Ron Gray

Taken from Mick Reeves' website pages: We recently fitted a steel disc weighing 1 kg on Jims engine shaft, ahead of the prop. To achieve the same effect with ballast on the firewall, it would need 1 1/2 kg.

Funnily enough, I was only last night thinking that it might be good to have a thread on here about the way things may have started to change as a result of a) Covid-19 and the lockdown and b) the spiralling costs of ARTF / BNF / Foamies. I did a very quick and dirty check on latest prices of 'typical' warbirds and was somewhat taken aback with the results. Now don't take this list as a definitive one, I've only done a small amount fo cross referencing and no doubt some prices will vary. The criteria I used were warbirds round about 1700mm WS, and construction either foamies or ARTF / BNF etc. P51 1700 - Foam - FMS £430 (I paid £300 for mine 2 years ago!) P51 1500 - ARTF - eFlite £460 P51 1700 - ARTF - Hangar 9 £390 plus retracts £130 P47 1700 - Kit - Seagull £240 plus retracts. P47 1700 - ARTF - Seagull £300 plus retracts. In terms of build time, obviously the FMS is out of the box, ready to fly once Rx and batteries have been installed, the other need a bit more time to get them ready. From my own experiences of assembling ARTF I tend to take a couple of weeks to get them ready, assembling the tail surfaces, hinging, fitting servos and control linkages, engine fitting, cowl cutting etc but some do take longer! A friend of mine bought the H9 P47 at the end of Jan and took over 2 months to get it ready, of course he wasn’t working on it all of the time but he did say that there was a lot of fiddly work to do on it. But in each of the above you end up with a finish that the manufacturer has chosen both in terms of colours and type (glossy!). Now, for my part, this is an area that bugs me, if I have a scale model then I want it to look a bit scale like in terms of its finish, so I don’t want a gloss finish on my hurricane and I don’t want it to look like it just came out of the showroom. Obviously this is q personal choice and if I wanted a Duxford ‘clone’ then fine. Again, from personal experience with the FMS ‘stang. It is a fantastic bit of foam and out of the box had that ‘wow’ factor. It flies really well and looks convincing in the air, but… It’s now over 2 years old so is looking a bit tatty. I made wing and tail bags for it to protect it from hanger rash but it still gets some. You have to be careful with it in the sun and despite me putting covers over it the dreaded ‘crock skin;’ has appeared on the dark painted areas and the cockpit has suffered from this too. The tail will soon need to be glued in position, I’ve bolted it on but it gets loose. I’ve had to replaced the landing gear as they kept breaking (a very poor design imo) and despite me landing it with extreme care on our tarmac runway, there are cracked appearing in the top surface of the wings where the retracts are flexing. As for the power, I’ve carried out the prop pitch mod but it is still slightly underpowered. And this is a model that now costs £430. This year has seen a forced change on a lot of things, from a personal perspective it re-kindled my love of building ‘planes, not just assembling them and flying them. What it means, to me, is that I can build something to my standards and finish it the way I want it finished. The result putting it simply is pride on what I’ve achieved but the other benefit is in the cost, IMO the foamy / ARTF / BNF route is no longer the ‘cheap’ way into flying that it was. Some people rating this may well think, all well and good but I don’t want to spend the time / haven’t got the skills for building. Well let me assure you that, as we are on the thread that Richard started, a Warbirds Replicas kit is dead easy to assemble and they are very quick to assemble too, no previous experience necessary. the other argument is ‘I can’t / don’t like painting’. Again there is a popular misunderstanding that this is difficult, it is not. Of course if you are talking about scale competition then, yes, hours and hours can be spent but I would suggest that, for most of us, something semi scale is what we are after. I’m certainly no expert at either building or finishing but I’ve managed to produce something (Lavochkin LA-7) that looks OK to me, and that is what really matters, not what others think it looks like. I worked out that even with all of the little finishing details that I added it took me about 3 hours for the painting including the fuel proofing. No air guns / air brushes were used, just simple and cheap rattle cans. the cost of the finish worked out at £10! We now have a fairly unique opportunity of getting a UK manufacturer to develop top quality kits for us at sensible prices that build into excellent models with proven flying characteristics and I, for one am very excited about this prospect. Several of my fellow fliers are now expressing an interest in building one of these models instead of buying another ARTF which has to be good news!

Nice job you've made of the landing gear 'box' and with that style of 'gear you won't get the ground handling problems the standard kit has! the full size Rocket had a variety of landing gear styles including retracts! But I'm surprised that yours has come out really nose heavy, mine is powered by a Laser 100 and the flight batteries are located just behind the servo tray, on the fuse floor. As I said earlier, yours just doesn't look like the same kit as mine, the construction is different, are you sure yours is a Seagull Radial Rocket?

Didn't get a lot of time on the build today but started with shaping the LE and TE Tools used, razor plane and my long Great Planes sanding bar which makes short work of these tasks. Wing tips added and sanded to blend in to the wing Then it was time to cut out the ailerons, firstly the veneer Then the razor saw was used to cut through the foam The instructions say to sand back the foam to the veneer to give a good surface to stick the false TE and the aileron LE to but I used my soldering iron foam cutter (see my Lavochkin LA-7 build log elsewhere on this forum). Then after the glue had set I shaped the aileron LE to give them about a 30 degree movement up and down. And the balsa end plates were also fitted to the ailerons (above photo) and the wings. As has been mentioned several times now the tail area can be a weak point on these models and I've already added thin ply doublers to the inside of the fuse. Chris Foss issued supplementary notes with the kits advising to strengthen the elevator with carbon so that is what I have done, using an 8mm carbon tube let into the balsa (it's the black line you can see in the following photo) Edited By Ron Gray on 21/06/2020 22:27:58

Hi Gary, from what I've read on various forums, a wide range of different engines have been used including the 180, I would just make sure that the tail mods are done to prevent failure in that area.

Sorry Andy, I missed this thread and the question about covering film into concave curves such as wing fillets. What I do is cut a strip of film wide enough to cover the fillet and a bit of the fuse. Then I use various tubes and round bars from aluminium and copper and heat those up to apply the heat to the film in the curve, 15mm copper tube is excellent and you can form it into different profiles for areas such as tailplane / fuse junctions. To heat the tubes I use a hot air gun. Takes a bit of getting used to but works for me!

Oooo, it's exciting Bob, a bit like a Christmas present, can't wait to get it opened and see what it is. I've now decided that I will continue to use Cass Art for paints, they have a great colour range, it's very cheap, covers well and their delivery is first rate. for soft masks I use bits of depron cut in all sorts of shapes and hold it at various distances from the surface. That way I can vary the edge sharpness of the colour joints and I don't have to stick it to the surface, angling the spray away from the edge eliminates creep. Interesting thing I saw when looking back at the Cass Art site, they also sell spray caps with varying spray patterns.

Oh that looks so good Danny!

Excellent point Denis, the number of times I’ve lost those little screws and have used any one I’ve found with the same thread!

Glad to see that you’re getting back to (the new?) normal and I would like to thank you for keeping your sales service going over the last few months, it certainly helped me keep going with my builds!

Or make your own!

@Peter - I think that in my case the servo arms were not OEM ones so the fit was not that good. Too be fair, I haven't had any problems with any of my other Hitec servos.

Thanks Gary, the masking tape 'trick' is a really useful one especially when joining wing sheeting together as you can then sand the sheets down before fitting them to the wings which results in even sanding. To be fair to Chris Foss he does suggest doing the fuse sheets this way in his instructions, but I also made sure that I sanded teh sheets before putting the sides together as it's so much easier! Not a lot of progress today as I was doing other things, but any progress is progress! Cockpit floors added, I've gone for the '2 seater' option which gives a longer canopy which I think suits this model, so there are 2 floors to fit. As has been mentioned by others in posts above, there have been some instances of the tail section failing so I took the precaution of adding some thin ply doublers to the rear section of the fuse sides, about on the line of the tailplane LE. I also plan to mount the tail control surface servos in the rear of the fuse so these ply pieces will give them some more support. The cross pieces you see in the following shots are temporary braces I put in there whilst the glue sets (yes I should have stuck the ply in before joining the sides together!) I was able to make a start on the wings by fitting the LE and TE balsa strips, I used Gorilla Glue brown expanding glue for these as they are stuck directly to the foam core of the wings.