Week 7 – A Little Support

Last week I built the starboard leading edge of the wing and floored and painted the aft-most sections of the fuselage.

This week I mostly worked on the starboard undercarriage and the bay it goes into, with some work on other internal details.

To start, I found and laid out all of the bags for this week’s work.

The first set of pieces are for the air intake which lays behind the leading edge I built last week.

This section would end up being one of the most difficult due to needing to straighten the bundle of wire in the bottom left of the above photo.

The first step was installing the two intake holes into the wing leading edge section as shown below:

Next, I installed the brackets onto the air intake.

Then I installed the two small curved pieces of metal into the holes in the vent.

Following that I had to measure out and then drill two holes into the wing to mount the whole assembly.

Then I added a pencil line to represent the point at which the fuselage meets the wing.

I then proceeded to paint the air intake, and glued it to the wing.

Further, to this I began adding details around the intake, including wires.

In the picture above a small hole has been drilled to allow a wire to be threaded through to the fuel tank.

And this issue was finished off with the addition of two thick pieces of copper wire.

Next I unpacked the next issues pieces.

And began marking the two side pieces up for adding rivet marks, using the other piece as a template.

Before setting aside the pieces to be painted later.

I then unpacked the other two issues’ pieces.

Before beginning to add rivet marks to the two bulkhead pieces.

The second piece has a couple more lines of rivets than it should because I misjudged the distance that the central rivet lines should be apart.  Also the curved line of rivets on the bottom edge was challenging.

Again these two pieces (and several others) were set aside to be primed and painted.

Next, I painted the engine control board and the forward hinges for the undercarriage.

I also assembled the engine oil tank.  Part way through attempting (and failing) to install it I decided that the simplest course would be to completely remove the engine mount from the model.

I also installed the hinges mentioned above, and glued a piece of the black wire between the two mounting points for the engine.

Then, I added a collection of wires to the back of the engine mount as shown here.

At about this point I installed the four bulkheads into the undercarriage bay following painting them, and finally began work on the structure of the undercarriage.

The pieces shown above were then screwed together as shown in the next photo.

Then I added small pieces of metal to represent bolt heads.

Before gluing the two arms into the proper place in the undercarriage bay.

I also added a pair of valves to the upper set of wires.

And the last thing for this week I added a piece of wire down the back of the two lower arms of the undercarriage assembly.

Leading to this week’s conclusion.

 

Next week I’ll be finishing the starboard undercarriage, and starting on the over-wing hydraulics.