Detailing Retracts & Doors

Dec 31, 2006

Upper gear doors

Technically, the triangular portion at the trailing edge of the upper doors was attached to the lower doors rather than the upper doors. I just didn't want to hassle with the additional effort to make that happen, and risk the potential for something not sliding properly when the two door halves compress.

So, this area is part of the "upper" doors on my 190... nobody can really tell the difference looking at it. But, I needed the separating panel line the splits it from the rest of the upper door. To do this, I just scored the upper door with a cutting wheel and Dremel, then smoothed it out with a small hobby file.

Flipping the door over, I detailed the back side of the triangular area, adding the more scale look of the four ribs and brace. These were fabricated from styrene L-channel and some balsa scraps.

Going back to the front, I added the remaining scale fasteners for the doors. My retracts only mount in two places, and I used scale positions for the four fasteners at these two points. The remaining scale mounting points needed to be simulated to fill in the gaps as shown in my photos.

To do this, I ground some shallow, circular depressions into the upper doors where each fastener point would be, using a Dremel tool. I then cut some thin slices of a 4.8mm styrene rod and glued them into the depressions. They are not exactly the same size as my "functional mounting screws" but are very close. After painting and weathering, these will all kind of blend together for a convincing look.

Lower gear doors

For the lower doors, I had already done a little bit of surface shape detailing on the backside, back when I was building the door panels. Now all I needed to do was to do some light detailing on the front side. This was done by again scoring the panels with a Dremel and file, then cutting a variety of styrene sheeting details and a little bit of large diameter styrene half-round stock.

Once all the details were fabricated and glued in place with Medium CA glue, I hit everything with a couple coats of Filler Primer and sanded smooth. The end result is not competition-accurate, but is very convincing and has that cool look of the 190 pants.

Detailing the retracts

Now for the Shindin retracts themselves. Again, I really wasn't going after competition level accuracy here, and wanted to keep these struts simple and light, but a little bit of detailing was in order to meet my expectations.

First off, only two of the four main mounting points on the upper doors were functional on my struts, so I needed to simulate the other two standoff brackets that reside between the top and bottom brackets. These would basically line up across from the simulated fasteners that I covered in the previous steps on this page.

To do this, I used a triple thickness of FliteMetal, cut into narrow strips, to wrap around the struts at the standoff locations. I then cut a balsa block to shape and surfaced the front and back of it with 10mil styrene. Lastly, I placed it on the backside of each standoff position and wrapped one last strip of FliteMetal around the whole thing to hold it in positron (again, triple thickness FM).

The end result is a good "stunt double" for the two functional aluminum standoff brackets that hold the upper doors, and these "fake" brackets are much simpler and lighter. The only thing left to do now is mask all the "sensitive" areas, like screw holes/threads, and begin applying primer. Once again I chose to use "Self-Etching" Primer on the aluminum retracts, but there was no need to add the Filler Primer on top of it. I'll just paint right onto this primer when the time comes.

Wheel details

Now we'll take a look at adding just a little more detail to those great wheels from William's Brothers Products. Once you pop the wheel covers off you can start working on them. The thing is though, that these things press fit extremely tight in the wheel, and can only be removed by pushing them off from behind. Just stick something through the axle hole and push out the cover from the back side. However, once the wheel is mounted on the axle and plane, you won't be able to do this anymore if you ever need to remove the wheel covers. Read on and I'll show you how to remedy that issue.

Now, back to detailing... I first cut out the small triangular valve stem opening on each cover using Dremel tool and hobby knife. Next I got some styrene tube and solid rod out, and cut some slices off each one to build the hub details. These were glued in place on the wheel covers with Medium CA, but only after I scuff sanded the surface of the covers. To make sure I had the position dead on, I drilled a small hole into the covers from the backside where you can see the center position clearly marked.

Once everything was scuff sanded, I went ahead and masked off the entire rubber tire of each wheel before applying a couple coats of Filler Primer. Once the primer was dry, I sanded smooth and moved on to the last detailing step

The final detail step was to add the simulated bolt heads that ran around the perimeter of the wheel. I made these by cutting slices off of a piece of styrene hex-rod and gluing to the plastic wheel with Medium CA. One more light hit with primer and it's all ready to go.

I had a real tough time getting the wheel covers pressed back into place on each wheel since they fit so tight, but that's a good thing since you don't want these popping back off at an inopportune time. I did have to sand the excess primer off of them around the edges as it added just enough to stop the covers from fitting back in the wheels. Once I cleaned up the edges, I was able to get the covers back on... but still, with a lot of persuasion.

If you remember my promise earlier on this page, I told you I'd give you a tip on getting the wheel covers off when your wheels are mounted on the axle/plane. Just drill a hole in the backside of each wheel, about half an inch from the axle hole, all the way through the front side of the wheel. That will give you a hole to poke through and pop the wheel covers off when the axle hole is occupied by the axle!

I'd really like to remove all the masking and assemble the gear, doors and wheels all together and show you how they all look in the airframe, but I don't want to have to remask again later when I shoot my color coats. For now, we'll both just have to be patient. :-)

That's it! Detailing of the entire plane is now done and I'm ready for rivets! Of course, there are a lot of details that will go in the cockpit, but I won't do them until the plane is finished. For now, I need to get busy on simulated rivets and then I'm ready to start shooting some color on this bird.

"scale rivets"