seemed pretty closely matched, so I decided to just go ahead and go for winter.

This is where I ran into a bit of difficulty. The kit fuselage skin fits like a glove, but the re-colored skin did not want to go on properly without a bit of warping. I decided to cut the fuselage skin into three panels (sides and top), since gluing such a large piece in one go would be problematic anyway. I glued the side panels on with contact cement, making sure the holes for the wing tabs lined up with the holes in the fuselage formers.


I cut the bottom skin into two pieces, again to help with gluing, and it went on with no problems.


I decided to add some additional substructure to the fuselage top deck before adding the skin there.

Only afterwards did I notice that the kit actually includes a cockpit deck underside (part 27b). I did slice off and use a part of that piece aft of the copilot's seat, because it includes joiner tabs for the rear fuselage deck.

And this is where I ran into a second bit of difficulty. When I dry-fitted the fuselage deck, the two sides did not want to line up properly with the already-affixed fuselage sides. Aligning the fuselage sides with the wing tab slots resulted in the starboard side being about 1 mm farther back than the port side. In this shot, you can see that the skin lines up correctly with the wing tab slot (lower left), but the printed fuselage deck hinges do not line up between side skin and deck skin.

I could choose to line up one side or the other, or have both sides slightly off. In the end, I chose to focus on mainly getting a tight seam between the top and sides on both sides of the fuselage and to deal with the small alignment problem later.


I think what this demonstrates to me is that if you choose to use the winter camo re-color, you should expect some minor fit problems viz a viz the original kit parts, but you can live with them, especially if you absolutely must have winter camo.

Cheers!

[ccoyle]

Another thing I should mention. I found out that there is a tiny, but noticeable, discrepancy between the sizes of parts printed at 48.4848% depending on whether the files are opened using Adobe Acrobat Reader versus Acrobat Pro. Don't ask me why.