Hello All,
I’ve been posting here and there about some of the different areas of this model I’ve been working on, however it’s time to put it all together and do a Work In Progress posting. This is likely to be an extended version, as my construction methods are not fast, and the time I have to devote to modeling is no plentiful.
The subject is Hans Dortenmann’s “Yellow 1”:
I really like that this was the longest service “Dora”, and the stories accompanying it from the pilot add color. It’s possible that I’ll change the scheme where it’s “Black 1” or “Red/Orange 1” with only the rudder yellow, but for now this is what I’m going with.
In full disclosure, I started this model for Daywalker’s “Reich Defender III” Group Build, however that was a miserable failure from me; there was no way I could finish in time. Yet, I’m still plugging along on this kit, looking forward to seeing it on my shelf.
Since this has been in progress for nearly a year so far, this story won’t be in the normal order that you would expect. Today’s installment will focus on the work that went into dropping the elevators.
As a bit of background, I wanted to reposition at least some of the control surfaces. I’m using the Eduard flaps and will have them dropped a bit, but felt the need for a bit more. Between the rudder or the elevators, I chose the elevators. I’ve got a lot of reference material on the 190, and I don’t see a particular trend as to what the elevators look like on the ground. Mainly, I see a pretty even mix of neutral, lowered or raised. So, speaking to a couple of my colleagues who are pilots, they say it’s usual for the elevators to drop when on the ground, and in the absence of hard evidence to the contrary in reference materials, this is what I decided to go with.
That also meant there were two changes that had to be made: The elevators have to be dropped, and the control yoke had to be positioned forward. Going into this, I had imagined that repositioning the yoke forward would be the hardest part. Not really - dropping the elevators wasn’t easy either.
The Elevators
This was my first attempt at the procedure. Thankfully I had a few extra pieces left over from my 190 A build that just recently concluded. In the end, the best fortune I had was using the excellent Mission Models scriber to deepen the panel lines and a trusty Xacto to clean up the end points. Then half round strip was cemented to the elevator and after drying was filed and sanded till the shape was correct.
At the same time, a groove was cut into the back of the fixed part of the elevator, firstly with the JLC saw, depend with the JLC scriber and then filed more till a groove was apparent. There was some matching necessary, but eventually this is what I came out with:
Overall, I’m pretty happy with how that came out. By no means perfect, yet pleasing to my eye.
The Control Yoke
The 190 has a rubber boot at the base of the control yoke covering the mechanism that actuates the control rods. In the Eduard kit, there is just a big rubber boot attached to the floor. In the documentation I have, and this photo from the National Museum of the United States Air Force, you can see a pipe coming to the base of the control yoke and that the boot doesn’t go directly to the floor:
In fact, you can also see that there is what looks like a square cross section under the boot. In one of the Eagle Editions books that shows an abandoned D-9 cockpit, you can see the second pipe going aft under the seat. So in addition to rebuilding the boot so that the column could go forward, I also needed to build the pipes and space the boot above them.
For the boot itself, I used alternating sized discs that were produced with my punch and die sets. I’ve got three different versions: The Waldron Sub-mine, another set that aren’t very good (and I can’t recall who made them) and the new set from CB Model Products. It took a few times to get something that I liked.
As I punched each disk, I also sanded off the “front” corner, so that as it was stacked up it had a forward “lean”. For the stick itself, I used the portion from the Aires Fw 190 A-8 set that was originally intended for use with this kit. (What a joke - it’s simply the exact same set designed for the Tamiya A-8 - there would have been major trouble getting it into this kit).
Here are some pics of what I came up with:
While it’s apparent that there is a difference in overall height between the stock Eduard and my new concoction, I’m happy with it. If you look carefully at the main areas of the column, there aren’t a lot of differences in the proportions.
So, there you have it. I’ll continue to update this post with new work as it’s done. And I’ll do a better job of showing real in progress photos - the end product isn’t usually very satisfying.
Best regards,
Mike
