Nakajima Ki-43 Hayabusa by ccoyle - FINISHED - Orlik - 1/33 - CARD - Japanese Army fighter Allied code name "Oscar"

[ccoyle]

More exciting Oscar action!

 

Moving forward (literally) toward the engine mount. The mount consists of three concentric rings supporting a bulkhead. You can see that the fit hasn't been so good on the first two rings, and there is an ugly gap at the bottom. I think this gap will eventually be filled with wing and covered by a fillet -- hopefully.

 

But having nothing to brace the engine bulkhead is worrisome. Any pressure applied while mounting the engine could possibly collapse the structure. So, I measured the gap between to two bulkheads and cut some scrap card stock to act as spacers.

 

And here's the last ring + bulkhead added. Once this dries, I will fill in some of the loose seams with white glue, but this will all eventually be hidden by the cowling.

 

A handy tool to have for card modeling is a screw punch. I got this one for Christmas a couple of years ago, along with a set of ten bits in 0.5 mm increments from 1.0 to 5.0 mm. Here I've used it to punch out the two holes where the wires for the horizontal stabilizers will be inserted.

 

And lastly, I cut out the remaining rear fuselage pieces so I can edge color them all in one batch. Soon we'll have a fuselage!

 

Stay tuned!

 

[ccoyle]

Fuselage complete. Had to do a little nipping & tucking to get everything together to my satisfaction, but managed in the end. There's something weird going on with the empennage section -- the little center-line tick mark on the top and the bottom seam both line up properly with the section in front, but the printed horizontal stabilizer areas are not level. The port side is about 1 mm higher than starboard. But I'll deal with that later.

 

[ccoyle]

Burnin' a vacation day today and getting a little work done before settling down to watch some World Cup qualifying. I made a slight error with the vertical stabilizer which I did not catch until after it was done -- the vertical frame piece is supposed to set inside the skins about 1 mm back from the edges instead of flush. You can see the difference by looking at the aft edges of the stabilizer and fuselage. Hmm . . . oh, well. Horizontal stabilizer sub-assemblies completed and ready for final assembly.

 

[ccoyle]

All stabilizers mounted and fillets in place. In order to counter the slight offset of the horizontal stabilizers, I had to add a tiny bit of dihedral -- normally the stabilizers lie in the same plane, but here they will tilt up just a smidge. The difference will only be noticed by the geekiest of airplane geeks.

 

 

My wife just now asked about why the plane looks so scraped up. 😆

[ccoyle]

Working on the wing skeleton. This has been a less than enjoyable part of the build. One problem has been that there are only two interlocking joints in the entire structure (circled); the rest are butt joints. Butt joints might not be all that bad except 1.) most of the joint locations are not marked, neither on the kit parts nor on their laser-cut replacements, and 2.) white glue and wood glue have both shown a remarkable inability to "grab" the laser-cut cardboard quickly, forcing me to tack the parts with CA and then reinforce with wood glue afterwards. Oh, and 3.) the two main spars are each a single, long, FLOPPY piece. So, non-grabby glue + no locator marks + floppy parts + almost no interlocking joints = 🤬. But it's done.

 

[Egilman]

Are they using a one piece wrap for the wing skins or is it cut up in separate pieces?

[CDW]

I really like the chipping represented on the skins. Looks great. 

[ccoyle]

25 minutes ago, Egilman said:

Are they using a one piece wrap for the wing skins or is it cut up in separate pieces?

 

Each wing is one piece except for the wingtips. Like most low-wing monoplanes, each wing will have a long fillet along its root where it joins the fuselage.

[Egilman]

2 hours ago, ccoyle said:

Each wing is one piece except for the wingtips.

I thought so...

 

That's where the strength comes from.... in airplane engineering it is called semi-monocoque construction where the strength is derived from the skin attached to the formers

 

That as opposed to monocoque construction where all the structural strength is in the skin....

[ccoyle]

3 hours ago, Egilman said:

in airplane engineering it is called semi-monocoque construction

 

Well, a card model doesn't bear the same loads and stresses as a real airplane, but its builder does have to construct it without raising his blood pressure dangerously high, like this wing might be doing. 😆

[Old Collingwood]

3 hours ago, ccoyle said:

 

Well, a card model doesn't bear the same loads and stresses as a real airplane, but its builder does have to construct it without raising his blood pressure dangerously high, like this wing might be doing. 😆

Best  remedy  "count  One two three"  and repeat as needed.

 

OC.

[ccoyle]

8 hours ago, Old Collingwood said:

Best  remedy  "count  One two three"  and repeat as needed.

 

Actually, the situation I've run into is similar to what happened with the Mohawk, albeit on a different structure. Part of the wing construction hassle is that the perspective shown in the single diagram of the skeleton, which looks fore-to-aft, makes some aspects of the aft construction unclear, making a certain amount of guesswork necessary. To tackle this, I'm going to have to cut out and shape the wing skins to deduce where the contact points for some of the skeletal elements should be. Of course, I'll report later on whether this all worked out or not.

[ccoyle]

So, this trough-like structure (circled) is the best I could come up with for the aft skeletal pieces. Whether it's correct or not is debatable, but the wing skin does fit properly, and the skinned wing will fit the fuselage correctly -- as far as I can tell at this point. I won't apply the skins until after I have built and fitted the wheel wells.

 

 

BTW, a strange detail of this kit's construction is that optional parts are provided to make the ailerons as separate assemblies. This wasn't an option for the rear control surfaces -- the rudder and elevators were printed as separate parts, so separate they had to be. I won't make the ailerons separately, as IMO there is little to gain visually by doing so, unless one chooses to display them in an up or down configuration, and building them separately allows more opportunities for boogering things. There are two completed examples of this kit at kartonowki.pl, and both of them have separate ailerons, but with the ailerons displayed level with the wing. You can judge for yourselves whether the reward is worth the risk.

[ccoyle]

7 hours ago, ccoyle said:

I won't apply the skins until after I have built and fitted the wheel wells.

 

Changed my mind.

 

 

Just a dry fit of the wing to fuselage.

[mtaylor]

That is one well used aircraft.  It'll need a new paint job in the near future.

[ccoyle]

8 hours ago, mtaylor said:

That is one well used aircraft.  It'll need a new paint job in the near future.

 

From what I've been told, the Japanese used a very poor-quality paint that chipped and flaked easily, hence the characteristic scruffy look.

[ccoyle]

A little more progress -- wing tips added and one wheel well built and installed. Parts for the second well have been cut out. You can see the rather torturous shape into which the wheel well wall (say that five times fast) must gently be shaped. I only had enough evening modeling mojo to complete one well.

 

[mtaylor]

Nice work.  No time pressure here as the hands need to stop shaking, the nerves need to calm and the eyes uncross.

[ccoyle]

1 minute ago, mtaylor said:

No time pressure here as the hands need to stop shaking, the nerves need to calm and the eyes uncross.

 

Mostly it's because bedtime is approaching. Sleepy modelers tend to rush and make mistakes -- it's best to know when to quit for the day.

[mtaylor]

Amen on knowing when to quit for the day/night.

[Egilman]

11 minutes ago, mtaylor said:

Amen on knowing when to quit for the day/night.

+1

[Veszett Roka]

6 hours ago, ccoyle said:

 

Mostly it's because bedtime is approaching. Sleepy modelers tend to rush and make mistakes -- it's best to know when to quit for the day.

 

I hate to suspend the build. Mostly because i hate to clean all the brushes, close the paints, clean the workbench for next time. However, stomach is a good judge when to quit. Mine is a corrupt one, i can pay with a glass of liqueur 😉

Edited October 13, 2021 by Veszett Roka
typos

[ccoyle]

Okay, now things get a little ugly . . .

 

First, the wheel wells were completed. You'll notice that there are a couple of pieces of fairing added to the front of them. That gap that was mentioned back in post #31 was not covered by these pieces.

 

 

So, the first order of the day was to fill in this gap, beginning with a joiner piece cut from some scrap.

 

 

But, as you can see in this shot, the ring that the joiner strip attaches to is too big.

 

 

I had to snip the ring open, remove a bit of material, and then rejoin it so that the resulting skin structure could meet the underlying bulkhead properly. Once that was done, I had to create some filler pieces. I first made a template to fill the gap, then cut the fillers from one of the surplus color swatches provided in the kit. These were glued in and touched up -- some random "chipping" helps hide the surgery scars.

 

 

And here's where it gets really messy. The wing fillets are made in two pieces. The larger aft piece (mostly obscured in the photo) actually fits well and was not a problem to install. Nope, the problem was with the smaller forward piece. There simply was no way that the fillet, the lower wing fairing, and the forward fuselage were going to meet properly. At all.

 

 

Yet again, the diagrams did not present a clear view of this particular aspect of the build, meaning some guessing about the shaping was necessary, but even so, this joint wasn't going to happen cleanly. This brings back some rather unpleasant memories of my Yak-3 build, whose leading edge wing roots were also a major headache. Some filler is plainly going to be required here -- will report back later on the result.

[popeye the sailor]

you've come a long way Chris.....and she looks great!    looks even better with the chipping....they put in some nice detail.   well done!   

[popeye the sailor]

hope you get the defects covered OK!

[Egilman]

1 hour ago, ccoyle said:

this joint wasn't going to happen cleanly

That's the understatement of the year! It's curved in like four different directions all at once..... You know the obvious way is to fill it with putty then shape it, another way is to paper mache it... Multi layers of thin, hourglass shaped strips soaked in watery paste glue, once dry, light sanding should handle the edges....

 

Saw that done on one of those German forums....

[VTHokiEE]

I was impressed before, but now that I'm trying to tackle a card model myself I am speechless. Can't wait to see how to tackle the gap.

[ccoyle]

33 minutes ago, Egilman said:

another way is to paper mache it

 

Hold that thought. 😉

[ccoyle]

So here's the patch job. I did actually use a kind of paper mache (bits of paper towel soaked in white glue), covered by a bit of spackle, then sanded down. I touched it up a little more after this photo, so it looks better at the moment.

 

 

And here's the entire left wing fillet.

 

 

Only one more side to do! 🤪

[CDW]

Very crafty AND effective repair. Certainly a trick only known by experienced card modelers. First time I've ever seen it used.