Been having some fun working on a scratch-built instrument panel. Look carefully at my 1/5 scale gauges and ignition switch and you'll see that they are laying on a photo of the real instrument panel of a 1926 Ford Flivver hanging in the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit. Link: https://www.thehenryford.org/collect...rtifact/264186

The one cent-sized gauge is a Ford oil pressure gauge. The dial is glued to a 2017 penny painted with Rustoleum textured black. The penny is .75 inches in diameter. I was shooting for .66 cm.

The 25 cent-sized gauge is a Jaeger Tachometer. The quarter I picked at random for a scale reference at random is from NC commemorating the Wright Bros.' first flight at Kitty Hawk, of course. I found a similar tach on eBay for £895.00 or roughly $1,000. The plastic ring was exactly 1" in diameter and pulled from the center of a pinstriping coil and painted with Testor's silver paint. I was shooting for .994 cm.

The gauges were worked up from scratch in PowerPoint and scaled down in a .jpg file. I put nail polish on the printout after gluing them down. I covered them with a thick (quality) clear plastic from Venom lipo battery packaging. The ignition switch is carved out of balsa and ply and painted with Testor's steel and silver. It was coated with clear nail polish. I used Sally Jansen Advanced Hard as Nails Strengthener. I'm making a big deal about this because it is thick, didn't run, and didn't streak my paper dial. Now, it's tough to make balsa look like metal and I'm open for suggestions.

I have three tiny eyeglasses screws for each gauge and the switch that are planned for the instrument panel when I get to that stage.

The Ford Flivver plastic model by Williams Bros. was available on eBay. The 1/5 scale RC plane plans are actually based on the plastic model rather than the real thing. So I ordered it and built my first model plane since the 8th grade.

Despite being manufactured in 1995, the kit was in great shape. The decals never tore and the plans and sprue were sealed in plastic. I thought hard about keeping the kit untouched for some vintage collection one day--hey, it's 22 years old! But decided I needed the model-building experience. And the insights I'd get along the way.

To me, the plastic model was hummingbird tiny. The wingspan is just 5.5" and fuselage is 3.8" long. The Testors paints were not thinned and so they dried just thick enough to leave fingerprints if I wasn't careful. The dark blue paint had to be stirred every time the bottle was opened or it varied in shading; noticeable in touch-ups. I never figured out how to do the rigging on the tail feathers and opted eventually to put small black plastic strips cut from a broom. One wrong slip of the glue carefully put into place by toothpicks and the paint was marred. I don't own a magnifying glass, so there were some close-up tasks that caused eye strain. In viewing some YouTube how-to videos, I quickly figured out that this plane is so small to begin with that it would compare with a 1:78 vehicle or bomber.

The late Dereck Woodward who drew the 1/5 scale RC plane plans was right about the instructions that...Continue Reading