jeff2wings

In total it took me 9 hours to make but the ease of setting up and surcurity of holding the crankshaft more than make up the expenditure of time. One of three to be made for Westbury Atoms Minors

I would be careful with the cuts as you have very little engagement with the scroll on one jaw ,if the intermittent cuts are jarring the gears hard you can dampen the effect by using a piece of wood against the chuck, see page 4 of my thread

All sorted and ready to start making crankshafts!

It's based on a design from Hemingway ,your best bet is to machine between centers unless you have a piece of 2" aluminium bar stock to make an offset fixture

Made some useful progress today, hopefully will have it completed tomorrow

Had a free afternoon so spent the afternoon on the lathe, basically bringing the o/d to final size and parting off to length and then deciding that the thread form wasn't exactly too my liking and taking another cut. also found the offcut of brass I was looking for so made another intake Next I will need to lap the cylinder and size the piston and c/p to size after soldering the intake and transfer on cylinder for second engine boring to size and as I need to make another crankshaft for the Speary, may as well make a couple for the Westbury atoms

Hemingway drawings Aeromodeller 46-47 And the book they came from

Original drawings show transfer and exhaust at 21/32 to the centre of the port,Hemingway drawings measure to the bottom of the port, and inlet at 13/32 to centre

'Modern ' diesel engines, as in '50's onwards used this method for the transfer ports probably as it makes the production of the casing easier.

Found time to make inlet and transfer covers would have preferred to make the inlet out of brass but didn't have any in the right size

Taking a rest from balsa bashing (and the fact I'm about to fit a new kitchen 😐 ) I thought it time to revisit a old project, the Speary 5cc diesel. the engine did run but it was difficult to start and had poor running and power, so I stripped it down and checked the port timing. the exhaust and transfer being well off ? Humm,how so,well I used the drawings from Hemingway not the originals from '46-7 and compering them there is a error in the later drawings, so back on the lathe then . I also have another case that I'm going to use for a spark ignition version

Well you're making good progress particularly as the lathe is both basic and vintage (but perfectly adequate )you might find it useful to have a look at modelenginenews.altervista.org there is a full build thread for the Speary that I'm sure you will find useful . In the meantime, I've a bit of catching up to do 😄😄

A face plate can be very good for odd shapes

Nice old pre-war Drummond, you have a face plate for it?

Just been checking the hemmingway drawings agents the ones originally published in 46-47 and there appears to be a difference in the transfer/exhaust dimensions, what drawings are you using?

And that's it,fixed ready for maiden v2.0 and I'm done, bye!

Bi fly new struttery finished and a TT91 installed, just radio gear and a bit of covering to go

Engine/cowling sorted

Making progress with the Pitts added triangular stock for u/c After filling all the holes adding engine mounting reinforcement, square bit sets the side thrust Filler panel with access to tank now the real fun bit,dealing with repairing the cowling after captain hackers efforts

Ah,the Nordec that promised much but fell short, sadly by the time it was revised the time for engines of this class had passed, you can read the story of Nordec on the late Ron Chernich's website Model Engine News, the Mk 2 Nordec being the inspiration for building this

Royal were probably among the first quality engines from Taiwan, any one who's had experience of the flash brand will appreciate that statement, the .40 is almost a direct copy of the fabled OS 4O FSR so should be pretty decent and were fairly popular in the U.S. in the '80's being sold through the Tower hobbies outlets

So back to the Pitts repair/remodeling of the fuselage so having forcefully removed the pilot who put up a bit of a fight considering his disability of not having a head, l need too add a floor and extend the upper fuselage deck forwards in order to convert to single seat I took the easy way out by using some balsa blocks next the front decking needs extending back All the upper fuselage decking is made from foam with 1/16 sheeting, the foam being hollowed out to 1/2 so not overly robust, so l used 3/32 for the extend and added some 1/32 on top of the original deck

And the bi-fly is having it's wings repaired now I splashed out on some gorilla glue 😄 Top wing holes filled in and marked out for new strut fixing just needs new plate and servo mounting

,Well it was originally flown with a os 120 fs but I don't have one of those in my collection, but l do have; Enya 120f (bit of a lump) MDS 148 (silencer bit awkward) Laser 150 nib humm 🤔

So after about 8 hours of very careful sanding and scraping................ ........we have a usable wings ready for mounting on the bi-fly, er,no,so the story is that when I picked up the decrepit Flair D7, my 'friend ' also gave me an equally decrepit airframe of a cermark Pitts Special S 2b , well it saved him a trip down the local trip! And ten years later I'm going to resurrect it. So here's the fuselage the canopy (and the pilots head ! ) were missing Well now that I've had a bit of practice at getting the blue off... Going to need a few cups of tea to get through this 😐 oh dear, think I will need my angle grinder to sort this out 20210508_174220.heic