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Thank you. This post brings the buildlog up to date with this weekend's work.
Folding wings were a necessity on the modern carriers introduced at the start of WW2 such as Illustrious and Ark Royal, as these vessels were designed with lifts to move the aircraft between the flight deck and armoured hangers on the lower decks (older carriers were converted cruisers or merchant ships). The Swordfish had a simple pair of aligned hinges on the wings that could be released with an external lever, but the retractable landing gear of the Fulmar made it impossible to hinge the whole wing at a point that made the aircraft sufficiently narrow. Fairey therefore used a mechanism which first hinged the inboard trailing edge up and forward to allow space for the wing to swing backwards, whilst somehow still allowing the flaps to function. Later designs such as the Sea Fury and Bearcat had powered upwards-folding wings, whilst the Wildcat and Hellcat had more complex angled hinges.
Obviously, I had to make this. The first part of the process was cutting the wing into outboard, inboard and flap, then cutting out and making the landing gear wells, and trying to persuade the wing skin to make the right curve over them. The wingtip sees another new technique - trimming a thin piece of mount board as an internal former over which the burnished skin could be glued. The nav lights will be filled using tinted varnish later on. After that - the guesswork about wing thickness and chord began. I have some blueprints for the Fulmar but by the time one has factored in the thickness of the paper skin, any simplificiations made by the designer and the internal walls not being perpendicular to the fuse, they're of limited help. I proceeded by trimming mount board to an approximate shape and adding layers until everything looked like it matched. Of course, the wing chord has to match either side of the join too...
The hinge is a simple loop of substantially reinforced card layers, which will turn around a stub of cocktail stick as the pin. I want to add some kind of peg and hole so that the whole weight of the outer wing isn't resting on this when in either stowed or flight position.
At the moment the wing roots are attached to the fuselage and just need some firmer attachment to the spar to maintain the dihedral and take the weight when sitting on the landing gear. I am increasingly thinking about going over the entire model with paint, so any gaps can be filled with varnish or 'paper sprue glue' before this stage. The repainter has done a good job, but all the colours need to be desaurated and lightened for the scale and there are numerous parts of my scratchbuilt sections that are going to have to match up.
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