Thanks again gents for your continued interest, I really appreciate it! And thanks Tom (Olo) for sending the link. It's an interesting story about the Poles who joined the RAF and I had heard of the name Jan Zumbach already before. Read about him in James Holland's book The Battle of Britain. A real tragedy that these brave men didn't get the honours they deserved during the victory parade, all because of political reasons. A shame.
Well, it's been a good weekend for modelling. Next come the wing skins, which are I think the most critical part of the build. The shape of the wings is elliptical, with no straight leading and trailing edges. For this reason the upper and lower wing skins are separate parts that have to be connected like the two halves of a shell. The central skin folds like an envelope, as here the leading edge at the wing roots is straight.
Before starting to glue I lightly sandpapered the leading edge of the reinforcement surfaces in between the wing profile formers into a tapered shape. To already mitigate the risk that both wing skin shells may not mate well it's better to leave just a bit of room in between.
I glued both bottom skins to the central section and checked for alignment with the wing structure. You might expect some sort of slight misfit but in fact I didn't discover anything like that. Good for morale
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Then the landing gear wells. No gluing tabs here so everything is glued edge to edge. For proper placement at the wing skins I glued small pieces of thin board to hold the wells in place. They nicely fit within the wing structure. Finally I glued the bottom side wing surface to the internal structure, using the aft spars at the aileron locations as reference point as the wing skin does not overlap at this part of the spars. Note that I glued the central section and right (white) underside first, and finally the left (black) one. Doing everything at once is too risky. It's all about span of control.
The recession at the right wing is the location where the air cooler will be placed. Part of the reverse side of the skin is printed light grey but that seems to be somehow forgotten at the gluing tab of the air cooler recession, refer to the red circle. Not a big deal as you won't see anything of it once the wing has been fully assembled, as I found out a bit later.
Next will be the upper skins.
Regards,
Erik