Colin Leighfield

I’ve thought about it, I noted you saying that rigging yours took a long time at the field and I want to work my way around that. Still thinking about the detail, i’ll finish up sorting it out as I go along! One more wing panel covered today.

I’m thinking of a couple of screws into the carbon-fibre tubes. I’ve used that before, I don’t think the span-wise loading is very high. I don’t want to use the rigging wires to do that.

It’s got all of the right ingredients, as long as you can minimise those duct losses.

As far as I could tell it was right? Also I’m looking to have the wing bays pre-rigged and assembled if I can, to slide onto the carbon-fibre rods and minimise the messing-about time at the airfield. I’ve seen it done.

I’m covering the wings before finishing off the fuselage.

Tailplane and elevator covered with Solartex and joined. Another job done!

I’m sure that will improve things Simon. When a skint school-kid, the only things I could afford to make were chuck-gliders! I enjoyed drawing up my own and tested all kinds of ideas, deltas, swept wings, canards etc. I also worked my way through the WW2 fighters and although being profile, they were scale in every other way. Spitfires always flew well, in spite of the fairly small tailplane. I do remember though having problems with the Typhoon. It was completely unstable directionally and would finish up going half sideways into the grass. In desperation I cut the chin radiator off and hey presto! It flew perfectly, though now looking more like the original prototype Tornado than a Typhoon! The point though was it made me aware at a tender age that there has to be a balance between side areas in front of and behind the c of p. I’ve never tried to calculate it!

Before I wrote this I’d missed out the last page of your posts, which answered the questions I was asking, so this is the edited second attempt! What a build though Simon! I’ve done some Depron planking and it works well, but the amount of work in doing it on projects like this is huge! The way you are doing it combined with 3D printed formers and ribs is a proper combination of sheer old-fashioned skill and modern technology. You continue to amaze. The stability problem you describe is similar to what I have seen in the past with planes that have a lot of surface area in front of the c of p and relatively small tail surfaces. Enlarging them would probably sort it out, but it’s non-scale and adds weight where you don’t want it. A larger tailplane would tolerate a rearward c of g a bit better though. It makes you wonder why the original handled as well as it was said to.

The last few days I’ve been working on the tailplane and elevators. I’m using Dubro heavy duty hinges. Before covering I need to reinforce around the hinge positions. The glass-fibre dummy elevator horns and the aluminium tubes for the false elevator cables are in place. The working elevator horn was made from an offcut of the 0.9mm brass components sheet that Ernie made for us, folded over to make 1.8mm and soldered.,that has worked out ok.

It’s difficult isn’t it David? You have made the obvious corrections. Perhaps best to fly it a couple more times to acclimatise to it as it is and see if these are just characteristics that you can adjust to? I wonder if the full-size plane was naturally pitch sensitive. I suppose it could be possible to mix some elevator trim into the throttle control. A little down with rising throttle and a little up with reducing throttle?

Thank you David and Dwain!

I remember this one Simon! You’ll certainly have it flying again.

I’m now at the sorting/sanding stage before covering, time to put it together and check alignments etc. Here the differences between the Spanish/Yugoslavian variants become obvious. They’re for me the most interesting of the Hawker Furies.

That would be my instinct, not that it is necessarily correct! If you moved it forward say 3 mm it would at least be an indicator of what to expect and is unlikely to cause a disaster, I would have thought. I suppose the most important thing if you do move the c of g forward is what the nose does after you reduce throttle.

Isn’t that lovely!

Hi Danny, sorry I’ve only just seen your post, I had to leave this for a few days because of other things going on. (Decorating!). No I’ll cover them before fitting, but before I do that I want to assemble the airframe and check all of the alignments. Hopefully back on it tomorrow.

The next steps are around finishing off the fuselage and at this point I need to sort out the fitting of the tailplane and fin. Although everything looks accurate to the plan, on a trial fit the fin isn’t sitting right. The reasons aren’t immediately obvious, I’ll take a look in the morning after a night’s sleep! If thinking about it doesn’t keep me awake, that is!

Thank you Dwain and you Danny. What’s changed is that I’m getting a couple of hours in on this on most days now, whereas before sometimes I couldn’t touch it for weeks. Today I’ve been working on the second wheel, using a Permagrit to get the hub disc shape right and finishing off with fine sandpaper and sanding sealer. I think it’s as far as I can go with this type of undercarriage, although when finishing off I will pay some attention to fairing the length of axle inside the wheels back to the legs. I’m onto the completion stages now.

Thanks DD, we’re getting there mate.

Getting there, I think my interpretation of a Dowty Sprung Wheel will pass.

I only had a couple of hours this evening but the method of reproducing the wheel appears to be ok. I just need to finish carefully sanding the hub disc on the left wheel and it won’t take long to do the other one. When this is finished I will be on the home run with sorting out radio installation and control linkages and preparing the airframe for covering with Solartex.

The object of vandalising the wheels was to bring the outside face to flush with the tyre edge. I was surprised to find that the wheels were hollow, I’d thought that they were solid plastic. To restore strength undoubtedly removed by doing this I filled the centres back in with 1/2” balsa using epoxy resin and some Micro-balloons filler. It doesn’t look glamorous but job done. I’ve fixed the wheels on and secured them by soldering on flat washers on both sides, positioning them on the ends of the axles to replicate the full-size. Now I will be able to tidy the wheels up by fitting shallow domed hub discs, which I will make from balsa tomorrow. The flat washers will be completely concealed inside the hub discs. I’ve also given the undercarriage legs a coat of sanding sealer, then doped on tissue.

I realised that I hadn’t soldered the lugs for the flying/landing wires onto the undercarriage legs before finishing the leg fairings, so some work was necessary, but that’s sorted now. Next step in finishing the u/c was fitting the wheels, but it become apparent that the conical form on the hub was nothing like the flattish disc on the Dowty sprung hub. After some deliberation I decided that vandalism was necessary, so attacked one of the lovely DuBro wheels with my trusty Black and Decker Powerfile. Fingers crossed, watch this space!

That’s really good!

It certainly looks as if it will be, with that wing.