Egilman

You have a Private Note Brother...

Afterburner Heat... would discolor the Titanium skin and got hot enough to burn off the paint.... and BTW- All F-100's were aluminum/silver painted from the 100th aircraft on... YES, All of them, it was to deal with severe corrosion issues the airframe developed during testing at Edwards.... The paint was retro applied to those first 100 that survived... Bare metal is not appropriate for this aircraft, except the titanium sections of the tail skin... So the reflectiveness comes from the shinyness of the paint not the surface condition/fineness of the metal... Yes it did, NA used 80% of all the Ti used in the aircraft industry until 1954... It didn't matter if they had the original J-57 petal type afterburner installed or the Later F-102 type.... the paint still burned off and the Ti discolored on all of them in direct proportion to AB use.. The reason for it was most of the Aircraft parts were machined from billet stock instead of riveted formers and panels, it was thought that by using solid parts to build the airframe they would act a heatsinks and keep the heat off the skin panels... (see, even great engineers can sometime be real dense) what they thought would serve to protect the panels actually served to concentrate heat in the AB areas.... It was, I don't see it, it was a completely redesigned aircraft using completely different materials and machining processes... All resemblance to the F-86 is purely coincidental... As far as the Tail heat/paint, burn/discoloration issue, here are some pics I've been holding on to for my 1/32 trumpy version... There are any number of explanations of how to get that color effect on the net... Which I'm sure you have seen... Several things to note, USAF birds flying over the USA did not have discolored tails... this was simply because the banning of sustained supersonic flight over most areas of the USA proper... Over seas and in aircraft in foreign service, all have this discoloration.... Most of the Birds that flew in Vietnam were "D" models with some "C" & "F" models, the "C" model was the fastest of the Super Sabres with a top speed of 925mph at 35K feet... (the "D" was the second fastest at 910mph) In standard combat load as well, Yes it was the first production supersonic aircraft in the Airforce inventory, (closely followed by the F-102) It's maiden supersonic flight was flown by none other that George Welch CMH the fighter ace of Pearl Harbor, two weeks later that first production aircraft killed him... For a brief time the Super Sabre held the world's Absolute Speed Record as the fastest thing in the sky quickly surpassed by the F-101, F-104 and the F-110 (F-4 Phantom) Known as the "Hun" in SEA service it was the primary fighter bomber of the US military until gradually replaced by the F-105 around 1969... As such, (during it's time in Vietnam) it carried and dropped more ordinance than the entire force of 15,000 some odd P-47's that flew in the entirety of WWII... It was a remarkable plane... Bit of a widowmaker, (when it first was adopted) but loved by the pilots that flew it and even more loved by the troops it covered and supported on the ground.... Hope this helps brother...

Just to keep myself busy, I went ahead and dropped the engine back into the chassis today as well.... All that was needed at the moment was revising the rear flange to match what is actually on the car rather than images of what was on the standard engine... It fits beautifully... (I narrowed the frame about a inch and a half, it was part of the reason I was having problems fitting parts before) Next up Frame Accessories, the Rear Shock brackets and the Rear Spring mounts which it turns out are completely different from what was modeled earlier... Onwards My friends.....

Another Can't miss...

Well time for another update.... Motor Mounts and crossmembers.... First up the Rear Motor Mounts.... And the Crossmember that supports the engine is next... And then of course we have to support the front of the motor as well... And the back side showing the connections to the Frame.... Finally all assembled into the full frame....

Simply beautiful!! Bet she's a stunner in the sunlight... Very well done, best I've seen... (including my own)

Making progress.... The next two cross members... The Brake Intermediate Shaft crossmember and the Thrust crossmember.... And the Thrust Crossmember... And mounted to the frame rails... She's actually beginning to look like something belonging to an automobile... {chuckle} Next up the Rear Motor Mounts and it's crossmember..... Onwards my friends...

Beautiful job on the original configuration of the 14-Bis... So many kits of this built, but no real research into what it actually was when first built... This has it all.... VERY NICE!!!!!

Oh please don't, (aside from normal streaks & stains) way too many of these birds are made to look like they were flying out of garbage heaps or never got any maintenance on the flightline... They were always being wiped down and cleaned, the ground crews were very proud of their planes and pilots and kept them looking their best, Especially in England... (flying side by side with the RAF almost mandated it, they wanted them to look their best...)

Me neither, I tried them a while back using the Micro sol trick with them, didn't work for me.... they all tore in some fashion, at least when a standard decal tears, you have a chance to recover from it, with these wet-transfer decals, no chance if they tear... You cant reassemble them into a useable decal.... Next to impossible to get them off cleanly once they have fractured as well... Not worth the risk IMHO...

Another update.... The first two crossmembers, now modeled accurately... Rear Cross member.... With the frame rails... Reverse side.... And finally the rear firewall crossmember.... Accurate to what is really on the car.... Still making progress... Onwards...

Not sure yet Brother, gots to get it designed first... Then reduce it to a scale which will preserve it's details yet allow it to be printed.... I'm still a long ways from there..... But I'm going to finish it..... and then decide....

Yes, long about 1908 the differences between the three types began to blur....WWI brought it to a concordance... Afterwards, mortars were trending downwards in size, (becoming an infantry weapon) howitzers stabilized at around 150 or 155 mm, (but the largest were still 240mm class) and were the heart and soul of the artillery branches and guns became anything firing in a flat trajectory in direct fire, however with a lot of overlap in application... By the end of WWII massive howitzers and guns had no real distinction on the battlefield, they both could do the same jobs... This is clearly seen in the usage of the 155mm & 8" guns and howitzers of the US army the 280 mm Atomic Annie was classed as a gun rather than what it actually functioned as... With Big Bertha, in1914 they reduced the weight of the explosive charge from just over 900 kilos to less than 800 kilos and gained some 5,000 metres in range out of the exact same barrels... Ballistics is always a relative game, you identify what you need your weapon to do and design it to accomplish it... Once that's all done, someone who knows less than the designer slaps it with a type name and it is forever typecast into that.... Metallurgy is a science, and a very extensive science at that... And yes Chilled Iron for a long time was considered the best armor one could buy and was one of the hardest metals produced, but by 1936 most high velocity guns could easily penetrate it and armor production moved into homogenous plate and cast high carbon steels at much lighter weights.... Chilled iron armor also had the very bad habit of fracturing into hundreds of small pieces, when it failed it became it's own shrapnel... One of the drawbacks of Chilled Iron for artillery shells is sometimes it was just too tough... They would hit and go off but the casing wouldn't fracture, they would blow the fuse out of the tip when they went off... this is why there are thousands of big artillery rounds that have been recovered from the WWI battlefields... Essentially buried intact but with no fusing or explosive charge.... Yeah the Carbide cutter, and in 1936 the diamond tipped cutter.... (Hughes Tool Company) But then again it wasn't just metal cutting tech that improved, steelmaking did as well, pretty much leaving cast iron methods behind

When she is done, I hope we can get a look at her in natural sunlight....

Ok, does anyone know the difference between a Mortar, Howitzer and Gun? Big Bertha was a Mortar, (Morser in German) the British and American 9.45" (240mm) Gun was a Mortar.... The difference is in the angle of fire they produced, Mortars are relatively short ranged weapons to deliver plunging fire, when originally designed Big Bertha only had a range of 9k metres... extremely short for an artillery grade weapon. But, it fired a projectile that could penetrate 1.5 meteres of reinforced concrete, 4.5 meteres of cast concrete and created craters that measured 6 meteres deep and 30 meteres wide... As you see in the video, large shells were pressed into basic shape while white hot then hammer forged and allowed to aircool this had the effect of aligning the grain of the steel and eliminating any stresses created by forced cooling, toughening the steel but leaving it malleable... (as the press forming of the casing showed in the video establishes) There are two ways to quick cool newly formed steel, water and oil, both create a hard outer surface and a tough grain aligned interior material it's generic term is called case-hardening.... High carbon steel is heated to an orange color, (do enough of it and you quickly learn to judge temps by the color of the metal) then plunging it into various liquids to cool it rapidly, what happens is the surface of the metal crystalizes and when cooled it creates a hard outer casing and a tough inner material... for steels that have less than 3% carbon content, the steel needs to be carbonized first before the process of case hardening it can be done... But the idea is to create a very hard outer surface with a tough inner core... That is not what is being shown in the videos.... 'Hartguß' or Hartguss, is the German name for Chilled cast iron, part of the ductile iron class of materials specifically... Yes it can be formed in press machinery like in the second video, but it is difficult to machine given it's formulary makeup, it can be ground though and is used to make camshafts and other such long wearing products... It acts in industrial uses like Case Hardened Steel... It is easier to produce than steel but harder to work into useable parts... I imagine they can make shells from it and looking at the old deteriorated examples in the museums I would say they did.. (they look like rusted corroded cast iron).. If you want, I can dig out my Machinists handbook for the section on hardening the various types of metals for more accurate info.... Not saying your wrong, just saying that from specific knowledge I know that artillery rounds were not made from case hardened materials, it made them too hard....

And this video shows the German process of forging large artillery round blanks before machining.... I believe it's from the Krupp works long about 1918....

Artillery Shells weren't cast anything, they were usually made of a steel alloy from sawed off round bars... This process started as soon as they started using rifled barrels.... Here is a British Pathe' film of ladies making artillery shells in the process used in 1914-18.... Pressure rings or "Sabots" were usually hard bronze and machined as part of the shell once they were swaged onto the projectile... No casting of anything, bar stock straight from the mill to the saw shop... Everything from 20mm all the way up to 480 mm... They would have a shiny smooth machined surface usually +/- .0005 in surface irregularity... There are plenty of photo shots of shiny shells lining the trenches waiting to be fired... Or, period pics like this on of a Big Bertha with a Shell ready to ram... You see how shiny the shell was? Yes they would stencil explosive information as to type of shell it was on the sides, but they wouldn't be painted like they were in WWII of even today... The French army started the war with 5 million shells of all calibers in the arsenal, they went through them in three months... The German Army had 12.6 million artillery rounds to start the war... NO ONE had any conception of how fast the modern weapons could be fired so their prewar stocks were established under rules dictated by 1870's rules of artillery use... They were making shells as fast as they could, and in 1915 there was an actual artillery round shortage (on both sides) where a battery of guns might have 20 rounds between them... They didn't have time to paint artillery rounds...

Short update... Front Suspension Bracket.... Where she resides.... And the individual part... Making progress.... Onwards....

Nah according to the troops it was assigned to, it was too cramped inside, the crew had no room to be human.... {chuckle}

Not a big seller for Tamiya, that's why it costs so little, but it's the only real game in town for that particular model.... It's pretty accurate and cleanly molded... Would benefit from aftermarket tracks though, T91E3 Workable Track Links 1-35 AFV Club It's had an undistinguished career as a tank, designed to be a light recon tank, but sized more like a medium tank, it never really fulfilled either role well... After the initial issue to US troops, (who didn't like it) the remainder of production was sent to foreign allies.... Aside from Vietnam where the bulk of it's combat history took place with the ARVN, (who loved it) it's only real combat capabilities were revealed in the CIA backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, 8 of the 16 tanks landed held off three companies of T-34-85's in the only successful incursion off the beach, they eventually ran out of ammo and were destroyed or forced to surrender, the other 8 were abandoned on the beach... It was a good tank, but by the time it was being issued, the whole concept of heavy, medium & light tanks was passe'.... The Main Battle Tank concept was being developed along with the M-48 Patton.... I'm down brother...

Looks pretty darn shiny to me..... (metallic shiny)

His web store is Scale Collectables.com... The owners name is Dan Silvestru... He's a great guy... A little over a year ago he offered to collaborate with me on the creation of models, I would create the STL files and he would create the masters for production... It looks like he still does that for designers....

Thanks Rob.... Not really a drawback, it's an expansion of knowledge.... With the extra images to study it makes for an even more interesting build.... More practice as well.... An example of why I had to start over... Frame rails... the first part modeled.... On the left is the new version, on the right is the old version... Currently figuring out the suspension bracket that inserts into the frame rail on the forward end... (it's what those rivet's are securing inside the rail) The new pics give me a lot of that exterior detail... Back in the age this car was built, (and most cars of the period) welding wasn't something that was widely employed... Today a car like this would be completely welded together and my first drawings didn't make this delineation... Another thing, there isn't very many washers used, it seems that generally they just bolted and nutted straight to the parts, unheard of practice today... Today you do not design or build/assemble machinery without washers... {chuckle} Little details.... Well, the Doc is very optimistic, Me, all I can do is learn to live with it, it's not the end of the world....... Keep plugging away....

Welcome to the Log, and Yes it is, no easier way to change things on the fly... I'll try to keep it interesting..... Thank you...

It's up on evilbay.... Fowler Tractor 1/35th scale D Models, that's in their e-bay store.... Not a bad price for what your getting...