Sopwith Dolphin - Lower wings added

This is what a regency biplane would have looked like

At last, I've got the lower wings in place. You will also see that I've done the rib effect. So now everything's ready for painting.

Actually, after the last post, I realised that I had made a very stupid mistake. When I was drawing up the alignment guide for the masking tape in TurboCAD, I didn't bother marking which end of the wing was which. I thought I would just make sure that when I printed it out I kept it the right way up. But I forgot that on my printer the sheets come out upside down. The result was that the rib pattern was the wrong way round on all four wings. Unfortunately, I didn't realise this until I had done the spraying. As stupid mistakes go, that's pretty stupid, in my opinion; as I said at the time, in roughly those words.

So next day I had to sand off the paint from the wings, mask them up again and have another go (but not before adding some annotation to my TurboCAD alignment guide). In the process, I noticed that I had thinned the wings down slightly, which was slightly worrying. On the plus side, they now have razor-sharp trailing edges.

They came out quite well in the end, though. Judging by feel, the ribs should look just about right under a couple of coats of paint.

Attaching the wings was pretty straightforward. I hadn't bothered with locating pins or anything, though, so I built a jig, as seen below, to make sure the dihedral and location were right.

I used thick polystyrene cement to start with. Then, after leaving it all overnight, I brushed the joints with liquid poly for extra strength. I hope that's going to be enough. The fit was quite good, thanks to the straight-sided fuselage; but because of slight inaccuracy in the moulded section of the fuselage at the front, there were tiny gaps at the leading edges. So I've just now filled them with tiny amounts of Milliput.

I've also had a go at making the tubular centre section with brass rod. But my soldering technique isn't up to a precision job like that, so I resorted to 0.5mm plastic rod. It shouldn't come under too much stress, so when joined to the upper wings the whole assembly should be strong enough.

So now it's all ready for painting. But before starting on that, I think I might take a break for a bit while I move house.

Or I might just make the components for the undercarriage first...