After some trials and tribulations building my first biplane Peanut I needed a simpler project to catch my breath. Last year I ordered and bought a Dumas P-26 Peashooter kit at the local model shop. The plan looked real good, the design struck me as reasonably lightweight, and the parts were laser cut, a new experiennce for me. In short, just what I wanted!
The only disadvantage in the kit was the sticker sheet; that would have to go and decals used in stead.
The laser cut parts were attached to the balsa sheets with very small bridges, easily cut. But what about the charred edges? They would have to be sanded clean. Mind you, I never minded cutting out printed parts. You spend a few relaxing hours, sipping tea and thinking pure thoughts and meanwhile a pile of nice clean parts appears on the building board. But this brown stuff dirtied my hands and contaminated my sanding block. Oh, well, such is the price of progress. To be fair, the lasering was very precise and the parts were shaped perfectly resulting in assemblies that almost fell together.
In an evening I had the flying surfaces assembled and started the fuselage spine. The next day the fuselage formers were glued to one side of the spine, and the horizontal side keel added. Using medium CA allowed me to unpin the fuselage and add the right side formers and side keel almost immediately. Adding the 1/16 sq. stringers quickly resulted in the traditonal bird cage fuselage.
Throughout the wood selection was very good.
I have thought about this little airplane for so long.....but others always seem to jump to the front of the line! I'll be watching this build with great interest. You seem to be off to a ripping good start.
The next step is the cowling. The cowling consists of a front ring of 2 laminations, a front former with a hole for the plastic nose button, a rear former, nine distance pieces and strips of 1/16"balsa for the sides. I didn't like the 1/16" balsa front former. I could very well imagine the nose button being pulled right through by a fully wound motor. So I added a 1 mm ply doubler at the rear of the former. I also did not like the round plastic nose button going straight into a round hole, so I enlarged the hole for a nose plug from two layers of 3 mm balsa.
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On the right is the nose ring with the distance pieces, in the middle the front former with the nose button and the new nose plug and on the left the rear former with a distance ring and a locking former for attaching the engine to the fuselage. I assembled the cowl with help from some plywood blocks to keep it square.
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After covering the sides with balsa and sanding everything smooth, I attached the cowling to the fuselage with the locking formers mechanism but I added a 1 mm ply ring between the plastic button and the nose block; this will enable me to adjust the down- and side thrust with shims. In the picture the nose plug is not pushed fully in.
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From the rear of the cowl the assembly looks like this.
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I suspected that the cowling could rotate with the motor running so I aded two small magnets in the rear former of the cowl and the front former of the fuselage.
The woodwork of the model is finished. Nose filled in with 1/16"balsa sheet, 2-dimensional 'spats' made up, undercarriage legs soldered and balsa mounting blocks fitted. This is a nice feature of the model; you can fit the U/C legs after the model is finished.
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Time to cover the model. Because of the tapered wingtips I covered them first. Before covering I gave the model one coat of nitro dope, sanded smooth with 600 grit paper. I use De Luxe Tissue Paste for attaching the tissue. This works well but I learned that it is necessary to dope the structure first to avoid the woodgrain rising. I normally start at the top and with these lightweight model I do not fold the tissue over to the bottom of the wing, just down to cover the edges.
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I wanted to minimise the overlap between the pieces of tissue, this meant that I had to work from the tips inward.
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The bottom of the wing is flat so here I could work from inboard to outboard.
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The fin and stab could be covered with one piece of tissue per side. The Dumas tissue behaved perfectly.
The fuselage was covered in strips. I started with the middle of the fuselage and cut strips to the width of three stringers. In retrospect this was probably too much as I could not avoid some wrinkles. Being the first strips I could cut them oversize, trimming them after de Tissue Paste dried.
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The rear fuselage was done with 4 strips, two port and two starboard. The final strips needed to be cut precisely to avoid exessive overlaps.
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The Dumas tissue came folded, unfortunately so I ironed it, reducing the folds significantly but not smoothing them completely. Fortunately, they disappeared after moistening the covered parts. And any wrinkles disappeared too. I was very happy with the nice smooth covering.
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The thing I wasn't happy with were the dark spots where I hadn't completely sanded out the scorch marks of the fires of Mount Doom! They were clearly visible through the tissue. I hope they will become less obvious after doping the model.
The cowl was next. One tusue strip for the side, a wide circle for the back and a narrower circle for the front. The centers of the circles were the pefect size for covering the front and back formers of the cockpit! I also covered and added the headrest and covered the two-dimensional'spats'. The tailsurfaces were doped and pinnend down. The middle panel of the wing is awaiting its first coat. Since the parts need to be pinned down for 24 hours after each coat to prevent warps as the dope hardens, giving this wing 2 coats of dope will take 6 days!IMG_5517.JPG
Since the rules state that a pilot is required in an open cockpit, I thought an instrument panel was a good idea, too. I found a picture of a P-26 instrument panel, resized it and printed it on decal paper. My first attempt was printed on clear decal paper but the blue tissue shone through the decal. A second attempt on white decal paper was better.
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The pilot is one of those perfect lightweight ones the Cech competitors bring with them to events. I bought this one for 5 Euros.
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He needs a control stick in his hand. The only problem is that he is looking to the right and I intend to fly the model in left-hand circles! Luckily his hand is held to the left of his body, which means he is steering the ailerons in the right way.
Looking pretty darn good. Its going to look amazing in the air.
Doping the wing is proceeding. The right-hand wing gets a 1/16" shim under the TE to establish some wash-out.
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After the required two coats it was time to add the undercarriage to the bottom of the wing, add the false spats and glue the wing to the fuselage. I always only glue the wing at 4 spots; at the LE and TE on both fuselage sides. This allows me to unattach the wing if necessary with some acetone. If this will be of any use with this mid-wing airplane is questionable. The rubber band is meant to get the wing square to the fuselage as the wing dries.
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I decided to add a floor to the cockpit aperture as it was a bit of a schasm. This meant that I had to cut down the pilot to the size of a bust. He does retain his dignity by having a (very short) control stick in his hand.
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The next step was to build the belly of the fuselage with the 4 formers provided, the bottom keel pieces, and the stringers. All fitted beautifully.
Hi Henk,
nice looking Peashooter...
Regarding images, you do not have to insert them into the text. I know they look better when in the correct position and text description, but they will appear anyway in the end, so needless repetition.
Just drag them into the box (or choose them for attaching) but do not "insert" them by clicking on them.
George
The motor was tackled next. The kit provided a print of an aircooled Wright engine; not very realistic but fitting with the Kit Scale theme. Also provided in the kit was a length of aluminum wire meant for the individual motor exhausts. These were bent with round-nosed pliers and glued to the back of the motor. The ring of the nose button was painted in a blue color. After the wing was glued to the fuselage, the belly of the plane was built up with the formers, keel piece and stingers provided. All this fitted perfectly. Next the belly was covered with 4 pieces of tissue; the fourth and last was cut as precisly as possible to avoid unnecessary overlaps. The red kit prop was sprayed black on the back and silver on the front.
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The next step was the rigging. I used thin grey coloured silk thread. One problem was that the rigging between the 'spats' was not clearly shown on the plan, so I did not include it in my 'rigging plan' and had to add these 'wires' afterwards. Lesson learnt: even if you build a model from a kit, keep being sceptical and question the plan and instructions in every step!
The model was now ready for flight, but I wanted to add the decals first. I copied the stickersheet on clear decal paper in my inkjet printer. The colour saturation was not as good as I had hoped, so I printed two sheets so I could have my choice. I cut circles and pieces of white decal paper to underlay the US stars and fin flag.
First I airbrushed a coat of matt varnish onto the decals because I felt this would best match the sheen of the doped tissue covering. But when the next day I put a decal in the water, the colour leached out. The matt varnish obviously did not protect the ink. Then I used a coat of gloss varnish and that did the trick. The only problem was that the yellow and red stripes on the fuselage did not have enough density and needed a white underlay too.
Was it the kit supplied decals that had the colour run in the water?
It looks great - very nice covering job.
John
Never having used decals printed at home, is the white decal material just to provide a white background so you don't have to print white on clear material, or can you print directly on it, leaving the white areas "blank"?
This kit did not have decals but stickers. I did not want to use them as they are too thick, too heavy and too shiny. So I copied the stickersheet onto decal paper with an ordinary household inkjet printer. Since these don't print white, there is a choice of printing onto clear decalpaper with a white underlay, or directly onto white decal paper but this involves cutting out the decals very precisely. I opted for cutting out circles and stripes of white decal paper, applying them on the model and then putting the coloured decals over the white ones. But don't forget that the inks that the printer uses are water soluble and need a coat of varnish to protect them before you soak them in water. And I found out (the hard way, how else?) that matt varnsh does't do the job. You need gloss.
I love Dumas kits but hate the stickers they supply. They are way too heavy and very difficult to apply without ruining something. I love how you overcame this short-coming. That little P Shooter looks great. Its going to to look marvelous in the air.
Thanks for the detailed explanation ST. I have an Epson inkjet printer(old) that used their Durabrite Ink originally and it I was able to print the tissue and water spray it without the ink running.
the Epson Durabrite ink is the only one that I have heard of that is water proof.
Mike Kelly posted this
I've been using an Epson Workforce 7710 since 2018. It does a great job and the inks stay fast with water, dope, Krylon, alcohol and thinners (I expect your previous Epson used the same inks). I've had the print heads clog up maybe twice since I've owned it but with repeated runs of the built-in head cleaning utility the heads returned to full functionality.
I think the comparable current model (which uses the pigment-based Dura-Brite inks) is the 7820. It seems to go on sale every couple of months for less than $200. It's 11x17 capable for printing and scanning - I make use of the larger format on most of my projects.
John
Yesterday I found the time to finish the P-26: the number 23 on the nose. Earlier I found that the coloured decals on the clear decalsheet needed a white underlay to be bright enough. With the stripes and the circles this was no problem, but the numbers needed to be cut out. First I thought I'd tape the clear decal pieces with the numbers onto a piece of white decalsheet but that meant I had to cut through two layers of decal paper, not easy! Then I hit the idea of soaking the clear decals and gluing them onto white decalsheet. This worked better. The size of the numbers made it an iffy job, but luckily when I soaked the finished numbers in water, the clear decal reamained firmly stuck on the white decal and the numers went on well and look fine (in my biased eyes).
In the meantime, the Peashooter has made its first attempt at flight in the hall. I had checked the C/G and the model balanced exactly on the point given on the plan without ballast! I started with the rubber provided in the kit, a single loop of 1/8" Tan II. This was much too weak. I added a loop of 1/16" but this was still not enough. Two loops of 1/8" proved to be enough power, but the model would not rise from the ground. I had provided for some down- and right side thrust so I removed the downthrust until the point that the P-26 would do three laps on the floor of the hall, a nice car as the British say. Fortunately they were nice left hand circles! A gram of weight at the tail provided a stall. Then the time ran out and we had to clear the hall. Looking at the prop axle there is still some downthrust. So at the next session this will be trimmed out step by step untill the model takes off.
Nice job. Looking good! :)
Hoping that it takes to the air on the next attempt.
ian
Good luck with the trimming - it does look quite impressive.
John