Gear Door Finishing and Fit
First, thanks to those who comment on the build suggestions. I'll keep them in mind.
After a long hiatus of summer flying, I managed to fix up the shop and start the P51 build again. I focused on the main doors and their fitment to the Pica kit using the CJM retracts I chose. As noted in earlier posts, there isn't a lot of room. The gear is big and I have to take liberties with scale which I am calling "pseudo-scale" not even semi-scale. Oh well, as long as it looks ok
I previously showed how I built the fiberglass doors and a rough detail of the main doors. I am now adding a fit of the outer gear doors. The first 3 pictures show a rough process.
The Main doors as I roughed them out didn’t fit at all. The wheel is too high in the gear bay and the problem of fitting them was elusive. Finally I thought of putting contact sandpaper on the wheel and spinning it from underneath. I purposely left the top wing skin off because I just had the feeling I’d have to get my hands in there. This allowed me to spin the wheel and apply pressure to sand away the interference. Slowly the Main door came down level. See picture 4.
I sealed the balsa wood and I started to prime the surfaces. My goal is to finish with an AlClad or Testors aluminum paint finish, so this will take awhile to prep. Maybe in my next post I’ll have it done to show. I’ve never tried to paint an aluminum finish before so this will be an experience for me. See picture 5.
Hopefully when all is done and mechanically mounted, I’ll test it mechanically and get to finish putting on the top wingskin. This has been a challenging and for me, a tedious part of modeling. I still worry about landing gear strength and now whether the servo has enough strength to hold the Main door shut while flying. Perhaps I worry too much!
Last edited by szempruw; 03-03-2017 at 08:09 AM.
Reason: minor edits