Sopwith Dolphin - not much progress

Apologies for the lack of posts recently. I've been working on getting the upper wings into place, but in such a slow and cack-handed manner that I'm still not quite there yet.

The picture above dates from several weeks ago, and shows the Dolphin in its all-purpose assembly jig, with Evergreen rod being measured up for the struts. Once I'd finished doing this, I cut the proper struts from aerofoil-section plastic strut (Aeroclub I think). They ended up looking like this:

And that was where I made my first mistake. Trying to be clever, I had added location pins to the struts from thin Evergreen rod. But these were incredibly delicate, and when I started actually trying to glue the struts into place, the location pins had a tendency to break off. Since I was using CA glue, the pins couldn't be prised out of the location holes, so (getting a bit reckless), I was forced to do without. The result of this was that the struts had to be pushed one way or another to get a good alignment, and I ended up with smears of CA glue over the lower wing surfaces.

It was a pretty amateurish job all in all. And that wasn't the worst of it, because when I finally finished smearing glue all over the wings, I noticed that the effect wasn't all I could have wished:

Like the gull-wing effect? Me neither.

So after thinking about it for a few days, as usual, I ended up tearing the upper wings off, drilling out the location holes again and making some new struts. This time, I used a new more accurate jig; one which will also allow me to see the lower wing during assembly and provide a sanity check in the process of assembly. Here you see it in action.

So today I've started cutting out struts. Before starting work on these, I had another look at Windsock 54 and noticed that the front and rear struts are different. The front ones have a longer taper at the bottom, which accommodates the bracing wires going to the top of the rear struts. So my new struts will be slightly more accurate than the old ones, apart from being the right length. Here they are with their undercoat:

Notice the clever sprue type of thing I've used. When I was doing the first set, I just glued them at one end, with the result that the airbrush tended to blow them loose. This arrangement will be much stronger.

More soon, hopefully.