Building the De Havilland DH-106 Comet 4

[Don Boose]

Great progress on this beautiful airplane!

Don

[scon10]

Three steps to show you today.
First, as I mentioned earlier, it is easier to determine the seam of each engine cilinder in order to correctly position the associated bulkhead in the correct position. This is essential because of the complex, assymetrical shape of these bulkheads. (Moderator, how can I place pics within the text, so that pic and text are correlated? Now, they end up all at the end of my reply. Thanks.)


Next, I have glued an actual photo of a jet engine front onto the front bulkheads parts B31 and B37, so that when you look inside the engine intake, you will see compressor blades and the central spinner. For that, I needed to place these bulkheads perpendicular to the direction of flight (DoF), so that you don't get a perspective distortion when looking inside. The plane of the engine intakes makes an angle of around 25 degrees with the DoF, so I needed to sand these bulkheads down a bit, making them a bit more circular. Actually, I would have needed to reshape the intake interior part 28/39, but I had already glued them in place...
I hope that the pic makes this clear.

Finally, the engine parts are ready for assembly. For this step, I attached partial glue strips on top and bottom of the engine cilinders 31/42 and 36/47, which must fit over the main spar bulkheads B43 and B44. These will form the connection to the engine central parts 32/34, 43/45 and the cooresponding ones at the bottom.
Also, you will notice that I always cut out half lips in the center of each bulkhead and fold them outwards, so that I have a grip on these bulkheads.
That's it for now, so long.

[birder]

that looks great! Excellent choice with silver paper. Kudos to Lex.

[Lex]

Stunning work Scon! I'd never expected you'll do such a big job with the conversion... Keep it going!

[John Bowden]

Boy that silver paper sure does top off a great model......... Congratulation to both you and Lex!

[scon10]

Some updates on the wing construction.
The dihedral of the wing is maintained by compensating the weight of the wings by the spars. Since the spars are interupted in the middle under the fuselage, because of the engine construction, I needed an additional load carrying member to keep the wings upward at around 5 degrees. So I inserted a small wood brace between the left and right engines, see pics.

Further, I am using Red River silver paper, which unfortunately is rather thin, so to avoid the spars showing up as ridges throug the thin wing panels, I decided to cover the internal wing construction with a stiffer kind of cardboard, the light blue top and bottom panels you can see in the pics.
And so the wing and engines ware completed, see the last pictures to show how the Comet now looks like. Alas, not yet with the pinion tanks (as they apparantly were called).

Cheers for now.

[birder]

looks great, love the silver paper

[scon10]

So, after all this technical stuff, a few titbits for all of you who would have loved to be a passenger aboard this Comet.
So long, while I continue with the front fuselage.

For those interested: the background of the picture with the Stratocruiser is the Boeing field in Seattle, and in the second, with the Super Constellation, both aircraft are over Scotland on their way to cross the Atlantic. The Comet is obviously overtaking the Super Connie...

[Lex]

Stunning work Scon!! The silver paper simply takes the model to another level!

After a long struggle, I'm afraid that my 4C repaint probably won't happen after all... But I'll send you the files for the fuel tank for sure!

[scon10]

Well, here are a few first pics on the completed model of the De Havilland Comet 4 in BOAC colours. They are a bit hastily made, and not "put into scene" (with nice clouds as background etc), so I'll make some better ones, also to show to more advantage the fine lines of this aircraft.
Unfortunately, the wing leading tanks are not (yet) attached...