Sopwith Dolphin Retrospective No. 5 - Rear Decking

Here's how it looks with the rear decking:

The problem here was to represent the effect of canvas over longerons. I knew I could forget right away about trying to carve or mould my way to a decent result, but I thought that a sheet of plastic card, scored on the reverse, might do the trick. I think I've seen this technique mentioned somewhere before. So I tried it out with a bit of scrap and it works a charm. The scoring actually serves a structural purpose in addition to what you could call its mimetic purpose, though the two are closely related. At this scale, a piece of card just doesn't want to conform to a roughly conical surface; but after scoring it curls up like a little kitten.

The difficult bit was going to be getting the shape right. In theory, a perfect flat surface probably can't be curved to fit precisely: the canvas would have been shrunk to fit by the (PC10-pigmented) dope. But I could be wrong about that. In any case, I had the feeling that if I cut out a circular sector and adjusted the edges a bit, it might work.

After a bit of rudimentary trigonometry, I drew up a template in TurboCAD. Without going into the geometry too much, it was a bit more complicated than a simple sector, but the scoring lines representing the longerons were straightforward radii. I printed it out, taped it to some thin card, scored along the longerons, then cut it out. After three attempts, I had something that was just about right. Note the flat edge at the rear, where the curvature of the decking is very slight.

This almost did the job, but the plastic card still didn't want to curve properly near the rear edge. The solution, as before, was to follow the structure of the original, and add actual formers and actual longerons. The original would have had 7 longerons, but it would have been an act of demented obsession to try to achieve this. I used three, in this fashion:

I then went ahead and glued on the decking. Then, trigonometry having done what it could, I sanded the edges to conform with the fuselage sides.

Next: is the fuselage cluttered enough yet? Not by a long chalk.