Greg Davis

I've released the wings from their jigs and started attaching eyebolts to the tip of each top and bottom rib. I also decided to lash the ribs to the spars for some additional security. Since there apparently is little to no construction documentation of the actual plane, one would need to make a guess on the method joints were made. I read in one source that (some) joints were made with aluminum fixtures; but I have assumed these were bamboo to bamboo where a lug could be used. I also would guess that the spars and ribs could have been connected via metal straps. I doubt that they would have been bolted because there would not be a lot of rib material left after drilling a hole for a large enough bolt. I simply went with a light brown thread for the lashing - something that wasn't out of the question and at the same time wasn't too distracting. The left wing is done to this point: BY the way, I did substitute smaller eyebolts for the ones supplied in the kit. The supplied eyebolts are over 2 scale inches in diameter - I felt that was a bit too big. A total of diagonal reinforcements, made of bamboo, will be added to upper and lower wings between the spars and the most extreme ribs. After that is down, the wing panel will be ready for rigging - some of which can be done before attaching to the fuselage. Still debating about including the ailerons or not.

Mark - Thank you for the link. This is an interesting idea. I may give it a try on a couple of extra ribs and see if it would work here. The curve of the ribs is not as extreme as the bend that was needed on the Wa'a model. I have a feeling that it may be more easy to get the more extreme bend to stick. Greg

Over the last couple of days I focused on fabricating the 16 wing ribs that are not part of wing panels. They are all cut to the correct length, have their nodes added, and painted to match the rest of the work done to this point. After being soaked, the rib material had been in the rib bending jig for a couple of weeks. When I pulled them out of the jig, very few held any of the desired bend. I am hoping that the airfoil shape of the ribs will be held reasonably well by how they are attached to the spars. To do this, the mid-section of the ribs need to be pushed upward between the spars. My attempt to do so involves clamping a third spar at the point where the ribs have their maximum height. This temporary spar was clamped to the three corresponding ribs in the wing panels (and propped up at the end near the fuselage connection). Here is a picture of the lower ribs being added to the right wing. The extreme ends of the ribs are held down by wood strips clamped to the jig after the rib is threaded under and over the spars. The ribs can be pushed down under the two actual spars enough to get a glue stick between them. Finally, the rib is clamped to the spar until the joint dries. There's not a lot of room in there to position the clamps! The upper ribs were slightly easier to attach! I expect that the ends of these ribs will spring up outside the spars when the structure is removed from the jig. It will most likely look worse at the end near the fuselage, but this will get better when the four spars are connected to the fuselage. Unfortunately this will be the best that can be expected as the rigging has no opportunity to hold the rib shape. On to the left wing!

I received good news via e-mail today from Model Expo - Mr. Davis, Hope you are doing fine. We are checking your request for parts. It seems that your kit is missing one full sheet, with parts # N7 (two) Part # N8 (two) Part # N9 Part # N11 Part # N13 Part # N15. We are providing it. As for part #N2, it seems that it was printed wrong. It's the part #N10 in sheet 2 Please see image attached. Best Regards, Ricardo It is the sheet of parts in the middle of the picture that were missing from my kit and it looks like they will be getting to me soon!

I was looking at the pictures of the plane on the Model Expo web site today (where its been discounted another $20 from when I purchased it a couple of weeks ago). There is a picture with all the kit materials laid out. In this picture the replacement parts that I have asked them to send are not shown. I am now thinking that there may have been a quality control issue with the whole run of the model - I would not be surprised if all the kits are missing eight laser cut parts! So while I will continue to hope for the best, I'm not banking on getting the rest of the parts anytime soon. If worse comes to worse, there may be enough scrap freijo to construct the parts I will need.

Here are the finished panels in the wing jigs The spars are 3 x 3 mm laser cut in a sheet of freijo. Not sure why Model Airways didn't just cut strips. Being laser cut, there was the residual char to clean up. The two sides flush to the sheet of wood didn't take long to clean up; the other two sides took longer. Because the spars have a square cross-section they can be released from the sheet, rotated 90 degrees and placed back into the sheet for the sanding / clean-up. This way I didn't need to worry about rounding the corners of the strips while sanding. Before and after Notice that the spars come in two lengths. The shorter ones go on the top wing and the longer on the bottom. They have been cut to take into account the finished wing's dihedral. While labled as A1 and A2 on the sheet, unfortuately (as far as I can see) there is no note of this / direction in the instruction manual and/or plan sheet. Perhaps Model Airways will make an edit for future runs of the model! I've attached the spars to one of the wings so far The next step will be to make up and attach eight additional ribs to the wing panel. They will go where the four slots are in the jig that do not hold wing panels.

Wing panels are painted and ready to be loaded into the wing building jigs!

Today another 300+ nodes were added to the six wing panels - tomorrow they get painted to match the fuselage.

I forgot to say that the new color, thanks to my wife, is a mix of Titanium Whire, Yellow Oxide, Burnt Umber, and Deep Green - no way I would have come up with the mix on my own!

Now the fuselage has been overpainted to match a piece of bamboo I had There is still some of the yellow ochre coming thru in a few places; not sure if I'll leave it this way or give it one more overcoat. There's yellow coming thru the real thing here and there, so maybe I'm ok as is (?).

All the nodes (about 200 of them) have been applied to the fuselage. It seems to be looking like bamboo now!

To be truthful, there was never a time that leaving the nodes out was really on the table. I am using a light brown thread for the nodes; it is being tied around the dowels in a 'random' pattern that averages just under a scale foot and has a standard deviation of a couple of inches. Just a simple overhand fastning with a dab of CA. I haven't rigged a ship for a while and my knot making skills have slowed. But given how many will be needed for this plane, they are sure to get better fast. After snipping off the excess thread, the 'nodes' look like this: Once a brown wash is applied I'm hoping that the result will be a good representation of bamboo.

All the completed bamboo structures have been given a coat of yellow ochre: Thinking strongly about trying to mimic the bamboo nodes! After that is done (or not) I am planning to give these parts a light brown wash.

Alan - Thank you very much! I think all the modeling 'practice' on wooden ships over the past 15 years or so is paying off. Mostly I find with each new project a bit more confidence going into the build. Also it doesn't hurt to have amassed a good collection of modeling tools. Greg

I had planned to build the nacelle structure this evening. This structure will complete the bulk of the fuselage; it will support the engine and landing gear, as well provide the junction points for the wings. The plan went into the dumpster whenI discovered that a number of laser cut parts were missing from the kit - 8 parts to be exact. I suspect that one sheet of laser cut parts was inadvertanly missed when the kit was packaged. So I've sent a replacement part request to Model Expo; I hope that they are swift with finding and shipping the missing pieces. In the meantime a new task will need to be chosen to keep moving on!

I added the four axle support beams to the canard: There are a few more parts that go into the canard around the time that it is to be braced - but done with this structure for now!

The remaining canard side has been added. There is an axle that passes through the canard and has a tube attached to it. The tube will eventually have a shaft passing thru it that attaches to the fuselage. Left / right motion for the canard will happen along this shaft. Up / down motion will happen along the axle in the canard. Four bamboo support beams will be added between the central axle bearings and the top / bottom of the canard - something to do tomorrow. The tubes that cross in the middle (where all the movement occurs) are soldered together. This may be the only soldered joint on the model. A jig is provided in the kit to properly align the tubes to be soldered. The jig worked great when I resistance soldered the joint.

Here the canard sides are being connected to the top (bottom?) of the structure. I've used 1-2-3 blocks to keep the sides perpendicular to the third side. I should be able to do the same for attaching the fourth side. To keep the top and bottom the same size, all the connecting pieces were ganged and then cut together on my table saw. I did this for the side pieces as well. The diagonal pieces were formed individually.

Started the canard today. I made two copies of the plan so that I could assemble the two sides simultaneously. Giving them a little more time to dry now before lifting the sides off and then adding the top and bottom pieces to join them.

All of the crosspieces, top and bottom have been attached. In this photograph the two most forward top crosspieces are still pinned and drying. The instructions seem to imply that (top and bottom) you can pin the fuselage sides front-to-back right to the building board. In actuality, there is some curvature in the top / bottom profiles so this cannot be done. For both the top and bottom crosspiece installation, I was able to pin the sides flat starting at the front and going toward the rear to all but where the last two crosspieces would attach. After the 8 forward crosspieces dryed, the structure was unpinned and rotated until the region of the remaining crosspieces were flat on the building board. As with the wing panels, I am putting a bit of CA on both sides of each joint. I'm thinking about moving now to the basic canard construction. The canard is the last major bamboo dowel construction. Once that is done, I will be painting the wing panels, fuselage, and canard bamboo parts. After that, these subassemblies can be attacehed to non-bamboo parts and subassemblies. There is actually one more bamboo based subassembly - that of the ailerons. The initial flights of the 14bis were made without ailerons. They were added prior to the final flights the aircraft made and were controlled by wires connected to a shoulder harness that Dumont wore when piloting the machine. Right now I see them as being optional for the model.

The sides have been glued from both sides and now are being joined via the lower crosspieces. I glued and clamped the rear of the fuselage sides together first while respecting the angle of the junction. The two sides are pinned to the building board. I made a spacer to match the width the upper surface in the region where the pilot basket will be. The top is narrower than the bottom. The spacer together with a pair of 1 x 2 x 3 blocks and shims have let me set the sides centered and angled to the final shape of the fuselage. Hopefully this will give the desired symetrical trapazoidal shape at the end! I'm actually surprised that a jig was not provided for this stage of the fuselage construction. A couple of the crosspieces are already in - more later today. Not a great deal of space to work; using a long tweezer is helping me get the crosspieces into the correct locations.

I've moved on to the fuselage construction now. The plans for the fuselage sides are in the instruction booklet - not on a larger plan sheet. This is a place where Model Expo has gone a cheaper / less satisfactory way than in their other airplane and ship kits where they typically provide a number of full-size well documented plans. First thing to do is to connect the two needed plan segments into one. To deal with the alignment and overlap issues assocaited with working with two sheets, I cut sements out of one sheet so that it could be aligned more easily with the second sheet: After laying down some waxewd paper, the fuselage sides were easily assembled: The fuselage is constructed out of 2.5mm diameter bamboo. Unlike the 1.5mm diameter material used in the wing panels, here I noticed that the provided dowels often had reduced diameter near their ends. I suspect that the dowels are formed using drawplates and that the lead ends from the process were not always cut from the finished dowel before placing them in the kit. This is a quality control issue that Model Expo should look into! The actual side construction went quite smoothly. I will say that having a Byrnes table saw to cut all the uprights made the job quick. Right now the fuselage construction brings me back to one of my favorite rubber band freeflight models. It's now called Fly Boy and made by the Guillow's company; back in the day it was the Cloud Buster made by Comet and I must have made half a dozen of them. I will leave the sides pinned down overnight. Tomorrow they will be flipped over so that I can put another drop of CA on the joints. Once that is dry I will likely start connecting the sides. The final profile will be trapazoidal in cross-section with the top narrower than the bottom.

All six of the wing panels have been glued up now. I am worried about how strong these will be because of all the butt joints - are the panels going to collapse when they are incorporated into the wings? When I made balsa planes as a youngster I never worried about this and really never had too many failures; however all the planes were covered with tissue paper / silkspan or other types of coverings. So I have been trying to think of a reinforcement scheme that would be approprite for the model. I did find a couple of references that claimed that there were 'aluminum fixtures' used in construction of the actual plane. What these looked like I do not know. It also is reported that the original plans (and plane, except for the basket) no longer exist. All current plans are reconstructions based heavily on photographs often using the basket as a means to scale dimensions of the plane. Here is a link to a (what I think is a very informative) paper about the 14 bis https://www.fzt.haw-hamburg.de/pers/Scholz/ewade/2007/CEAS2007/papers2007/ceas-2007-065.pdf . Here is a pic of the six matching wing panels: I'm going to set these aside for a while until I finalize plans for replication of bamboo nodes (or not including them) and possible reinforment of the butt joints. Pinning the joints is out of the question. I am wondering if drilling small holes thru the dowels on both sides of the joints and then tying the pieces together would be a way to go. I don't know how isuccesful I would be in doing this and how intrusive the result would look.

That explains a lot! I'm going to need to rely on glued joints and the rigging lines to keep everything in place. It shouldn't be a problem since these dowels are between 1.5mm and 2mm in diameter and bend very easily. On the other hand, it is interesting that Model Expo / Model Airways is advertising the fact that the kit is made of bamboo and Freijo wood because the original plane was built from these materials. I am so used to the arguments in model ship construction to rarely (or never) use the same wood the original ship was made from because of one would like the grain of the wood to shrink with the scale of the model. I wonder if there would be a another material to build a 1:16 model of the 14bis with that would respect scaling of grain and have better ability to hold bend shapes. Now I need to put these ideas out of my mind before I go down a rabbit hole, researching everything I can about the plane and start over with a completely scratch-built model ... Keep to the kit, keep to the kit ...

Mark - I tried that initially - as directed in the instructions, I soaked the ribs (in the jig) with water from wet paper towels for an hour and then used a hair dryer on high to dry them out. I then left them in the jig overnight expecting the ribs to hold their shape. They had some curve, but not as much as desired. That's when I went to soaking the ribs in water, pinning them to the plans and letting the wood dry on its own. But there was essentually no improvement in holding the shape. Bamboo is new to me in this type of application and it surely doesn't behave like wood I've used / bent for making model ships! It might be the case that if the jig had been designed with a more extreme curvature, then after springing back the ribs would be close to the needed shape. I imagine that a good deal of experimention would be needed to get this type of a jig right. I'm just hoping that the bamboo is flexible enough so that the shape is held by the way the components fit together together with the rigging that comes later. At this point I think that will be the case, but time will tell. Greg