Hi Guys,
Thanks for your comments, much appreciated.
Well I've been getting stuck into the Take Off Dolly today.
I started off by completing the nose wheel assembly, it has a strange forward raking suspension unit, though the wheel forks go towards the rear. It will need a compression oleo later in the build.
One of my major issues with this dolly was that I needed to have two pairs of hands to manipulate the wheels the frames and the axle all at same time. So I made a jig out of Balsa to take the wheel axles, and an axle substitute. I could then lay the various parts on top of each other, sandwich between the outer frame and then glue.
Once done, I could assemble the dolly parts already prepared. This took a Long..... time, adjusting the axles, the supports, wheels, etc.
Eventually I succeeded, and managed to get the bomber component lined up. This then needed, two V shape supports from the dolly upper to under the wing. These were made from four lengths of aerofoil section plastic rod, set at an angle on a thin plastic card joining strip then superglued together, and dipped into Baking Powder (Thanks Zak) to make a really hard join. These were then sanded to a really thin section before cutting the arms to length. It took numerous attempts but I got there in the end.
At this point I did a dry run of the assembly just to check the angles, joins, alignment. I have noticed the starboard wing of the upper component need to be fractionally higher, which I will attend to once final assembly takes place.
The Dolly is 95% complete, it just needs axle covers, compression struts, some rivets and the RATO pack mounted an fitted.
Then it will out with the paint and decals...….
Some pictures of the above follow:-
Bigkev