Most of the time I start with the wings on an aircraft. I have a few ideal objectives with these:
- accurate and symmetrical dihedral
- avoid warping and have the wingtips correct for the chord
- ideally an accurate wing profile
- score the gaps around the control surfaces and possibly have them as seperate movable pieces
- possibility to drop/extend the flaps and add the visible details to these
- fit in LG bays/weapons detail without causing problems for any of the above
- make sure the LG is sturdy and correctly posed
- depict any fabric texture
To cut a long story short, this turned out to be a fantastic kit to get the fit right and add the gear bays, and the wingtips were perfect. Let's go into some more details.
Firstly I cut out the parts. I did initially leave the glue tabs on but then cut them off and made internal tabs. This is not such an obvious choice as it might seem, because the advantage of internal tabs giving a smooth edge is negating by it being very difficult to avoid a gap on the leading edge and a too-thick trailing edge when the skin is in final shape and closed up. I think I should probably have used thinner paper but again that can be a compromise to accuracy in holding the final shape and general durability. These are going to be handled quite a lot.
As you can see from the first picture I also cut out the gear bays, carefully as the printed surface will be re-used as the roof of the recessed bays; and also the small intakes at the wing root. You want to be careful with small openings like these as they can cause a weak point, especially as the paper must be bent and glued in this area (also, these are an example of differences in sub-types - most Yak-9s had much larger oval openings here). The next step was more experimental: I decided to try making some glue tabs to fit around the outside of the gear bays, as the previous method of having these on the bay and gluing those to the skin was a bit risky: it can cause warping, weakness and also cause the bay to be pushed up too far inside the wing. All that was needed was to stick another piece of 160gsm paper over and around the opening, then carefully cut parallel to the outside and bend the segments up. In the end this turned out to be at least satisfactory. You can see I added the kit supplied wing formers at this stage too, not very neatly but it did not cause a problem for the finished result.
The gear bays themselves: we have the 'roof' which was cut out and has some nice printed details already. This was stuck to a rectangle of card, and the reverse method to the opening glue tabs is used - cut parallel to the outside edge, make cuts to creat tabs and bend these upwards. After this comes a sightly fiddly part, gluing a long strip to the inside of these to form the walls. In general this involves sticking it in stages and pre-bending the angles with tweezers before gluing the next section. I intentionally make the piece deeper than needed and then cut them both to the same height when done. This is of course all an educated guess based on the wing thickness and the size of the tyres. A small hole is punched with a push pin to take the wire that will support the gear. These are then glued inside the wells and happily it all fitted with not too much effort and no damage. The wire is bent twice to discourage movement in all directions and attached to the top with CA glue.
Two final steps before folding over the skin: we make a spar to fix the dihedral and add general strength by cutting a shape and gluing about six layers of card to it. This sits inside the kit wing formers. Note that I would do this differently if the spar went through the fuselage of a larger aircraft. Some stacks of card layers (2-3) were glued at the wingtips to add strength, the wing tips were burnished around these before gluing shut.
