Marek corsair

[Darwin]

Shrike, I'll keep your kind offer in mind. I managed to buy a couple of F4U canopies from Krys, and think I still have a few tucked away in the "someday" box of model stuff. As well, I bought a supply of Sculpy and a box of plaster-of-paris, telling she-who-must-be-obeyed that I was getting it to make canopies with, so now I had damned well better try making at least one canopy to show her I spoke with straight tongue. Did you make yours with the Malcomb hood or a straight canopy?

[shrike]

The blown hood. Most Corsairs after the very early ones had a bubble. I started the set up with the Orlik IAR-80 which also has a bubble.

Strictly speaking the Malcolm hood is a Mustang thing.

I don't know if the thread I did on my toaster powered vac-former is still back on Zealot or not, but it might be worth a look.

EDIT ; just found the post - it's in Carl's (Golden Bear) Orlik Kingfisher build

[Darwin]

Now a step back to the cockpit section. Although the build more or less as Marek designed it was basically ok, I wasn't all that happy with the way the seat fit into the cockpit and the fit between the cockpit floor and the end bulkheads. The first photo shows the cockpit parts. I removed the tabs from the floor, and backed the floor with some scrap 2mm matt board. I also cut a couple of pieces of matt board to laminate onto the side panels. This not only helps strengthen the cockpit tub, but gives a lot of additional gluing surface for attching the end bulkheads and provides good gluing surface for the seam at the top of the side panels. I laminated the bulkheads onto 0.5 mm Coke carton cardboard. Note that I left the tab on the side panels...that one is actually useful.

To correct the seat placement in the cockpit, I trimmed a bit off the support legs. The second photo shows the cut line to allow gluing the seat directly against the rear bulkhead instead of to the floor. After assembling the seat, I glued the side panels to the floor, glued the forward bulkhead to the subassembly, and added details (such as they are) to the forward portion of the tub assembly.

[Darwin]

Next I added the rear bulkhead and the seat, completing the cockpit tub. One thing that really needs to be added to this kit is seatbelts...lack of belts really jumps out at you. A minimalist approach to details is fine for intermediate skill level models, but the belts really should be included. The next step in my build sequence was to add the instrument panel to the inner fuselage skin, then attach the skin to the tub assembly. Again, I removed the tabs from the inner skin, feeling that they hindered assembly more than helping. Even with 0.5 mm laminate, there is adequate gluing surface to securely attach the skin without the tabs. I attached the skin to the forward bulkead first, starting at the top and working down the bulkhead, one side at a time. Take it slow and keep the edge of the skin flush with the edge of the bulkhead. When the forward seam was dry, I then attached the skin to the rear bulkhead. I wound up trimming just a sliver off the rear end of the skin to get it flush to the edge of the bulkhead.

I decided not to use the joining strip for the bottom seam of the outer skin, To give something to attach the skin to, I cut a couple of dorsal keel pieces from scrap matt board and attached them to the front and rear bulkheads. The gap between the bottom edges of the inner skin gave plenty of room for adding them at this stage of the build. I then attached an end of the outer skin to the keel piece, and then attached to the bulkheads working up the side until reaching the cockpit cutout. Make sure you remove the cockpit cutout from the skin before attaching....leaving it in place will result in no end of grief trying to fit the outer skin to the inner. After checking that the outer skin was fitting correctly to the bulkheads, I continued the outer skin attachment up over the top of the fuselage until reaching the cockpit cutout on the far side. When I was sure the fit between inner and outer skin was correct, I continued working the attachment over the far side of the cockpit assembly and completed the outer skin seam at the keel piece.

[Darwin]

I completed the center section assembly by gluing the gun sight assy to the instrument panel (unfortunately, not shown in any of the photos), and did a minor bit of trimming to the ends of the outer skin to flush it up with the bulkheads. As shown in the final photo in the sequence, the fit of the dorsal seam of the skin is just about as tight as you could possibly ask for, without requiring any trimming. Marek did a great job of designing this portion of the kit. I haven't really noticed any fit problem so far, but this now leaves the problem of how to attach the cowling and turtledeck fuselage segments to the center section. The kit design only provides one bulkhead at stations C and D (already used in construction of the center section), and provides no joining strips. I intend making duplicates of those two bulkheads to add to the end of the additional fuselage sections, and butt the bulhkeads together ala Maly Modelarz construction. A bit of a modification will be needed to the turtledeck skin piece, in order to extend it over the cockpit tub rear bulkhead....otherwise, that will leave the upper part of the bulkhead exposed above the cockpit cutout. This may not be all that critical, since the canopy frame will probably hide that gap in the skin, but I'm doing to do it anyway as a Monk moment.

Now I'm going to disappear from the boards for a day or two while I do a bit of a stealth project. Ta

[Darwin]

Sorry about all the edits...internet explorer seems to have spazed out. I think all is ok with the attachments now.

[rmks2000]

I also had some issues with the cockpit. When I attached the cockpit skin, I placed the rear edge just forward of the rear bulkhead. The rear section was then attached to the rear bulkhead and I added joining strips to connect the rear skin to the cockpit skin. I did have a problem with the outer skin being very tight and some sanding of the formers was required to get everything to fit nice. I too reinforced the tub bottom for gluing purposes. One thing you may notice is that the gun sight placement seems to be to far forward to fit properly.

[Darwin]

While waiting for the next installment of parts pages for the models I'm beta building, I made a bit more progress on the Marek builds. I enlarged the 1:50 scale kit in New Zealand livery to 1:33 scale. The skin parts are a perfect, and can be interchanged with any of the 1:33 kits. I'm not sure which came first (the 1:50 scale kit appeared on DeWayne's inventory before the 1:33 scale kit was available, so I suspect the smaller kit was scaled up and additional detail put in for the wheel wells and cockpit areas.

After completing the cockpit section for the DeWayne 1:33 kit, I decided just to forge ahead with the model and work one through to completion, rather than build all four in paralell, one assembly at a time. The first model is the sacrifical lamb...the one I use to figure out assembly methods, etc....in theory, the lessons learned will be incorporated in the subsequent version, and the final one will be perfect. And then the neighbor's pig will be seen flying over his barn.

I got past the cockpit section fit difficulty just as I outlined earlier. The interesting thing is that the 1:50 scale version of the kit uses just that method...no joining strips and double formers at each segment join. What looks like a white rollbar over the cockpit is the portion of the turtledeck skin that was extended forward to cover the exposed part of rear cockpit bulkhead. When building the fuse segment forward of the cockpit, I made a couple of half-height formers to box in the wing spar. Unfortunately, didn't take any photos, but if there is interest, I can take some when I take up the second model again.

The engine cowling is a b""""hkitty to build as designed. It has an inner cowling, for which the forward end is petaled to obtain the curve....since the "bad" side of the cowl (the one you apply glue to) is on the outside of the cylinder, it is inside out and bass-ackwards with respect to any normal technique in the tookbox for petalled fabrication. In additon, the outer skin of the cowling is separated by a slight gap from the inner skin, thus the inner cyclinder is "freefloating" inside the outer at the front end of the cowling. After and extended period wrassling with trying to glue the petals together, I wound up cutting the damned things off, rationalizing that the exposed inner surface of the outer skin would not be readily seen by a casual observer. The outer skin uses tapering cylinder sections. Without the petal strips to back the outer skin, I had to jerryrig some joining strips. The result is OK when viewed from a distance, but not something I'd write home about. I have an idea how I may try to adapt the petals of the inner skin for use as joining strips for the outer cowling segments.

The only other portion of the build of note was the tail wheelwell assembly. I decided to back the top of the wheelwell skin with matt board, and then box in the tailwheel mounting pin with some scrap matt board. It should make the tailwheel just about bulletproof. In hindsight, I could have extended the "box" formers back toward the tail to provide a socket for the vertical stabilizer spar to fit into....I may try gilding that particular lily in the next model. the one thing I shouldn't have done was to glue the sides of the matt board platform to the tailcone skin....it left a very noticable "starved puppy" look.

[Darwin]

What puts the bent in the bent wing bird.

[cgutzmer]

looking great!