abufletcher

The good side of all of this is that now the prospect of doing a lozenge paint job on some future model almost seems like a walk in the park! Really, I would never have imagined that doing the Hazet radiators could be such a formidable scale challenge. I mean, to make up some "sport scale" radiators wouldn't be so hard, but really doing an FAI-quality job (and that's as good a standard as any) is really a whole other level.

abufletcher

OK. Time for some more perspective on "what's small" and "what's hard."

http://www.arcforums.com/forums/air/...p?t198071.html

abufletcher

And so I find myself back here again.

abufletcher

No wonder you've been at it for 15 years!!! Seriously, I don't know how you can fly a model you've spent a decade and a half building (with another decade left to go?)...

abufletcher

Flanges. 40.

udet1918

Nice work Don. If my math is correct it's double what you have plus 8 and you've got it. You're close it would be a shame to change tacks now.

Ron

Mein Duff

I know your circumstances are different in Japan and you aren't interested in competitions...or are there even any in Japan?...shooting for FAI standards is a lofty and worthy goal, it puts many of us on the same page...and we have to set the bar at some professional level. (although we all aplaud and support even the beginners efforts on this forum)....
I was impressed by all the suggestions and comments on how to make your radiators from other members recently...lots of very ingenious ways to fabricate pieces, all trying to help you get the best posible scale effect...but in the end of course, it's your judgement call. If your not competing in FAI the bar can come down.
As to casting these flange pieces...what physical size are we talking about? looks like about 8 x 4 x .5 mm maybe?....Seth Hunter's thread has some really good info. on casting materials we could all benefit from...casting could be still an "iffy process", and tedious, at this size I would imagine.

Mein Duff

Gee I dunno Don...post #1468 sure looks very promising to me...but getting the right tool width could be a problem.
As to my 15 yrs of "off and on building"....like you, I think I almost enjoy the building more than the flying these days...at least I don't have nightmares to deal with...being budhist also helps a lot...whenever I get there...hopefull while I can still see and fly[sm=confused_smile.gif]

abufletcher

There are fly-ins and competitions in Japan but they are less frequent. But the cost of traveling is way more than I'm willing to accept. It cost me almost $200 in road fees, gas, and other expenses to travel to a fly-in about two hours away, which was rained out. Even in the US some guys spend hundreds of dollars each year traveling to fly-ins. That's money I would far rather use to buy hobby supplies. For example, the Seidel engine.

It's not really "FAI standards" as I don't even know what FAI rules are and am really not interested. I guess I'm just saying that I'm inspired by builders like Pete McDurmott and I'd like to try to get to something like that level myself. If you shoot high, even if you fail to achieve that goal, your failures look better than most people's successes.

The bar can only come down if >>I'm

abufletcher

And remember those Tibetian yak butter sculptures designed from the beginning to be impermanent. And then there are the sand mandalas which are wiped away as soon as they're finished after weeks of effort.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrKxM_gRloY

Mein Duff

Hey Don....just to give you an idea why the SE5 front end is such a time consuming beast done to scale...[:@]

abufletcher

Well, they do call it "the flying tractor." I've got similar photos and yeah, one has to be impressed with the level of technological sophistication of these later-war aircraft. Maybe that's why I prefer the earlier ones!

Mein Duff

A Fokker DVII seems like a cake walk in comparison...its amazing how the Germans (or Fokker to be more precise) was able to simplifly construction while the Brits seemed to make it more complex !?! ever try to work on a Jaguar ?!??!

abufletcher

I'm working on drilling the holes on a second sheet of flanges. This time I skipped the hole punch step and just drilled the small side holes immediately. The paper, for the most part, hold the bit in location. Still I'm getting quite a lot of wastage where the holes are not quite right. I mess about about 1 out of 4 times. So I'll drill a whole bunch of them (100+) and just see which ones come out the best. I only need about 50 more.

Cutting and filing them to shape isn't actually very hard. Just tedious. It takes me about 30 sec. a piece once I have them drilled and cut.

abufletcher

Out of 112 copies on the new template, I got 52 "keepers" where the holes are lined up correctly. I don't know if I was sloppier this time or whether I was just less discerning on the last batch. It's surprisingly hard to get that central hole both equidistant between the two small holes on the side and lined up vertically.

The keepers can now be cut out and shaped. This will give me 92, so I may even get to discard a couple of these keepers.

abufletcher

And there is 92 flanges! I credit SouthPark's online episode player for keeping me sane throughout. So it took me three days (or about 6 hours of concentrated effort) to produce these flanges. That's about two weeks (at least) less that I would have taken to do it any other way that involved ordering materials.

CTDavies

Looks good, Don. For the radiator panels you could check if there's a rectangular Evergreen profile that fits. You could glue them together staggered and add the raised chanels with white glue or something. Evergreen has plastic materials in all sorts and sized, plus it would be hollow from the inside, which would give you that head on look you are looking for.

abufletcher

Chris, I already looked. The smallest square tube is 3mm wide. Remember that at 1/6 scale we're taking about a "tube" that's no wider than about 1mm. And the "corregated metal siding" also isn't right even though the spacing it about right. That's because it isn't "old-style" wavy corrugation but rather a modern "flat indentation" type. Those "channels" would at this scale would be only a few fractions of a millimeter wide (and I'd have to fit in roughly 10 on a 16.5mm wide panel).

Again, I find it interesting that the original Flight article drawings don't show these channels despite the fact that they are very detailed drawings. I get the impression that they weren't very visible except from certain angles in certain light.

But I can see that my fellow modelers are not at all satisfied with the corrugated paper method. Neither am I, but but I've thought about and/or tried just about every other idea. I have a couple more ideas I'll try, but I'm not hopeful that something better is possible at this scale.

abufletcher

The more I learn about the H-Z radiators, the better I am able to make observations about what I see in the old photos. So here are some further observations about the radiators seen on Albatros C110 that I'm (sort of) modeling.

1. Here appear to be 10 radiator panels per side, but the forward two are "covered." This fits with the observation in the article that higher horsepower engines needed up to 20 panels.

2. There appear to be two additional vertical pipes 9-8-7 (see blue arrows).

3. There is also an additional "spacer" fitting on the top between 9 and 10 with suggests that there's an "plumbing outlet (inlet) at the bottom at this point.

4. The panels are set up in sets of 2-3-1-1-1 (not sure about the "bagged" ones) going from the rear forward.

abufletcher

Going back to GF's idea (or was that Russ?) of using a knurled screwdriver as a press, I got this result by pressing on heavy foil with a piece of faux-leather underneath. The separations on the knurling may be a way of suggesting the "channels" on the original. Of course I'd have to buy a tool with this straight line knurling and then cut the slots at appropriate intervals. When you press the foil and then look at the opposite side, these channels are raised. The foil would also have to be laminated to the corrugated paper both for rigidity and for the honeycomb effect (which is not going to be perfect no matter what at this scale).

I'm going to try spraying on the primer to see if that lessens the effect. Strictly speaking this is now too many striations but it does to give a bit more of the impression of the original.

abufletcher

Makes me wonder what I might be able to accomplish with a section of PVC pipe. What I need is something like a custom-cut rolling pin.

abufletcher

Primer largely obscures the effect of the knurling but an application of graphite powered brings it back out.

abufletcher

Experiment: Custom roller #1

Testing whether or not I'm capable of cutting sets of parallel grooves with a razor saw/file. These lines are spaced at 2mm and so actually a bit wider than scale. If it looks like I can cut 2mm lines then I'll try 1.5mm lines (which should be about right). But before, I couldn't maintain the ridges on cuts like these.

First observation: Wood is not a suitable materials for this application.

abufletcher

This is worth spending some (more) time on since the radiators are so visible and also because I potentially need 40-80 of these knurled strips (10 panels per side, 2-4 per panel)!

abufletcher

Ready for the next set of attempts.