Without really trying to, I seem to have made my "signature model" the one recreated from a couple of old photos without a previously published plan: all Sopwiths, of course! The Gordon Bennett racer, the Bee aerobatic plane, the STLBP and lots more just waiting to be discovered. I find it fascinating and probably the most enjoyable part of the hobby, although I must admit that watching one of these models fly for the first time and looking good in the air, comes close. Mind you, there have been times when I could have chucked the whole lot in the bin: the Bee nearly re-kitted itself at Kings Park before it got more than three feet off the ground and all because I believed my own C of G figure!
So how does it go? The best way
is to take a holiday in southern Spain, sit in the sun with books,
coffee, bread and wine on the table and fill a sketchbook with
ideas. I did this in 2000 and still have three-quarters of those
projects unstarted. A sketch for the Bee is shown here. I got
the proportions about right but until I got home could not work
out how the top wing was fixed onto the fuselage, or where the
dihedral break came. Once home, I scanned and I enlarged the little
photos I had to A4 size, and then drew all over them to find how
things worked and where wires and struts began and ended. Then,
with only the wing chord and wheel diameter as "givens"
I drew up a 1/20th scale 3-view as accurately as possible. This
led to a 1/9th plan, with wood sizes, former locations and so
on sketched in. The constant checking that is part of the drawing
process always reveals more about the aircraft, and my estimate
of the Bee's span changed twice, down to the 18 ft that I now
think is pretty close.
Unfortunately this gave a model
size of only 24" (might make a really neat foam indoor model
for GWS hardware), so I redrew the plan to 1/8th and 27"
span, which made the cowling look quite large! Once settled on
this scale I immediately built the fin and rudder, covered, painted
and marked them to give me something to go for. The fuselage and
wings followed quickly and before long I was able to photograph
a "kit of parts" for Trevor: this was published in the
Dec 2002 Newsletter. And there it stuck, I'm afraid. One problem
with this "research, draw, design, build" process is
that there is always something else to get one's teeth into: in
this case it was indoor flying and foam. The SS3 and the STLBP
took up my modelling time for a few weeks until Tony Dowdeswell
rang to ask if I had anything in the pot for FSM. A frantic week
of drawing up a tidy plan and doing the usual finishing touches
before Wendy and I jetted off to New Zealand. And it hadn't even
flown! I can just hear the Chairman's words ringing in my ears
"I hate free plans, they are never checked for accuracy (or
flight!)". But after the re-kitting near miss at Kings Park,
I moved the battery forward a bit and the next quiet evening hand
launched into a rapidly darkening sky. I don't know which hit
me first: relief that it flew at all, or pride that it flew so
well! I could now truthfully finish my FSM article and put the
whole thing to bed, satisfied that if Clive did build it, he'd
get good value for money!
Not a bad result from a day in the sunshine, eh?