Sopwith Dolphin - Wings

At last, I've got round to doing some more work on the Dolphin. Before finishing off the fuselage, I thought I'd try to work out how I'm going to make the wings. There are two main features of the wings that are going to be tricky to reproduce: the camber and the aerofoil section. And I don't just have to get it right once: I have to make four of them, all identical.

I did at first think of using the wings from a Camel; but apart from the fact that this sounds like one of those hard-to-source ingredients favoured by witches, the wings of a Camel are too short, though the chord is about right. Also I want the main components of the Dolphin to be scratch-built (I've already decided I'm going to use off-the-shelf Vickers, Lewis and wheels).

I've seen descriptions of methods that involve wrapping a skin round a core, but at this scale, there isn't a lot of thickness to play with so I thought to start with I would try carving a solid wing. I thought I could probably carve a reasonable aerofoil section from 1mm sheet, but the camber was going to be difficult, so I decided to preform it.

First of all, I cut a length of sheet, just wider than the wing length. I was going to try preforming it with boiling water, so I needed some way of keeping it in shape. A cafetiere did the job:

That seemed to come out OK, but I had the feeling that it might lose its curve in handling, and this proved to be the case but I think the camber came out OK.

The next job was to cut a piece the right width for the wing. Now came the main difficulty of sanding: on a piece of plastic this length, it's difficult to keep an even pressure all the way along and get an even cross-section. To get round this, I glued a length of thick plastic strip near the trailing edge using liquid poly. This stiffens the whole piece and spreads the pressure during sanding. It also makes it easy to hold it at the right angle.

Once I'd done this, the business of carving the cross-section was very easy. The difficult bit was getting the temporary handle off again. On my first attempt, I ripped a piece out of the trailing edge because I'd used too much liquid poly in the first place. For my next go, I'll use a wider piece of sheet, and just glue the stiffener at each end; then it doesn't matter if the sheet gets slightly damaged, as long as there's a usable section in the middle.

The next job was to carve the wingtips to shape, using the Windsock plans as a guide:

I scored the ailerons, but I'm not going to bother cutting them out for this test. The results can be seen at the top of this post. Here's another view:

The next problem is how to represent the rib tapes. Using the skin method allows you to use the reverse-scoring technique. I could try this, using very thin sheet. But it would be difficult to make it conform to the wingtips. Another idea is to mask off the intervals between the ribs and spray a couple of coats of paint. This would give quite a subtle effect, I'm hoping.

For the moment, I'm going to leave the wing for a while and see if it has any tendency to curl or lose its camber. The next job is to finish off the fuselage. I've noticed that the nose is not quite right; it slopes a bit. So the first thing to do is reset it, so to speak. But I'm putting off this rather delicate task.