Fiddlers Green, ME 323 Gigant at 1/87

[Burning Beard]

This is one beeeeg plane, even at 1/87 it has a 24 1/2" wingspan. This will not go down as one of my favorite builds, the kit was originally designed to be the glider version but comes with the modifications to make it into the powered version, there in lies the problems. First, the modified vertical stabilizer doesn't fit, if you line up the grey camo on the bottom there is an 1/8" gap above the fuselage. Next there no indicators where to mount the fenders and wheels (five on each side) so you have to guess on the placement. All of the engine nacelles are the same though the wings taper towards the tips, they are also not set up to fit a rounded wing, the wing has to be rounded in the front to fit the fuselage. I also had a little trouble getting the wing to fit the fuselage properly (but that was probably my fault) and I got a twist in one of the wing tips (which I know was my fault). Also the wing struts are to short, I cut where they indicated and they didn't fit properly but what the heck I used them anyway. This thing has lots of petals, the nose is a modified petal, there a six spinners which are petals, and eight parachutes (for the RATO units) which are also petals. Another thing I noticed is there are not enough control horns for the wings, so make sure you print more.


Now, modifications I made that were not necessary (not very many). First, since I cant leave well enough alone, I cut the around the frames that hold the take off rockets, I also used the modified wheels that John Dell designed for his B17 models, and of course fixed the vertical stabilizer by adding in extra material. The textures had a white gap separating all the control surfaces from wings, etc, which I filled in with colored pencils. I also put 15 pennys in nose to keep the front down.


Here a some shots of the inside of the fuselage, a little rectangle bulkhead to keep the empennage from twisting and some cardboard in the front part to keep the fuselage the proper width to fit the wings.


And of course the finished model. I put in John Dell's B17C, which is the same scale so you could see how large the actual plane was.

Beard

[MacSongLi]

Amazing build Beard. A beautiful model. Nice work.


Gary

[Vinalssergio155]

Impressive work, it looks great the "little bird".Excellent work.

[Isaac]

Nice work on the big whale!


I love it


Isaac

[dwyaneward]

Impressive work thanks for sharing.

[Draco]

Wonderfull

[Butelczynski]

That's one big bird.Very nice work.

The way I'm reading Wiki's page of this bird it looks like it came with 4 or 6 engine arrangement.4 engine outfit still needed tugs to pull it so they fitted 6.It never came as pure glider (I wonder why?).

[cnhalfpap]

1/87 is the original FG scale ?
Or did you rescale it ?

[Burning Beard]

I shrunk it a lot, I had four pages with big margins to each one of the FG model. The original was 1/38 so it was huge. Even at four pages to one, I had 10 pages to print.


Thanks for all the nice comments guys, this was a rather tiring build, at the end it seemed like one those books you read were the author keeps adding pages. It was like you finish the build then oh yeah, add the struts, ten, oh you forgot the control horns, twenty eight, put the props and spinners, six, add the rockets, eight, you get the idea,


Mike

[Don Boose]

A formidable project. You really did a terrific job on this model, in spite of the challenges.

Don