Well, life has well and truely taken over since I last posted about the Big Guff. Distractions have included taking Miss Blue Eyes back to England in the two-tonner; repairing trainers, mine and other people's; participating in a light-hearted competition; finishing off my Reserve Baron for La Coupe Des Barons in September; gardening, I like to grow some of my own vegetables, and starting the construction of a Sharkface! What's a Sharkface? See image below.
However, I had the time yesterday to unpin the Big Guff's fuselage sides from the plasterboard and to frame up the fuselage. I found that the sides had stuck themselves together but with the judicious use of the bread knife I soon had them apart. Normally joining two fuselage sides would have involved fitting two formers under the wing seat but having decided to build the fuselage pretty much as Dr Good designed it, I pinned the fuselage sides to the plan view and cut up lots of 1/4" sq. I have not built a fuselage like this since I built my first model aircraft, a Keil Kraft Ajax, as an eleven year-old! The lines on the plan are rather thick but I simply positioned the fuselage sides in the centre of lines and cut the cross pieces accordingly. I used an aliphatic glue I had bought when I was in England. Marketed by Logic RC, this glue is very thick and though it grips very well it takes two hands to force it out of the plastic bottle. For the joints to the rear of the wing seat I used cyano to save weight. There were one or two instances where the cross member, upright and plan were not in the same place! Whether this was due to my inadequate workmanship or a fault of the plan, I'm not qualified to say. The whole structure will be covered in balsawood sheet and then covered in Solartex so you won't see any discrepancies. Despite these misalignments, I am generally pleased with the results so far; the fuselage is square and true.
The next stage is to pull in the nose and to fit the firewall and F2 former. Despite warnings from Jonathan Harper of Laser not to bolt the engine onto hardwood engine bearers, I have decided to go with the original arragement. I notice that according to the plan, Dr Good used pine for his engine bearers. I have a few feet of oak batten which will need planing to size so I'm going to use the oak counter-drilled for captive nuts to retain the engine.
As I have said earlier I will move the wheels to a more conventional position in order to make take-offs easier. I believe that Dr Good changed to a similar arrangement after the war, Peter Russell certainly did. I have not yet decided whether I will use grooved beech blocks or a plywood plate with saddles to retain the undercarriage. Whichever method I choose I will reinforce the structure between the second and third upright with thin plywood.
Then there's the question of the nose block. Do I use the same nose block as used by Dr Good and have the much longer Laser 70 poking out of the front, or do I extend the nose to match the engine? Decisions, decisions!
Once the fuselage is finished with the radio and engine installed, I plan to wrap it up and store it while I get on with lesser aeromodelling projects before tackling the tail surfaces.
Finally, I have been building a Roy Scott BE2e for several years, but work on this project has stopped partly because I was able to buy a complete BE2e in an estate sale. I also have a DB Sport and Scale SE5 unbuilt in its box. I have a 2 metre and a 3 metre roll of Solartex Dark Green and I was going to use these to cover the BE2, however, I noticed that the colours were different! Either they are from different production batches or the 3 metre roll is actually Olive Drab. Be that as it may, I have recently ordered 10 metres of Dark Green Solartex, while we still can get it, so that I now have 12 metres of a matching colour which should be enough to cover both models if I ever live long enough to build both of them! This means that I could use the Olive Drab/Dark Green to cover the fuselage of the Big Guff. The other options are Solartex Red or Dark Blue. The wing and tailplane will be finished in Antique Solartex. What do you think? Answers on a post card as they used to say on the BBC!
Despite a few minor misgivings about the plan, the kit is pretty good and it produces a magnificent looking model and my isn't it big! I won't be hand launching this one!
