Yet another build of Ken West's X-15

[evilfer]

First work! I've managed to do the first fuselage segment (a tiny bit) and the box for the front landing gear. All this in only two hours! :S

I'm sticking to the butt method for the fuselage, after airdave's explanation above. There is a stripe in the belly seam. About the landing gear compartment, for some reason I thought it'd be nice to fix the black circle around the hole in the middle; the result if the black stain you can see in the pictures.

I think the former circle in the second picture slipped too far inward inside the part. I was afraid that if it was too close to the border, it would later create a gap between the fuselage parts. I hope this won't be a problem...

[richkat]

Originally Posted by evilfer

Thank you for sharing those pictures! Can I ask why you made the nose silver color? It looks fantastic. I think the cockpit canopy is at the end of the build so I won't think about it for a while...

The very point of the nose held the "Q-ball" a device to show the angle of attack, even at hyper-sonic speed. It should be a titanium color, I forgot to go back and paint it........crap.........Rich

Here is a page about it Aircraft, X-15, Q-ball Nosecone | National Air and Space Museum

[evilfer]

A bit of progress. I have to say that the fitting is amazing. I was quite surprised when I had the front landing gear compartment inserted inside the fuselage. Fits perfectly!

I wish I had cut the parts for the front landing gear compartment with a bevel. I think this could help, specially for the sides that go from nose to back, to account to the fuselage conical shape.

I did damage the fuselage part near the compartment edge :(, but otherwise I'm happy with the result!

[elliott]

Looks OK here...

[evilfer]

Originally Posted by elliott

Looks OK here...

There's some wrinkling on the front corners of the landing gear box, the "paint" fell off at the white spot actually .

Anyway, attached is the last two days' progress. I'm joining fuselage segments using the butt method, or maybe a variation of it. Let me explain: Imagine you have two cylinder fuselage parts ("A" and "B"), and two circle former parts for the joint between them: "a" and "b".

One way of assembling this would be to glue A+a, then B+b, then Aa + Bb. However, I've found it easier to do: A+a, then Aa+b, then Aab + B. This second one is what I'm doing, if it makes any sense. Which method do you guys prefer?

So far the assembly has been relatively easy I think, though it takes ages to do things carefully to try to make the fuselage joins look good -- and still... But it's already showing some shape already!

[evilfer]

Added lower console, see attached. You may notice that the bar seam is visible... the reason was that I added the pedals (not the outer parts thankfully), fixed them with superglue, and then noticed that they were facing backwards! Pure genius. The easiest solution was to rotate the bar 180 degrees.

Richkat --thank you-- just sent me his page of the ejection seat, which uses a darker gray than Ken's original. I'll use that version, when and if I get there .

[evilfer]

Cockpit finished. This took me forever, but it was a lot of fun. Fitting hasn't been very good in my build. See left part of first pic: I had to "extend" the separators between the two walls at the back of the cockpit, to keep both parallel. I guess errors accumulated from that.

Billy's threads have been a lot of help for this part. I was surprised to read in one of his threads that this took him only one afternoon... the cockpit alone has been 8 hours for me at least :S.

I had quite a bit of trouble figuring out how to put the parts together for the stick. The best pictures for this I found were in sqwarsh X-15 thread, thank you! At the end, I'm happy with the result (it has some resemblance to a joystick I had some time ago :P).

[evilfer]

I'm having some trouble with the fuselage.

I'm cutting the circles for the fuselage parts more or less precisely on the line, with a tiny margin outwards. But they are all too small, in some cases very noticeably, making the assembly difficult. But in Billy's pictures, the fuselage/circles match perfectly.

Am I supposed to cut the circles with more margin outside, and then adjust them?
Or what could I be doing wrong?

[Vermin_King]

I always cut a bit large myself and then trim or sand. Having not done this model, I don't know the answer

[richkat]

I cut the formers big and sanded them to fit, I rolled the fuselage and glued then pushed in the formers. I also cut a hole big enough for my finger in the center so i could pull them out to the very edge of each section. You can also stand the section on end and reaching through with a rod and tap the former even with the end of the section..........Rich