ccoyle

Okay, on to landing gear. These were a bit of a challenge. We start with the stacked wheel disks -- no resin wheels offered for this kit. 🙁 Once they dried, I soaked them in thin CA. After that dried, I prepped the wheels for sanding by first trimming and filing their shoulders, then gouging out a hole for the screw to hold them on a Dremel shank. The screw is not long enough to hold a wheel without the rebate. Using medium grit sandpaper followed by fine grit, sanding the wheels to shape takes very little time. One of the wheels wound up slightly lopsided because its axle hole wasn't drilled dead-center. Next the wheels, or rather the tires, were painted, and the printed hubs were added. Wires for the struts were then formed. Take note that only one template is shown on the parts sheet, but the left and right struts must be formed as mirror images of each other, not identical to each other. Then we add the main struts. Note the white portions -- that is the portion of each strut that gets inserted into a wing in the basic version of the model (i.e., no wheel wells). If you're adding wheel wells, those parts will be visible, so they'll need to be painted. BTW, all of the tubular parts of the gear are printed on card stock, not on bond. I find that rolling the card stock makes the diameters of the tubes too large, so I always delaminate the parts by wetting them and peeling off the inner layer of paper, reducing the thickness of the part by about half. I made sockets for the struts by rolling some paper strips, soaking them in CA, painting them, and then gluing them into the wells. This makes a much stronger joint when the struts are added. I skipped photographing a couple of steps, but here are the gear glued into their sockets. The remaining strut pieces and gear doors have been added as well. I don't use a jig for positioning the struts -- I just eyeball them until they "look right." The outer gear doors look a little off-kilter, but that is the way they are supposed to look according to images of MiG-15s seen online. Whew! Glad that part is done! Of course, there is still the nose wheel to do, so we're not quite out of the woods yet. TTFN!

One of my coworkers is a former KC-135 driver.

Very handsome! Sailing prams are awesome.

A nice thing about a kit like this one is that smacks are still in use as pleasure craft, so they can essentially be modified however you like.

Welcome aboard! Wood is great, but we love plastic, too! Heck, we even allow card models, but we make those kids sit by themselves. 😉

Welcome aboard!

I'm gonna have to get cracking on the landing gear -- struggling with low motivation. I glued the wheel disks together last night.

Congratulations on a fine result!

Scow schooners had regional variations, depending on the local sailing conditions, intended purposes, local shipbuilding practice, etc. So a San Francisco Bay scow schooner is the variation of the basic form that worked San Francisco Bay and the San Francisco - San Joaquin Delta.

Alma is the last San Francisco Bay scow schooner, but not the last scow schooner.

Are you talking about a fine detail on the model, or the heady aroma of aerosolized enamel paint? 😉

If you read ahead in the instructions, can you deduce what the holes are for? Also, does the kit include 1:1 plans, and do those show the hole locations?

Wow! The finished model is a real eye-catcher!

Check the kit documentation thoroughly first. When white/Britannia metal first hit the scene, its benefits versus lead were loudly touted by manufacturers. If the kit's metal parts are Britannia, it'll probably be stated somewhere.

Mark is on target with his suggestion for photo format. The average viewer will have little interest in downloading an image to view it.

I decided to add the wing fences next, even though they are not the next item in the instructions. I do think they add to the plane's "cool" factor. Fences (left wing) vs. no fences (right wing). All fences on.

I noticed that there were a lot of doubled parts coming up, so I decided to take care of this task all in one shot. Exciting, right? BTW, there are two different schools of thought about how to do doubled parts. This kit includes both the fronts and backs as outlined parts, like so: The obvious problem with this method is that it is difficult to get the two outlined parts to match up exactly when the piece is folded (though there is a way to partially deal with this). Other designers will do the back side of the part (usually the interior side) as part of a colored field (imagine the gray interior part [above left] printed on a gray field, with no part outline). The benefit of that method is that there are no white areas if the back side of the part isn't perfectly aligned. That's it for now.

A good choice! I built the orginal Caldercraft version of Sherbourne 25 years ago (same designer). There is a series of books called the Anatomy of the Ship -- in the series there is a title on HM Cutter Alert by Peter Goodwin. Although a different class than Sherbourne's, I nevertheless found the book very helpful. If you are interested, you can still find copies online.

Horizontal stabs on. This is the photogenic side. 😑 Hint: Pay attention to not man-handling the vertical stabilizer too much during the earlier stages of construction. There is a serious dearth of internal structure inside the stabilizers -- just a single spar. Again, easy to build, but not particularly sturdy.

After commenting in my previous post about the lack of spacers in the wing frames, I decided to add some on this side, made from scrap pulp board. I then skinned the wing -- same process as the other side. Everything was then ready to mate the wings and fuselage. The MiG-15 and its derivatives had an anhedral wing mount. I was hoping that this was factored into the design of the wing ribs, i.e., the negative angle is produced by the internal framing structure even though the connecting rod is a straight piece. It looks like the framing was in fact designed that way. The wing/fuselage joints produced some significant gaps. Suspecting that the wing fillets would not entirely hide these, I added some coloring to the white spaces before adding the fillets. Fillets prepped. My suspicions were confirmed. As you can plainly see if you look closely, the fillets do not come close to bridging the earlier white gap. It's a pretty disappointing fit, actually, though from a stand-off distance it doesn't look bad. The horizontal stabilizers are next!

I think by now you definitely have the skill set to up the detail a notch on this kit. As you know, these kits have made numerous compromises to make them easier for beginner/intermediate builders. If you want to spruce things up, look for photos of Alma online -- she is an actual San Francisco Bay scow schooner and still sailing. It's even possible that the original Midwest design is derived from Alma, since her lines were taken off during a HAER survey, and you can see those here. From Wikimedia Commons Really looking forward to watching this one!

Different designers is probably the most significant difference. You have done this kit real justice, and the visual appeal of your little fleet is growing!

Very well done!

Coming along very handsomely!

Production has slowed a bit due to some distraction in the form of binge-watching another Apple TV series. But last night I felt motivated to get the right wing framed. At least now we can get a sense of the size of the finished model. I almost, almost made the horrific mistake of assembling the frames as a second left wing instead of a right wing (I have made that mistake before, doh!), but I caught the error in time to fix it without too much difficulty. Part #59, seen here dry-fitted, is a 3.8mm-diameter rod that pins the two wings to the fuselage; you can see part of it in the photo. I presume that most people, like me, don't happen to have any 3.8mm rods or dowels laying around, so mine is made from a bamboo skewer wrapped in card. Whatever works, baby! The wing framing is worth noting in comparison to far more robust designs, such as those seen in my Halinski builds. This kit is intended for intermediate builders, so perhaps the low parts count simplifies the construction in that regard, but I do think that some additional parts would have made this a better structure. In particular, some spacers in between the spars and ribs would have been welcome. Also, if you compare the above picture to the earlier left wing picture: you can see that the wheel well does not have the same dimensions as the gap it fits into, and some spacers would have been useful there as well.