Might I suggest that what you're all (beautifully I might add) replicating is "laceing" as in your shoes. The inspection panels were laced together to allow routine opening and closeing.

Stitching is more permanent. You don't tear the stitches out of anything unless you're destroying it.

MTC YMMV

Again STUNNING work guys!

Tom

Tom, you're exactly right and that's what bothers me about the heavy paint coatings on my "stitching." That's also why I like the idea (Craig's idea?) of putting in the "lacing" after I've attached (and painted?) the flaps with the eyelets.

I do think, however, that the lacing occasionally got a coat of paint slopped over it.

BTW, I think on the Snipe there was a difference between the horizontal lacing (which looks in the datafile photos to be the V-shape we'll all trying to replicate here) and the style of the vertical lacing. The vertical lacing looks like two strands of interweaving "thread" that forms a sort of helix patterns. This might have been done around hooks of some kind.

The other observation is that the stitching/lacing really does just look like a somewhat jagged line from normal viewing distances. We don't want to be creating the WWI modeling equivalent of the 1/4" wide "panel lines" which some WWII models might imply about the full scale.

On my 1:6 scale Snipe I'd imagine that the lacing shouldn't actually be much more than about 1/8" to maybe 3/16" wide (from top row of eyelets to the bottom row). That's tough to do when the eyelets themselves are 1/16" wide.

Honestly, even the 1/8" wide lacing looks a little too big on 1/6 scale. The 1/4" wide lacing looks ridiculous.

Some examples of Fuse Lacing.. Two are the full sized plane. One a Camel and the other a SE5a. The model shows my attempt to recreate it (hope you can see it. it's small!).

I founb these photo of an alternate way lacing was done on the Sopwith Dove. The last photo shows how the lacing looks when painted. All in all, it's a pretty subtle effect.

Don.. that stiching that you posted looks like the stitching presented in the Sopwith Drawings I have from Replicraft.

I'm pretty sure it varied over time even at Sopwith, let alone other UK manufacturers. From what I can make out in the photos in the Snipe datafile, the zig-zag style lacing was used (as well as a "figure 8" style on the vertical lacing).

Here's another late night experiment with lacing. My last attempt was WAY too bumpy so I sanded the styrene "eyelets" down to almost nothing (I'd do this before mounting the strips on the fuse) and then used a more scale type thread.

But the photo of the Dove lacing also got me thinking that maybe they "double laced" the zig-zag style to get the external V pattern. Notice the double-lacing on the left of the photo and the single-lacing on the right.

I also makes sense to me now why the Dove style lacing might be preferred. Doing it that way, with the seams overlapping, eliminates any potential gap.

Don I discoverd that that type of stitching is called back stitching. The colored threads represent the steps you go through to get that effect.

Bob
That's how I did the combing on my cockpit...............it turned out very well, and looks great.

Craig

Thanks Bob. That's what I'll be doing on my Snipe but will need to think about eyelets since what I'm using for the fuse lacing will be too big.

Craig, that looks outstanding!

So what do you guys think about the single vs. double-lacing idea I mention above? I'm strongly leaning towards doing the double lacing at the moment.

The double looks the best seems to look fuller, the single............................seems to be missing something. If you have documentation, go with the documentation. That 's my 2 cents worth.

Craig.

No documentation in the strict sense of precisely duplicated features of one particular Snipe. Instead I'm going for an "authentic impression" based on whatever informtion I can pull together from the recourses available (datafine and photos from the web). So far none of these offer an unambiguous method for the lacing on the Snipe.

But I'm leaning towards the double lacing for the following reasons: 1) it looks neat 2) It make sense that they would have done it this way for the same reason that they did the "back stitching" on the cockpit, that is, dependability and 3) there are zig-zags on the datafile drawings. But I'm guessing that this got done in different ways on different Snipes by different field mechanics.

Here are three more photos that show other ways of doing the lacing. The first is on a BE2 and the lacing goes in an out of the seam. The other two are of the Bristol Fighter where the lacing goes back and forth across hooks. This appears to be similar to what was done on the vertical seam on the Snipe.

Craig good job on your combing.. thats how I did mine as well (shown in the picture).

Don you should probably use what ever method looks best on the plane and is the least painful.

Bob, that's EXACTLY what I decided after spending over an hour single-lacing the piece I've prepared. I'm not sure if the eyelets would take the stress of a second thread -- and I'm not sure I'm up for another hour of lacing!

But perhaps most importantly at 1/6 scale the double-lacing looks just a bit too heavy. If I were doing a 1/4 scale Snipe, I'd definitely do the double as I really like the way it looks.

I'll post some photos of the result on my Snipe thread.

Don good choice then. WHEN you do your 1/4 scale plane your going to have all the details nailed down!

The scary thing is that I've actually found myself thinking about a 1/4 scale Albatros CI (or CIII). I'm afraid that when I finally give in to the dark forces of 1/4 scale it may be the last model I ever build!

Don come.. come over to the dark side.. you'll like it!

CIII, 1/4 scale, 115"

Oh, yeah, baby!!!

I think you'll be ready for a 1/4 scale Hawker Hind very soon [8D]