Good onya Pat. Today being a feral day a bit of retail therapy was probably called for. Me, I got to paint a ceiling. Yeh!!! I hate panting ceilings

Originally Posted by ozybard

Today being a feral day...

Feral days? Wow, I've always known you Aussies were wild, but this sounds like fun!

Steve

Dont get too excited Steve - in this case 'feral' probably refers to 11 deg C and 50 K winds niether being conducive to outdoor Springtime activities! Ah well, more time in the workshop (or painting ceilings as is Ian's want )

Pat

Pat,What about the Lysander??

Komet - it's still hanging from the ceiling - a few small issues that I haven't resolved yet - so I move on rather than get frustrated. But it will happen.....

Pat

After a brief interlude attending to a Great Lakes Trainer, the bench was cleared and the He111 box of bits retrieved from the shelf. Where was I at? After a ponder and a read of this thread (memory is getting rusty) I was attempting to match the embryo wing centre-section to the fuselage. Lots of cutting and sanding got it to roughly agree with the plan and a period of plan-scrutinising followed trying to make sense of a fairly complex structure!

The main spars out to the engines are built up of a balsa core with 1/32 ply skins. After the centre ribs, LE and TE were fitted, the whole section was fitted with vertical-grained shear webbing - BOTH sides of the main spar. It is strong! Then the area forward of the mainspar is sheeted with 1/16 balsa and later, the whole wing will be skinned in 1/16 double-skinning the main D-box leading edge from the centre out past the engine mount area. Even without the second layer of skin, it is very difficult to twist. Making things even more difficult, is the underside of the wing out the engines seems like a big compound curved area - there two minor dihedral breaks to the engines. Well that's how the 1973 plan shows it!

Next will be the complicated nacelle basics - engine mounts, retracts and probably flap servos live here.......

Pat

Glad to see this one picking up again. I think the He 111 is a very good airplane that is way undermodeled. Looking forward to how you treat the details.

Jim

It's my thread - O/T is OK I thought it was a bit incongruous pushing a WW2 German bomber aside, to effect some maintenance on my 1900's era Ewbank carpet sweeper - about 100 years old now and still in regular use! It's good keeping contact with stuff that is older than I am (WW2 vintage )

Going slightly back on-topic, the cleaner needs some new tyres - and I've often wondered about making tyres for my models. Any easy ideas?

Pat

You really know what '..back to basics...' means when building from plans drawn about 40 years ago! I suppose the builder was expected to understand what was required and interpret the sometimes confusing drawings to get the desired result. That is certainly the case here Apart from the dimensional innacuracies a hand-drawn plan inevitably brings, some aspects of the construction have been omitted, some drawn innacurately and some almost impossible. I imagine the original was a design as you go and the builder must understand-as-you-go. But it is all good character developing stuff. Things become obvious only when the preceding stages are completed. Then slight changes to the design are needed to achieve what the designer intended.

Anyway, here is the result of todays work. The beginnings of the nacelles. The original had a pair of .25 glow engines hence the usual wooden bearers. I felt that redisgning would be a chore and the bearers will support the retracts so they will also be used to hold the motor mounting plates at the correct offsets.

The LE sheeting shown is the underlayer of 1/16 balsa - another layer will go on top after the wing is fully framed. Now I'll ponder the plans and sort out what is needed for the outer wing panels.
Pat

Great carpet sweeper! I love stuff like that .

The wings on this beast took more time revealing their construction philosophy than I spent building them. I still didn't get it right but some minor corrections will make it good enough to sheet some day. I made some simple jigging to get this far but believe the wing panels need to be held rather accurately when 14" wide balsa sheet is applied each side! I plane to sheet one side and maybe the LE seperately and then will have to spend a lot of time on servos etc. The CS will house the Rx and the four wing servos will be in the usual modern place - in the wings The 1973 version was a nightmare - all servos (throttles, UC, flaps, ailerons) were in the centre bay with a zillion pushrods and bell cranks out into the wings. I guess servos were expensive then

The ailerons and flaps are the next nightmare....

Pat

You know that they were expensive back then, Pat. In 1973 a basic 5 channel radio (all radios were basic then) could set you back as much as US$500 in 1973 dollars. I don't know how much inflation has increased since then but I would say that's the equivalent of about US$2000 today. Servos were $30-$35 apiece. Make that $120-$150 today. And there wasn't any such thing as 'digital' or super-strong servos or micro-servos. They all were analog and about 40 ounce-inches of torque. Most were a little bigger than todays 'standard' servos although some were getting smaller (Cannon comes to mind). So, yeah, it was all about pushrods and bellcranks. Yeah, those were the good old days. Really made one believe in "KISS" (Keep It Simple, Stupid).

This one is looking good too, but, what else can we expect from 'Maltone'. Best wishes!

Tony

Thanks Tony - I'm glad prices are within range of my pocket nowdays I only need 6 servos as the retracts are electric but even that will be about $100 worth!

I spent a few hours today trying to understand the trailing edge stuff - ailerons and flaps. After adding many of the parts it is starting to dawn on me - the inboard trailing edge IS curved! No wonder the flap drawings look weird!
The '111 always had an odd curve in the wing TE and now I understand - why? no idea. Ask Ernst Heinkel!

The TE is sort of 'scaleish' with various rib extensions, aileron balance horn slots etc. All of which conspire to give me much head scratching. Add a couple of degrees of washout, tapering spars and curves, it is quite interesting

The flap hinges will be next - they are close to scale in appearance and with internal horns on the curved flaps, they promise more fun.........

Pat

she is coming along very nicely mate, quite an intricate structure those wings!

Cheers
Craig

The wing was really a pain on my made-from-a-door bench top, so I built a frame from scrap timber (not as flash as Hammerd!) so now the whole wing can be moved around the bench with ease This made it easy to finish off all the vertical-grain shear webbing on the open front and rear spars.

Also fitted are some 1/2" diameter rolled printer-paper tubes fitted into holes in the ribs. These should allow me to fit the various servo, power and lighting leads after it is all sheeted (long way off!)

I'll ask a washout question next.......

Pat