Blohm und Voss P.212.02 - part 06

And so the test build has begun....

I started by cutting out and assembling the wing formers.  Save for a minor problem cutting out the slots, everything went along smoothly.  I must confess though.  I used more than the usual amount of CA glue to stiffen the wing spars.

Here's how the wing is 'wrapped' around the wing formers.  Pretty good fit! :)

Here's how the wing tip is wrapped around its formers.

Wing, nacelle and wingtip ready to be put together!

The nacelle is first attached to the wing.   The nacelle fits rather well.  Unfortunately, the nacelle was a bit hard to assemble...

Finally, here's what the completed wing looks like.

That's all for now I guess....

Blohm und Voss P.212.02 - part 05

Done with unfolding via Pepakura!  I was expecting another unfolding nightmare like that of my last model (Heinkel P.1078b).  Surprisingly, this one unfolded pretty well.  I guess the simple fuselage shape and the constant chord wings made unfolding easy.

Here's a preview of how the parts will look like:



Yarrrr!!!! Thar bee cone petals on the engine spinner and the wing nacelles!  A necessary evil, I say.  Yarrr!

Unfortunately, the weekend is over.  I'll have to wait till next weekend to do that test build.

Blohm und Voss P.212.02 - part 04

I can't believe how slow my progress is!  I must pick up the pace one way or another...

Anyway, here's what I have so far.

First, the nacelle at the wing tips.

If you recall from my previous post, the nacelle was a bit 'fat'.  In fact, it looked more like a fuel tank!  According to the 3-view diagrams over at the Luft'46 site, the nacelle should have been 'flush' with the wing tip.

And so I labored for many hours trying to find the best way to make the nacelle fit the open edge of the wing tip.

And here's what I got:

So far so good!  Much better than the previous design.  Most of the time spent for this was to align the segments of the nacelle with a corresponding segment on the wing.  Doing this will help Metaseq produce a cleaner result by the time I do a boolean operation (Wing minus Nacelle).

Now my problem is that the nacelles are a bit on the narrow side.  Almost like landing gear struts.  If this ends up being hard to assemble, I may bump up the scale to 1:32.  For now, I'm sticking with 1:48.

Next, I spent the rest of the weekend making the formers:

The fuselage formers (yellow) were relatively straightforward to make.  Unfortunately, I can't say the same for the wing formers.  The wing formers required a lot of work.  Due to the dihedral of the wing, I couldn't just slice away with the knife tool to make the spars.  I had to do some basic trigonometric calculations to derive the wing angle.  Once I got the angle, I created a couple of plane primitives, which I then tilted to intersect the wings at 90 degrees.  After that, I did a boolean operation to intersect the tilted plane with the wing to produce the cross cut which would later be used to make the spars. 

Boy... I guess my high school trigonometry class had some use after all! Hehehehe.

Blohm und Voss P.212.02 - part 03

A little fine tuning on the wheel wells just to make sure they're big enough to accomodate the landing gears.

Note that the front landing gear has to twist 90 degrees before folding in.  This due to the space occupied by the engine intake tunnel.  On later jet designs, the intake will bifurcate to accomodate the pilot space and the landing gear.  (e.g. Mig 15)