Greg Davis

The last few days I have been working on two subassemblies - the firebox and the cylinders: The firebox has plywood front, back, bottom, and two trapezoidal interior pieces. The sides / top are planked with 2 x 4mm strips. Next it will be coated in spackle to fill gaps and grain so that when painted it will look more like metal and not like wood anymore. The start to the cylinder / undercarriage is also framed in plywood. The front / back shapes of the cylinders are plywood; the front having a brass piece laminated to it. I was very impressed in the match between the brass piece and the front plywood piece - the shapes and holes are dead on! When I cemented these two together I aligned them with the aid of two round toothpicks. The cylinder sides will be brass; the instructions call for five 4 x 4mm supports that go between the plywood formers and serve as attachment locations for pinning the brass. I decided to add additional filler wood to support the brass in the region, so the complete attachment region has a wood backing now.

OC Thank you - I appreciate your complement! A good deal of credit needs to go to the kit designers, so far it has been impressive how well the assembly has gone. Greg

I have nearly finished the cab exterior. There still are 4 hook (?) castings that go on the roof - I do not know what their function is; anyway I seem to have been supplied with just 3 of them. I'm not sure it is worth the time to contact OcCre about this as they look fairly easy to fabricate from scrap material. Something to do another day! So here is the cab sitting up against the boiler. They don't get attached together until much later in the build - but it is fun to see them together. Only other note is that the grab bars on the side of the cab and the corresponding wires forming the aft side of the rear cab windows have been made with piano wire instead of the very soft brass wire supplied in the kit.

My pleasure - I am so glad you (and others) are getting some entertainment from this build! Greg

Taking a little break from my 'main project' - the Santos-Dumont No18 Hydroplane. It is not cooperating currently, so best to leave it alone for a few days. This is one of the reasons that I like to have several modeling projects going on simultaneously - always something else to do and a chance to step aside if needed. Anyway, over the past couple of days, I've been cleaning up and getting the brass cladding onto the cab. Here is the photo-etch / brass sheets provided for the cab: I've had little experience with photo-etched parts, but these seem to be nice. The front and side pieces fit and went on well: The semi-circular pieces need to be bent to provide front window visors. The main reason that I've included this picture is to note the 3 small protrusions on the flat side of the visor pieces. After detaching the two parts from there sprues, I needed to remind myself not to file them off when smoothing the sprue attachment locations even though they don't look a lot different from where the pieces were cut out. The three protrusions register and fit into the main front brass sheet. In the first picture of this post you can see the corresponding three small slots near the top of the window cutout. The curvature was massaged into the roof brass sheet and then the underside was planked with strip wood before being attached to the cab assembly. The instructions basically tell you to apply glue and hold the roof in place until the glue sticks. I don't think I could pull that off! Instead, I clamped the roof in place without glue - even though the roof is cut to the correct dimensions, this took me several trials to get it exactly where it needed to be. I then put on the rubber bands to pull the brass to the formers and the edges of the cab. Thinned white glue was brushed at the joints between the three curved formers and the roof. I'm going to let that dry through the night and tomorrow I'll run a bead of CA along the brass-to-brass junctions. I might not need the one along the front, but the ones where the roof meet the sides seem to be important.

thanks! I have not seen any pictures that show the pipes with burns. In fact I have never seen a picture with the engine fired up! I have long wondered how they got the engine started. There is a picture of the SD 14bis being started with a large cranking mechanism, but that was on the ground and not in the water. I don't know about turning the propeller blades by hand either. I can only assume that the engine was started only a few times and wasn't run for long. There may have been so much torque from the propulsion system that once started it was turned off immediately. Related, there is a picture on the SD No17 airplane with apparently the same engine / propeller and the exhaust pipe are clean there as well. There is little documentation of the No17 and it is entirely possible that it was never tested for flight. It is possible it was abandoned and the engine then went to the hydroplane. Going on to his successful Demoiselle airplanes (No19 and No20), Santos-Dumont used smaller (20hp and 30hp) two cylinder engines. However, various Antoinette V16 engines were used to power airplanes in or about 1910. Here is a link to a great article on Antoinette aircraft engines: https://oldmachinepress.com/2016/05/28/antoinette-levavasseur-aircraft-engines/ . The author, William Pearce has been very helpful in answering many questions on how the V16 may have been set up in the No18 hydroplane. Greg

I can give that a try - it does sound like it would be easier to do! Thanks Greg

Today I began to work on / solve the exhaust pipe installation process. The pipes have quite a few bends and need to connect to a short stub on the cylinder castings. Several very failed attempts before getting to this version of which I've placed on two different cylinders to see how it looks: The shape is getting close (should be flat a bit longer across the top and there's a small blip in the tubing that I didn't shrink out well enough), but this is what the pipes are suppose to look like: This one has a 1/16" brass wire rod as a core. A short bit of brass tubing soldered to the start to form a coupler with the cylinder casting stub. Finally, black rubber shrink tubing was slipped over the wire and shrunk. I made enough attempts trying to bend brass and aluminum tubing to the exhaust pipe shape to believe that will not be an effective method of fabrication. Given that the exhaust pipes will be buried amongst other engine accessories I'm currently thinking that this may be a reasonable way to make the 16 needed pipes. Thoughts / comments?

Today's accomplishment was coating all of the wood with linseed oil - there is more surface area than you would expect! This will need to dry / cure for quite awhile. While that is happening, I plan to turn my attention to engine work.

Again thank you so much to everyone that is watching this build come together! The nacelles and hydrofoils are now permanently connected:

Decades of amateur bicycle racing and countless hours of watching pro-cycling finally became useful on this build!

Today's little project - a saddle to sit on: It was shaped out of C Boxwood and is approximately 1 x 1.5 cm. Right now the saddle is shiny because it was just coated with linseed oil.

A couple days of work on the steering wheel has gotten me to here: First I cut and milled a piece of brass to serve as the spokes of the wheel together with a rim. Two pieces of C Boxwood with a circle cut out were used to sandwich the brass piece - all attached with epoxy. Then the exterior was sanded to about the correct diameter. Sanding the wheel to a round cross-section then followed. A few more details to add, but this is what I'm trying to mimic: I feel that I am getting close - probably as close as my skills will allow!

Here's my start on the cockpit. I've made the platform, the steering column structure and the footrest. I'll trim down the parts that go thru the cockpit after they have been attached. Still to come the saddle / seat and the steering wheel (doesn't look easy at all, ugh!).

I have not lost interest in this model, but I have a few other projects going on and like to go back and forth at times! One of the projects, the Santos-Dumont No 18 Hydroplane has elevated to the top as I would like to take it to a modeling contest in mid-May. I will be spending most of my time on that; however, every model has its downtime for one reason or another and that will be the time that Phantom and my OcCre BR 18 Locomotive projects get for the time being. After that who knows - there must be 30+ models in the que! Finally 'fixed' the paint issue, and today I applied the first coat of varnish to the hull. It will get another tomorrow and then it will be set for marking the waterline and some copper.