My two favorite warbirds are the Curtiss P40 and the Grumman Wildcat.
For the US they were the first responders, in it from the start, and stayed in the fight for the duration.
If I can find a suitable model of the Wildcat it will be next in line after this build
just to give a sense of the basic and essential construction method. Whether you build for flight or display, the essential construction of each component of the kit is the same.
working on the fuselage. The P-40 has a really cool form, from the large chin intake, to the cockpit cutouts behind the pilot, to the way the gear sorta semi-retracts yet still kinda has too much of itself hanging out in the slipstream when it's up.
But the fuselage. Lots of work to do to get it looking more or less accurate..
I replaced the card stock that lines the cutouts with 1/64" thick birch ply..
You can also see that I doubled the firewall with a sheet of 3/32" thick balsa to give the plastic cowling more to hold onto, just sanded it to shape and then the cowling slides
over it with a good 1/8" of overlap / glued surface all around the inside edge
The infill finished, I have begun the filling and sanding process. This will take a week maybe
I fabricated and installed the glycol cooler cans - they are behind the scoop where they belong...I think maybe I should have cut out the dividers that were molded into the cowl and made my own.
Maybe next time..
the flash is horrible but it's the only way to see those cans in there..Also the top mounted air intake is installed now -
Thanks, Dave
So I took a break from balsa the other day, just to switch things up a bit.
This is a 1940 Willy's coupe - a Gasser.. from the same era as the P40 so I guess it's sort of 'on topic' maybe
hats pretty nice,i bought a dremel 3D printer,working on the CAD now.and my drawings for the truck bed are about done as well.should start building soon.
ok - there's sidetracked..and then there's SIDETRACKED...
The Holidays are approaching and I have been bitten by this model car thing - then I was browsing around on the Tamiya USA website and I saw something I had last seen in the mid '80's when I was working for a small graphic arts studio.
A couple of the guys had brought one of these RC Beetles in one day - Fridays were very light and loose and the boss man was a youngish feller himself and would allow for a bit of random fun so - they ran this thing all over the floor after clearing an area for it and it
was pretty cool.
Apparently Tamiya has reissued it as a kit..so naturally - I bought it. It's like a 50,000pc puzzle..that goes like a bat outta hell
It was lots of fun to build - and in the dirt lot next to my house - a lot of fun to run
thats pretty cool,i had the old teymia frog,hated its looks but it was alot of fun,im still building a taymia cascadia truck,and i have all the parts,except the motor,controller and a few other electronics,to build a 1/10th jeep rubicon.solid plastic body rather than lexan.all custom chasis and parts..well after market anyway..lol.
some more progress - please excuse the mess.
also - one of the things I'm not very good at is documenting as I work..I had meant to take pictures of the work I did on the belly pan but became a little absorbed and forgot to do that..
so here you see the belly pan being attached, as well as the before and after showing the wing fillet
the gear fairings and 'knees' were difficult to fit but eventually we got somewhere..I used 1/32" thick balsa sheet material at the leading edges and essentially mounted the under wing portion 'flat' using the balsa at the wing leading edge to fill the gap
between lower and upper halves of the knee
..seems to have solved the problem of poor fit related to the variable from one builder to another that Guillow prefab parts are tied to.
I use balsa strip material - typically 1/4" thick x 1/2 wide
only the outline of the blade is carved - the rest of the shaping is done with sandpaper and a small wooden block for the faces of the blades, and a section of 3/4" wood dowel wrapped with sandpaper
for the backs of the blades, sanded along the vertical axis - to get the concave shape.
the faces are sanded at a slight angle to achieve a discernible leading and trailing edge - and then rounded and tapered toward the tips. Then the backs are scalloped out using the dowel instead of the block.
It's a process but it works - then the proper incidence is obtained as each blade is installed to the hub.
this image shows how the wing is attached, then the balsa fillets (for and aft) are installed along with the wing root reinforcement (1/8" square balsa strip) as an anchor for the
spackle used to make the fillet.
Sherwin Williams shrink-free product is used.. the balsa strip also blocks the spackle from squeezing into the fuselage cavity and hardening into pellets - we aren't making baby rattles here
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