Flying Tigers P-40B Warhawk

[milenio3]

Hi Palindrome. Sorry for my late reply to your question on the control panel. I had troubles also on that part. But one thing I know: the control panel needs to be at the edge of the font area in the cockpit: try to align the control panel to the aperture of the cockpit.

One more thing, the cockpit should be glued along the edge of the cockpit aperture on the sides. In my first photo below, I failed to put it straight and you can see that my cockpit goes down in the front, but it must be at the edge.

Not sure what happens to the photo I posted before, but I don't see it now. Let's see if the following photos stay put, so you can see the way I glued the control panel.

I hope it helps.

[palindrome]

Thanks Gerardo. That helps.

[palindrome]

First part of the fuselage: the engine surround and chin cowling. The instructions only show joiner strips for the attachment points for the chin cowling, but I made another joiner strip for the fuselage join. I also used joiner strips for each of the seams in the chin cowling. I suppose some people could edge-glue this, but not me:



Unfortunately the top edges of the chin cowling didn't come out completely flat. There was no way to fix this without messing up the shark mount. The part itself is slightly off (; to fix it is currently beyond my editing abilities. However, the light gray I put on the joiner strip largely obscures the problem (it's much less visible in the real world than in these pictures, since I'm using flash to take my pictures). The shark mouth is looking good so far, so I'm happy with it:



The air filters/inlets that go inside the chin cowling. Note that the model's PDF file has only 3 parts, but it says to make them 3mm thick. Since I copied all the parts that needed to bonded to cardboard onto another page, I made 9 pieces. The stacks came out to 2.9mm, which is close enough for something that's going to be largely obscured anyhow:



Last part of this segment is the exhaust stacks. The individual pipes are rolled and then angles cut at the ends. They looked bad rolled with white insides, so I tried coloring the backs with the pen I was using to mark the edges. But this bled through the paper in spots and looked really awful. So I made a new set with printed backs. These looked much better.

Unfortunately my skills at making and cutting tubes like this is lacking. I'm not that satisfied with the result. The pipes are different diameters, different lengths, and different angles. I may decide to remake these (they don't get inserted until after the nose section is closed off). What I should have done was roll them around a proper-diameter wire, and then made a template from 1mm cardboard to ensure that the lengths and angles are all correct. That's what I'll do if I decide to redo them.



The next step is finishing the nose up. It's a tricky bit of geometry with the need to form the inlet at the bottom that then fits inside the chin cowling. I expect it to take a day or two.

[MacSongLi]

Nice job so far. Too bad about the chin cowling, it almost looks like the part was made too short. You lined up the shark's mouth very nicely.

Gary

[palindrome]

Thanks. The center two leaves of the chin cowling are fractionally too short. If I had cut them longer, they would show a white line. If I had trimmed down the outer two leaves, the shark mouth wouldn't have lined up. It really looks pretty good, so I'm not going to mess with it. But if I make a second one of these, I will try to fix the part in the PDF file.

I'm more unhappy with the exhaust pipes. I probably will redo them, but I want to do some more work on the fuselage before I go back to those.

[YOAVHOZMI]

beautiful work, nice and clean.

keep on the good work.

YOAV

[palindrome]

Originally Posted by YOAVHOZMI

beautiful work, nice and clean.

keep on the good work.

YOAV

Thanks Yoav. Your Kfir is on my list and may be the next model I build, if I feel I'm up to it. Then my dilemma will be whether or not to give it to my nephew - whose name is Kfir. Don't know if I'll be able to part with it

[palindrome]

Your pictures disappeared again, Gerardo. You might want to contact an admin to find out what's going on...

I redid the exhaust pipes. This time I found a needle of the right diameter and used it as a form, so they are all uniform diameter. And I made a small jig from cardboard to attempt to get the base bevel right. They came out better this time. I'm not completely happy with them; still some unevenness. But I'm not going to do it a 3rd time



Then I built the nose of the fuselage. This piece is somewhat tricky because of the compound curves of the radiator inlet. The front is just a circle. The rear is a circle with two "divots" taken out of the bottom, Then this bottom flows back to an arc to attach the air filter piece I built last time, which goes inside the chin cowling:



Now it was time to finish the front of the fuselage by joining this cap to the engine surround. Here I discovered a couple of major mistakes I had made.

First, I made the joiner strip from paper so that it was thin. But with all the test-fittings, I basically mangled it and it had no real strength left. I should have made the joiner from cardstock and adjusted the rear former (B) accordingly.

Second, the instructions recommend that all the formers be doubled to 2mm, but to my mind, that's just too thick, requiring that they be beveled to fit, so I made them 1mm. But former B should have been thicker. I wound up gluing a 2nd 1mm B to the back of the installed B before assembly, which gave enough support for me to glue the cap into the engine surround. But if I had made it 2mm from the start, the concave inlet sections would have had more support and probably would be smoother.

But the end result isn't bad. Not perfect, but not too bad:



The first picture is a "chin strap" that finishes off the blend of the chin cowling into the bottom of the nose. Here we see a few design problems with the model.

First, the black lower lip on the bottom of the chin cowling is too wide. It should really only be on the "chin strap," not on the cowling. Second, the radiator inlets are set too far back. The triangular separator should come to the front edge of the "chin strap." But it comes only to the edge of the formed chin cowling, before the chin strap is added.

Third, and most annoying, is that the design of the nose segment has the join on top, where it is (IMHO) far too visible. Part of the join will be covered by another small air inlet later, but it won't be fully hidden (and I see in an edge picture where a corner is lifting and needs to be glued back down). I understand why it's not a the bottom, with the complexity of the inlet curvatures. But I'd try to find a better way to design this piece.

Overall I'm pleased with the progress so far. The next step is the mid fuselage. Besides the hassles of figuring out the cockpit geometry previously discussed, I'm seeing something else I don't like: the main spar is just fit into a slot in the bottom of the segment. It's not even fully supported, since the spar is flush with the bottom of the segment. This seems structurally unsound to me. I'm thinking about how best to reinforce this. I think that I'll likely make partial bulkheads to go in front of and behind the slot. But that may run into the bottom of the cockpit. So we shall see what works, and I'll document it in the next installment.

[MacSongLi]

Even with all of the issues that you have highlighted, you have done a great job on both the front of the fuselage and the exhaust.

You might want to take a look at one of AirDave's P-51 exhaust (in particular the build thread of "The Undertaker"), it might help you our. Maybe even a kit bask.

Gary

[Don Boose]

Outstanding work and an exceptionally helpful construction report. In spite of the issues you have uncovered, I still want to try to build this model, and will make good use of your meticulous documentation of the build.

Don