Building the body.
I made 2 mistakes on this step. One mistake is in the plans. The neck collar base is 5 mm too wide. I fixed it by knife.
The second mistake, also the collar, I glued upside down, bit no big deal =P
Now it fits. Not as beautifully as I intended, but it fits.
I won't glue the wing to the body while I have no servos installed.
Now I need eletronics, push rods, turtledecks, landing gear and flaps.
I'm not exactly pleased with the way the cabin turned out. Its too difficult to get the shape right. I may have to rethink it. I'm open to suggestions.
I had to cut a bevel on the central former, especially on the windshield area, to get it to fit right. The most difficult are is the nose cone.
I made a 3cm cut from the nose to achieve that rounded shape.
I made a 3cm cut from the nose area to make it curvy.
The back of the cockpit area should be placed flush with the score cut from the foam. You may use the score cut as alignment as well.
Just glued the back area of the nose. Wait for it to dry, and put the nozzle under the paper, and put a bead of glue to glue it down.
If you don't mind the suggestion . . . you might get a tighter fit on the nose if you switched to concentric conic sections, sorta like this:
That's at the extreme -- You could probably get a good fit with just 2-3 half-rings at strategic spots on the nose, and once you've got the patterns straight, you can build it dry and it'll fit perfectly when you set it on the nose.
The More I look at it, the more I think i'ts not THAT bad for a prototype.
Maybe I don't have to fix a lot of things. Just add some more room to the posterboard pieces.
One small detail: the rudder has a counter balance. Where your hinge is is supposed to be the counterbalance. If you draw a line from the top of the rudder down to there the flap part of the bottom starts, you would have the proper hinge line. I doubt the way you have it now will make a difference in flight characteristics, and it is definitely easier.
I see what you mean. I must admit, that was a lack of research. I guess I could find a way to make the hinge to be were it must be. I also saw that many dc3/c47 kits change the rudder in order to make it easy to assemble.
Maybe I can find another way to do it. I have some ideas now, using a lollipop tube and some piano wire. Thank you so much.
I guess I won't be finishing this project until September. The wedding preparations are time (and resource) consuming. And then there is the honeymoon.
Thanks for sharing as much as you have this far,hope you see it done.It's a great help to the comunity.As far as prototypes go I think you have something to be proud of there for sure.That spartan is a neat plane too,it reminds me of my first I had years ago.It was a C goldberg freedom 20 and one of the best flying planes I've had.