There's Electricity in the Air:
Electric Radio Control Scale
My apologies to one and all for the lack of a column last month. I dutifully
wrote one and saved it to the little flash drive I carry, which I promptly
ran through the laundry. Talk about washing a disk drive. Washed that
little sucker clean it did .
I'll try to make up for it this month. Since this is a scale forum,
let me show you some of the things you can do to a foam ARF, (Almost Ready
to Fly), model to dress it up and make it more scale than it comes out
of the box.
In this case, the model is the Sig/Kavan DH.2. This is a 36" span
model made of molded foam with lite ply formers and vac formed detail
parts. The model is pre painted in a rather too green PC-10. The undersurfaces
of the wings and stabilizer are unpainted. The press-on decals are pretty
far off the correct colors. The shapes of the parts are pretty good, but
the model needs a bit of help to look good.
The trick is to improve the looks without adding too much weight. A
coat of paint is a fairly heavy thing to add to a small foamie model,
but in this case the colors out of the box were unacceptable and I decided
to pay the price. Foam will not react well to agressive paints like enamels
or lacuqers, so that leaves acrylics and Future as the obvious choice.
Plenty of colors available to mix from and completely foam-safe. I mixed
up a goodly batch of PC-10 and CDL which were applied with a wide brush
before assembly of the parts.
Homemade decals are always a great way to dress up a model without adding
significant weight. I took a scan of some roundels I liked and printed
them up on ink-jet decal paper. I wanted a further touch of detail and
found a photo of the AIRCO logo which I cleaned up and colored on the
computer. The logo was a decal applied to the outside of struts and boom
members, so I printed up a good supply.
Just like static scale modeling, scale R/C has it’s after market
details. There are more scales available, so the selection of aftermarket
products is a little thin compared to what you have for plastic models.
CAD drawing and laser cutting are making it easier to produce a product
in multiple scales and new products are coming along almost every month,
so that gap is slowly narrowing.
An excellent example of an aftermarket detail product is the Lewis gun
kit produced by Wright Brothers R/C. It consists of balsa, ply and paper
card laser-cut parts and some plastic tubing for the barrel. These kits
are available in a variety of scales from 1/12 up to 1/8.
What you get in one of these kits is a piece of balsa, a piece of ply
and a piece of card with the various parts laser-cut on them along with
tubing for the barrel. Laser-cutting detail parts is the technology of
preference in these larger scales just as photo-etched brass is preferred
in the smaller static scales. The thinner and easier to cut, (burn) a
material is, the less laser time it requires and the cheaper it is to
produce. This factor is significant when cutting thicker balsa and ply
and one of the reasons that laser-cut parts in general are not cheap.
Just like PE, the parts are left attached to the main sheet with little
nubs of un-cut material. Carefully cutting these nubs will remove the
part from the sheet. The Lewis gun is made by laminating a thicker balsa
core with thin ply pieces to form the main body of the gun. The drum pieces
are laminated to the correct thickness and the paper card top piece is
glued on as well as a handle out of a strip of tape. The tricky part is
removing and assembling the two small pieces which hold the barrel tube
and the tube below it these appear as small figure eight looking things
and the tubes are cut to length and slipped through the holes. This assembly
is then glued on the front of the gun and the drum assembly is glued on
top, Add a small piece of styrene rod or round toothpick to make the handle
and you are in business. Paint and finish the piece to suit yourself and
you have a right convincing Lewis gun.
The Kit provided a vac-formed pilot bust. A word about vac-formed detail
parts. This is R/C, DO NOT expect vac formed parts that fit together like
a vac-formed static model. I have found that even properly removed from
the sheet and dressed by sanding on a flat surface, most vac-formed parts
in R/C kits just don't fit well. There is a reasonable cure though. After
gluing the parts together as best you can and wincing at the awful seam,
there is a product that will help. Gorilla Glue is a urathane based glue.
Paint the inside of the part with a layer of this gue and then pour some
water in it for a few seconds and then dump it out. Set the part on some
plastic wrap or wax paper and walk away for two hours. When you return
the glue will have foamed up and hardened. You now have 1/16 to 1/8 inch
if sandable foam lining the inside of the pilot figure. Now you can attack
that awful looking seam on the outside with gusto.
The kit did not specifically provide for rigging and is considered,
(by some), to be structurally sound without it. I for one am not going
to build an un-rigged DH.2 on asthetic grounds alone. In addition to the
issue of looks, rigging adds an incredible amount of strength to the wing
cellule all for a few extra grams. I used Pro-Line 30 lb test fishing
line. It ties well and does not stretch once tightened. This is a greenish
looking line and I usually paint it a steel color before rigging with
it. I use WWI Modeling List member and IM contributor Dennis Uglano's
"DURAS" method of rigging. Basically stringing a long line through
as many pre-drilled holes as possible. On a 2 bay biplane like the DH.2
I rig the inner set of front and rear mainplanes and then use two long
lines to rig the rest of the wing. Once the rigging is adjusted for tightness
and you have checked carefully to ensure that you didn't induce any warps,
a drop of medium CA in the holes where the wires run through the struts
will keep it all secure. Be careful not to get CA on the foam. Foam really
does not like CA.
So for less than 2 oz of weight the model looks far more realistic and
is considerably stronger than one built OOB. As you can see, many of the
techniques used on static scale models can be applied with slight modification
to an R/C model resulting in a much more satisfying appearance. While
it does not even come close to a static scale model in terms of scale
accuracy and level of detail, the sight of it lifting off into the early
morning sky and tooling around the field in all its 1916 glory is an incredibly
rewarding experience.
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