My Sea Flankers: An Adventure into my Imagination and Insanity!

[silverwindblade]

This is just magic to watch. I always love your work, and this is as excellent as always.

[su27rules]

    Great work so far,I love it!!   

[sykotik]

  this is just awesome! I love the new shape your going with - it looks very Shinden like - but better!
I will be watching this one for sure

[FAR148]

Hope everyone is doing well this Holiday Season. Been making a ton of process on my three girls. Still going to post at the same rate, showing my past progress as I continue to build. But here is a look into the future.




Happy Holidays! 
Steven

[Old Wombat]

 

[FAR148]

Thanks guys
Of my three Sea Flankers, my forward swept wing bad girl is the most complicated. There were a few questions I had to answer before I started. Like, having to figure out how to incorporate the design of the wing into the fuselage of the kit? How are they going to attach to the fuselage?  How to make the wing to fuselage joint strong as well as having proper aliment in all views? Also, I knew I wanted to show her with her flight controls in an unpowered position. That means making her wing with positional flight controls. Not too worried about scribing panel lines or locations of the weapon pylons. Can figure that out once her wings are made.

I knew from the start that the best way for me to answer those questions, would be to work it out in Photoshop. To start, I needed to get image of the upper fuselage into photoshop and have it scaled 1 to 1 to the kit part.  So, I took a photo of the upper fuselage with the nose taped in place. In order to scale image of fuselage to the same size as the kit, I had to scale same part to its known dimension. I know from where I cut her wing off, the width of the upper fuselage was 106 mm from side to side. And the length of the wing where it cut was 144 mm. Back into photoshop, I can now scale those area to the correct dimensions.  I then did a quick print to confirm.



Now I can open the top view of her new wing in photoshop and scale it to fit the kit. After a few rounds of scale, print, rescale, I want happy with the look of this. I decided to move her horizontal stabilizer from the wing to the fuselage.



I can then mirror it to the other side and start to refine the locations of the flight controls. It is also time to start to think about how I'm going to attach her new set of wings to her fuselage. In the image below, the area highlighted in red will be the main strict of the wing. It will go through the fuselage, keying in between the main wheel bays and there are a cluster tabs located behind the main gear bays.



I measured and cut a test wing out of illustration board. With the test wing, it makes it easy to mark and make changes before committing to the final styrene part. Once I was happy with its shape, I can now use the test wing as a template to lay it out on a piece of styrene.



To maximize strength and help align the wing horizontally, I cut and glued a piece of styrene in-between the two main wheel wells. It will also be another gluing surface. The main wing structure was cut out of 2 mm sheet styrene. After some sanding and filing to true up all the cuts, time to get her wings into place.







What's great with having a one to one image of her wing is I can print it out again and use it to make all the flight control surfaces.  Which will come later.


Thanks for stopping by,
Steven 

[flappydaffy]

tip top job!!! very impressive 

[Dizzyfugu]

Cool! 

[kerick]

Nice work especially with the photoshop.

[silverwindblade]

That is insanely gorgeous <3

[flappydaffy]

so cool! 

[FAR148]

Thanks guys
Is been a while since I posted an update. To be honest, I've been struggle just how I was going to make the flight control surfaces for my Bad Girl. My first thought was to make templates of all the control surfaces, making sure they fit good and then trace the shape on to a wing, tail plane or horizontal stabilizer of what's left over from the Academy Su-27UB kit. This would work for the outer leading and trailing edge flaps but not the inner leading edge and inner trailing edge flaps. The sections of these flaps are thicker and would require me to make a top, a bottom and fill in the shape of the section. It could be done this way, but it would be a ton of cutting, fitting and sanding.

What I end up doing for the inner leading and inner trailing flap was that I made them out of high-density foam to make resin parts. Using the template, I made to figure out the shape and look of the flight controls, I cut a blank for each of the thicker flaps. I then shaped and sanded the flaps. The high-density foam is not as hard as styrene, but it is soft enough to shape very easily with sanding sticks. Once I was happy with all the fit and shape of all the flaps, I then sealed them with a coat of resin. After the resin cured, I lightly sanded them smooth. These parts will serve as master parts to be molded and cast resin copies. With resin parts just as hard as the kit's styrene, I will have no problem scribing in panel line details.



For the middle trailing edge flap, I made and fit a template that would work for both sides of my Bad Girl. I then transfer the shape of the flap to the tail plane of my scrap Academy Su-27 UB. I then glued a piece of styrene to the underside to build up the thickness. After it was sanded and fitted for both sides, I molded it and cast copies for each side. I wanted the inner trailing flaps to droop a bit. So, I sanded a bevel to the mating surface. Now that she is starting to take shape, I can stop looking at her!







Thanks for stopping by,
Steven

[Captain Canada]

What a neat shape ! Looks great. Cheers

[FAR148]

Hi guys,
It's been some time since I last posted. Life, work, summer along with being lazy. All three builds are still going and the Bad girl who was the farthest behind. Her problem was her panel line on her wings. What do they look like? How can I sketch out some panel line ideas? And then how do I get those panel line on the model?  I started by printing out the wing template to figure out how I was going to make the wing and use it to figure out how and what her panel lines will look like. After a few days of drawing, erasing and redrawing, I finally came up with something I was happy with.



The next hurdle was to get her new panel lines back into photoshop and then figure out how to get them on to the model accurately. So, I then scanned the pencil drawing and redrew them in photoshop. The way I figure out how to get the panel lines on to the model is not my idea. I watch many YouTubers and one Micheal Cthulhu, often uses this technique. With the panel line drawn in photoshop and printed out, I trimmed off the flight controls (I'll do the flight controls later) I then cut out a bunch of little "windows" so that when I place the printout on the wing, I can mark a line in the window on the wing. After all the "windows" were marked, I could then remove the print and now I can just connect the dots, so to speak. I did the same for the underside.



Now with all the panel lines drawn into place, it's time to start scribing. I like to use Dymo tape and my Starrett scribe for scribe work. Also, I like too to cut my Dymo tape into stripes to get more out of it. Place the Dymo tape, make a few light passes, remove the tape and move on to the next panel. After both upper and lowers were done, I then add a few oval panels using my steel scribing template.





Here you see her with her new panels scribed in, her flight controls taped into place and I add her horizontal stabilizers which are kicked out to 10 degrees.



Thanks for stopping by!
Steven

[McColm]

Your attention to detail is inspiring