Vickers Wellington

[kitnut617]

Flying boat maybe, but some whacking great floats could do the trick .There's plenty of floatplanes out there with fabric covered fuselages a lot less durable than the Wellington had.

Now there's a thought ------ hmmmm!!  

EDIT:  AUW of a Wellington 28,500 lbs.  AUW of a DC-3 26,900 lbs.  Looks like the C-47 floatplane conversion will work for that.

[jcf]

and yes it is geodetic, geodesic generally refers to domes of the bizarre and futuristic variety

When speaking of structures geodetic and geodesic are interchangeable and both refer to the shortest distance between to points on a sphere or curved surface.

Geodetic also has another meaning, that of pertaining to geodesy, which deals with measuring the Earth.

[PR19_Kit]

Barnes Wallis called it geodetic, it works for me........

I've done one of those Dak floatplanes, and what a pig it was too! I hope anyone doing a Wimpy floatplane would put the floats directly under the engines. Douglas put theirs inboard of the engines by about a foot, thus creating difficulties for modellers ever since. 

[kitnut617]

I've done one of those Dak floatplanes, and what a pig it was too! I hope anyone doing a Wimpy floatplane would put the floats directly under the engines. Douglas put theirs inboard of the engines by about a foot, thus creating difficulties for modellers ever since.  

Sorry a bit off topic----

I found I had to toss all the struts in the bin, too short and not enough of them.  But Aeroclub's Contrail Strut Package came to the rescue.  Also found the main wheels were totally wrong, there's a real one still flying, or was a couple of years ago, and it has Catalina wheels so that's what I change mine too.

http://www.airliners.net/photo/Douglas-DC-3-G202A/0338369/L/&sid=580cae7246625373e08cef81785b8943

[PR19_Kit]

Sorry a bit off topic----

I've replied here:-

http://www.whatifmodelers.com/index.php/topic,20134.new.html#new

[Mossie]

The problem with that is that if you filled the fuselage with Helium, all the crew would talk in very high squeaky voices and wouldn't be able to identify themselves to air traffic control.....

Who said anything about helium, hydrogen is a much better lifitng gas..........

and yes it is geodetic, geodesic generally refers to domes of the bizarre and futuristic variety

You'll REALLY be wanting the exhaust flame dampers then, and good luck firing the turret guns......

Breathing in hydrogen would actually make your voice deeper!  Wouldn't reccomend it for party tricks though, it's very bad for you....  Usless fact No.724.

Anyway, back to usual programming, Kit mentioned Vickers doing their own whiffs.  I always think the Mk.V & Mk.VI were something that we'd come up with, with a joke cigar stuffed in the nose & plenty of PSR to follow.  Maybe something for another thread, but makes you wonder about how WWII aircraft would have developed had high altitude ops developed as expected by the experts.

[GTX]

How about a testbed aircraft with a jet engine in a pod or in the tail (as was done with Lancasters)?

Already reality:




Regards,

Greg

[PR19_Kit]

See what I mean about Vickers doing their own Whiffs? 

[kitnut617]

Anyway, back to usual programming, Kit mentioned Vickers doing their own whiffs.  I always think the Mk.V & Mk.VI were something that we'd come up with, with a joke cigar stuffed in the nose & plenty of PSR to follow.  Maybe something for another thread, but makes you wonder about how WWII aircraft would have developed had high altitude ops developed as expected by the experts.

I've got one of these on the go too, an Unicraft conversion.  It's not too bad, typical Unicraft stuff, but it's recommended for the Frog kit.  Which as it happens, never got released, but fortunately the moulds surfaced in Russia.  The only available kit from these moulds is the Marquette kit but you'd have to be quick as I've read somewhere that Marquette is closing down.  The problem with the Frog kit is that the fuselage is about 3-4mm deeper than the Airfix or Matchbox kits, which makes matching the conversion to these quite a major bit of PSR.  But the conversion matches the Frog kit very well.

Here's some photos of just how deep the Frog kit is compared to Airfix and Matchbox using the conversion as a pattern.  I don't know about the MPM kit as I've never compared one to the conversion.

[kitnut617]

In the top photo you can see that the conversion matches the Frog kit very well, right down to the raised lines.  For the engines I've used a couple of Aeroclub products, E084 Taurus engine set and P120 Vickers Viking prop set.  These have the added bonus of two spinners to use elsewhere.

On the Unicraft website is a review/build and the fellow who built it used a pair of P-47 props.  These look just about right but for one thing, P-47 props turn in the opposite direction to what you can see in the photo, so I wouldn't use them.  I've lengthened the Taurus cowling to match what's in the photo by adding the rear half of a Dakota cowling

[GTX]

How about a tri-motor (piston that is)?

Regards,

Greg

[Weaver]

How about a testbed aircraft with a jet engine in a pod or in the tail (as was done with Lancasters)?

Already reality:




Regards,

Greg

Now that's interesting: what are the engines (the jet and the inline piston engines)?

[Weaver]

What I've read about the geodetic design is that each part was about 18-20" long and that when a section was damaged you only had one or two parts to replace which could be done by semi-skilled workers.  Such major structural damage to any other design resulted in the aircraft being consigned to the repair factory where it would wait to be repaired, whereas the Wellington could be repaired by the ground crew at the airfield, usually being ready for the next op'

That's correct: it was VERY tough and repairable. The problem was that the jigs and skills used to build it were quite different to other aircraft and the jigs were hard to change, so once Vickers were commited to the Wimpy, it was hard to change the design much or switch to something else. It wasn't impossible of course, but it was never considered worthwhile.

[Mossie]

Nice looking build Robert, I've wondered about that Unicraft conversion myself.

The engine on the testbed is a Whittle W2 or W2B, I think there were two aircraft modified to run it.

There's a list on Wiki of all experimental Wimpeys:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickers_Wellington#Experimental_and_conversion_variants

[kitnut617]

Now that's interesting: what are the engines (the jet and the inline piston engines)?

Judging by the parallel burner cans and the large-ish straight tail pipe Weaver, it's the RR Welland. The Whittle (IIRC) had a tapered tail pipe.  The inlines are Merlins Mk.60's I think, the nacelles look a lot like what the Mk.VI had.