Sopwith Dolphin Retrospective No. 2 - Fuselage Framework

Here are some photos of the first stages of the project. The photo below shows the first cutting of plastic.

First cutting of plastic

I didn't really bother with much research for this project, but I did have Windsock Datafile 54 handy, and this has got 1/72nd drawings, plus a lot of manufacturer's photos and drawings. The scale drawings don't show the positions of the uprights, though. If you want to make a Pup, Camel or Snipe you're better served. I decided to draw up a plan in TurboCAD, which I happen to have installed on my PC. To do this, I just scanned the drawings, imported them into TurboCAD, estimated the positions of the uprights from the photos and added extended guidelines for them on a separate layer. Then I printed out the drawing and made a jig out of mapping pins for the longerons, then cut each upright to size and glued it into place using liquid polystyrene cement. You have to be careful at this stage not to push the longerons out of true by cutting the uprights too long, but otherwise this part is not especially difficult.

There was no avoiding the fact, though, that the next part, the business of joining the two side pieces into a 3-dimensional box structure, was going to be very fiddly. This had to be got right, and the whole structure had to be square; otherwise everything else built on it would be thrown out of whack. But early on in the planning of this project, I had envisaged a strategy for this sort of situation. Instead of just going ahead and hoping for the best, I was going to invent techniques as I went along to ensure build quality. In this case, what was called for was a kind of jig to keep everything square. I though about it for a while, didn't really get anywhere, and finally put together a rudimentary jig that basically held the side pieces vertical while I went ahead and hoped for the best.

As it was, the whole thing ended up not quite square, but it turned out to be close enough to allow a tiny bit of fudging.

Makeshift jig

Framework assembled

Internal structure added

The next job was to make the fuselage skin. To do this, I added another layer in TurboCAD and traced round the lower fuselage outline. Then I printed it out, taped it to some 0.4mm card and cut right through paper and card with a very sharp blade. It's not too difficult to cut a nice smooth outline this way, but it takes a steady hand. I actually cut out a few pieces and used the best two. I drilled out apertures and scored panel lines with a pin. Then I built up the box shape and tried the framework for size

Fuselage pieces

It all fits. Hooray!

Next time: you know it's a proper modelling project when you start stretching sprue.