Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Focke-Wulf VTOL - Part 8


 Hmm...something's gone wrong.  The pictures are gone.  I think I may have overdone my G+ Photo Album maintenance.  I'll fix these as soon as I can.

 Alpha Build Started!

Oh boy.  It's been more than a year since I've unceremoniously stopped working on this.  When I re-opened my metaseq work files, it took a while to get re-acquainted with the stuff I've left behind.

So now, I'm at this point where I need to design the spinner shafts (because I want the propellers to spin), the landing gears and the weapons (I'm planning to place a couple of guns on the wing roots, and a couple of ordinance pods).

But before I dive into that, I'd like to stop first and check if the model is buildable!  :)

So I fired up pepakura and did an unfold of the fuselage and the formers.

The Formers

I am not particularly fond of designing formers.  It's hard to guestimate the correct size of the formers.  Often times, the formers will turn out too big or too small.

Another thing I dislike doing is making joining strips.

So I decided to do a bit of an experiment by combining two chores into one-- former+joining strips.

Unfortunately, I lost the pictures for this one.  Maybe when I get back to this project, I can post new ones.


Skinning the Structure

With the formers/joining strip structure assembled, the next step would be to wrap the fuselage skin around it.

The initial wrapping process was very tedious because the former/joining strip structure was not rigid.
But as I finished assembling more of  the fuselage components, it became a lot easier.