So the Tiger Moth is a completely different build to the Pilot, not least in the fact that it's meant to replicate a real airframe. So once I'd covered, shrunk and doped all of the flying surfaces, my attention turned to all of the ancillary bits which help to make it look like a real Tiger Moth. Lots of time, cutting, sanding, profiling, bending and painting later, we had this pile of parts.
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With that job out of the way, attention turns next to joining the top wings together. First the oil tank is pinned back to the board, (the plain balsa construction in the middle of the picture above), on top of the plan it was built over. Then the wings are placed back over the plan they were built on and then propped up, so the wing tips are 9.5mm above the board. The inner rib was built at an angle to provide the dihedral, but blocking the wings helps ensure it's correct. The whole assembly is then glued together.
In order to cover the oil tank, VMC want you to use a paper pattern covered in tissue, you can either cut this from the plan, or like I did, download and print your own sheet of paper templates from their website.
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This template has black lines printed on it, I can only presume to mimic the metal corrugations on the original. Once covered I glued the edges of the tank and wrapped the paper around it. The edges were blended in using the water/glue mix from earlier.
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Attention then turns to finishing covering the top of the fuselage, first the finished top wing is used to aid placement of the cabane struts that hold it up, once they are glued in place, the top wing is removed and attention turns to covering the top of the fuselage. Like the oil tank, paper patterns covered in tissue are used to cover this area.
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Some of these pieces were a right pig to work with, the small sections that sit behind the cabane struts contain many changes of angle and the edges of the tissue paper needed folding over to hide the edges of the paper, this part drove me crazy.
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The finished article looks pretty good though, it's a little wrinkled in the photo, but it's still drying out and looks pretty good now, not perfect, but more than good enough. Close to glueing the wings on now and finally it might start to look like an aeroplane.
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