Messerschmitt P.1106 R - Part 5

It's been a very busy Q1 for 2011.  I've been in an out of the country since January, and I hardly have sufficient time to engage in card modeling.

Last February, I managed to get a rare free weekend to get back into action with my P.1106.

In my last post, I've only finished working on the fuselage formers.  I've yet to resume working on the wing and tail formers.  Not in the mood for 3d modeling at that time, I decided to start printing out the Pepakura unroll and start assembling just the fuselage...

BIG mistake.

Just look at these hideous pictures:

Notice how those fuselage formers seem to want to pop out the seams?  Well, when I was working on BV P.212, I surprisingly didn't experience any problems with the formers.  I made the formers of my BV P.212 by downsizing each fuselage segment by around 4%.  The fit was pretty good. 

SO I tried the same with my P.1106.  A lot of good it did me.

Another issue I had was with the wheel wells:

Blech!  I kinda experienced the same problem with the Heinkel and BV... I guess I never learned.  The bad fit of the wheel well was caused by the fuselage former pushing back the front walls of the wheel well.
At this point, I gave up.  I needed to stop what I was doing before wasting more time.

I had to resize those formers and solve the wheel well problem.

Not wanting to resort to trial and error, I decided to see how Metaseq's units relate with the actual scale outputted by Pepakura.

I created a cube primitive and set its size to 100x100x100.

I then imported the file to Pepakura.  I then set the Scale Factor of the model to 1.0 (1:1).  To my pleasant surprise, Pepakura reported that the length of the model is 100mm.  So I guess that means 1 unit in Metaseq is equivalent to 1mm in Pepakura.

So I created a kind of ruler objet in my P.1106 model and unfolded it in Pepakura:

Looks good!  Looks right! :)

So now, using my virtual ruler, I shrunk my formers by 1mm around the edges.  That should make up for the added bulk caused by the joining strips:

Now, to take care of that wheel well problem.  For this I decided to leverage the fuselage formers by getting rid of a wheel well's side/face if that wheel well's face touches a fomer.  To simplify the wheel wells even more, I introduced a set of lateral formers that would also double as the top walls of the wheel wells:

Those lateral formers would also serve to align the formers properly.

Assuming the formers are .75mm thick, I set the size of the slots to 1mm using my virtual ruler. Here's how the former assembly turned out.  Very promising!  The slots on the formers fit so well I didn't even have to use glue to hold them together.

I guess that would also require me to change the assembly strategy to wrapping/skinning the formers instead of individually assembling each section and joining them.  Gee I hope this measuring thing works!

That's all for now. :)