Beech King Air

The promised photos. The first shows a very crude setup to try to obtain an equal and accurate 6 deg. dihedral for the wings. The result is a compromise due to the very bad way in which the engine nacelles are represented. They are twisted totally in the opposite direction and sticking to the 6 deg. would make it impossible to align the engines in the vertical direction, so the result is as near as i could get but obviously not spot on. In the other pics the wings are glued in place. I am now working on the joints.

Thanks Ray, oh let those lovely rainy afternoons come back, a true modeller's dream.

Great work Brian ..they are realy taken shape now ...

Gordon wrote:www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHl3L5VajOc&feature=player_embedded

Welldone Gordon , what a good feature ...

Nice work Brian, and a well deserved aircraft on any Maltese modeller's shelves. Pity that there is no decent kit of the Kingair, considering it is used so widely both in civil and military roles. Hope to see them soon finished!

bcauchi wrote:Thanks Ray, oh let those lovely rainy afternoons come back, a true modeller's dream.

Amen to that Brian...sick and fed up of this bloody heat.....can't spend more than 15 minutes in my workshop....too stuffy...and to add insult to injury...my faithful airbrush compressor which has given me 35 years of loyal service has just died ....so modelling on hold at the moment...
in nannu

This is coming along really nicely Brian, especially considering how much work you had to put into the wings to straighten them out. Don't worry too much about getting the correct angle on the wings, at that small of a scale, I don't know if it would even be that noticeable? Is that silver paint or silver wax on one of the wings?

Hi Brad, that is rubnbuff. I really went to town with the polish as an experiment to see how close to chrome/silver i can get it and i was pretty satisfied. Used that wing as a test platform for my upcoming bike build. At the same time, the wax shows up any minute imperfections and scratches. And believe me, there were a lot of those.

Next up was the very obvious large radar housing on the underside of the fuselage. This had to be scratchbuilt. A very frustrating process indeed. I first tried making it out of milliput but the blasted thing just did not want to dry for some strange reason, it is still not rock hard today, after a week. Obviously it was discarded. I then produced the component from plastic. Glued blocks of plastic filed and sanded to shape. It is basically made of three parts.

Here you can see the first attempt using milliput





And finally, here is the part in place on the underside of the aircraft.


By the way, any suggestions for masking the round windows on the side of the fuselage? i need to find the perfect round shapes to cover them up. Have been unsuccessful up to now and i need to start painting soon. thanks.

Hello Brian,

Well done mate - it's always a pleasure viewing your projects.

Cheers.

Insomma Brian , your the one man job.....

That really looks nice and looks like some tiny detail to sand all that.

A couple suggestions for taping the windows. When I have taped dome sections, you can either try getting really narrow taped and use a whole lot of pieces and just keep working your way around the window starting at the top and laying each piece next to each other from the edge of the window to the middle. Or, cut a wide piece into a bunch of little strips.

You would have to test this on some practice pieces, but you could try some white glue and then see how easily it peels off, you could also tasked putting a wet cloth or paper towel against the glue so it really softens up or melts before you try to remove it to see if that's easier.

Same thing with testing, but maybe rubber cement would work? I have read where some guys use it in place of liquid mask, but I've never tried that.

or maskol for the edges...and the centre blu tack....

Dottore

I had maskol in mind but never used it. How do I get it to set in a perfect circle? That is my problem. I was thinking of a round small diameter punch and die set maybe i can punch out masking tape circles.The diameter of the round windows is roughly 4mm.

This is way cool. Really can't wait for this one

Steve

One other thing you could use it is the Silly Putty I sent you, it can be rolled out pretty thin, although I wouldn't go paperthin with it. I've found it is easiest to cut with a wet knife blade. What's nice about it, after you are done painting, you can remove it and put it back on the ball of Silly Putty and work it back in, for some reason, the paint doesn't matter.

I sent this link to Brian at his home and he really liked it, so I thought I would put the link year as well. Such an easy way to make circles out of Silly Putty or tape or just about anything else.

http://cs.scaleautomag.com/sca/tips_techniques/f/8/t/106628.aspx

More pics of the work i am doing on these babies. Here is the completion of the radar fairings/covers.







Next up are the props. The first photo is of one of the kit props, needless to say it is trash just like the rest of these kits. The props did not even fit on the engine nacelles they were oversized and irregular. First thing i did was loose all the blades, then i put them in place on the engines and sanded them till they mated with the rest of the engine nacelles. The blades were produced individually, home made from scrap plastic, mostly reshaped prop blades from the rubbish box. A very simple jig was made to glue them in place with some degree of accuracy. The result is far from satisfactory but given the crap level of the kits themselves, they are acceptable. Probably, when painted they will not look that bad......well i hope so anyway. Next up is the undercarriage, this is going to be totally scratchbuilt since the kit parts have nothing to do with the actual plane parts. I have lots of photos but have been told not to make them public so you just have to take my word for it that i am working with reference to the real thing.

Forgot to tell you that the kit props were 3 bladed whilst those on our aircraft are 4 bladed.

prosit Brian...impressive work as always !
in nannu

[quote="in nannu pec"]prosit Brian...impressive work as always !
in nannu[/quot

Make it X 2 welldone...