"Very nice sandy beach ... but the sea is really far !". French Aeronavale (Navy) Potez 25 TOE. 1934 "Pink Cruise"

[PanzerWomble]

Great progress , your skill with resin is exceptional .

[KevinM]

1 hour ago, PanzerWomble said:

Great progress , your skill with resin is exceptional .

I have to agree Guy and throw in one more tidbit I am starting to realize Hubert might just have a brain.

[CANicoll]

And this is "An update but nothing spectacular to show"??? OMG, I don't get half this much done on a complete build!!  Your work is amazing to follow and is far beyond my simple capabilities.  But fun to watch.

[HubertB]

5 hours ago, KevinM said:

I have to agree Guy and throw in one more tidbit I am starting to realize Hubert might just have a brain.

How easily you can be fooled 😂🤣😂 !

Hubert

[DocRob]

Fantastic progress Hubert. Glad that the production of the reinforced struts went well.
Your experiences with 3D printing will be kind of a guideline for us non enlightened. In surfing we call the first person in current dummy 

Cheers Rob

[Martinnfb]

Hubert, variety of your skillset and the quality of your work is simply fantastic. 

[HubertB]

Thank you guys, you are too kind with me ☺️ (only Kevin seems to have had an honest assessment )

You know you have beautiful eye(let)s, honey ?

Well some more progress today. I had prepared some time ago eyelets for the rigging, using shamelessly the late Les Delatorre's technique for mass production.

So I had a bunch of those :

They are made with 0.3 mm copper wire stolen from an old electric motor. I have a lifetime (and more) of copper wire supply with this one.

Now was time to insert them in all the anchor points for the rigging (and a proof that the holes had been drilled   ):

 

 

 

 

 

When all the holes were duly fitted with some eyelets, I was left with this, of my original 56 ones . And I did not loose one in the process ! (But there is one - the short one - which fell off the fin but i could find easily, thanks to a T-word - this one is for Martin  - bench. Which is why you can count 5 in the tray, when, of course, the number used is even, 52)

 

If you wonder, the hook is the tool used to wind the eyelet, after it is inserted in a pin vise. Des Delatore's website is still up and his tips for WWI rigging are invaluable.

By the way, the long double eyelets will have a fairing built around their base, to reflect the Potez 25's original system.

Once all eyelets were inserted, I fixed them in place with a drop of CA, using my very high-tech glue dispenser :

It is a sewing needle, of which I ground the tip to keep the  eye open, and inserted in a pin vise. When it becomes clogged by CA, a dip in acteone will clean it, and in the last resort, three seconds in the flame of a lighter and the CA is gone.

One last bit of work this afternoon. When printing the new parts, I managed to get very thin walls, for instance for the carburetor intakes. The walls were 0.25 mm thick. Unfortunately, this also means they are fragile, and, of course, one of the carburetor intakes did not like all the handling :

I decided to replace it with a part made in brass sheet: even if it was knocked, it would bend rather than break and that would be easily fixable.

My soldering skills still suck, but I managed to solder a replacement inlet in the proper cone shape :

And in position :

 

 

You may have noticed that the left inlet is bigger than the right one. The Lorraine engine was a W12, and the left and upper cylinder banks were fed by a single carburetor, bigger than the one for the right bank of cylinders. hence the larger inlet. Btw, this is another detail that Lukgraph missed, with two identical inlets supplied.

Et voilà !

Hubert

[Martinnfb]

Lovely work, full of unexpected details. 

[HubertB]

M
Jigs, masks, figures, the trilogy of progress …

Well, time for the Sunday evening update. A few hours of work this week, whilst I was struggling with a back-ache which was making sitting in front of the bench for hours in a row a bit difficult.

First, I am happy to report that my jig to glue in position the cabane struts worked ! To quote Hannibal Smith, « I love it when a plan comes together » 

As I am nearing the time when I will have to splash some paint for good, it was also the time to glue the cabane struts, an essential step before gluing the lower sesquiplane wings, and then the upper wing. Last time I showed the jig I had devised for gluing the said cabane struts at the proper angle. Installing the four cabane struts, the two side jigs, and the upper jig required four hands at some time, with a bit of stress as I had used 5-minute epoxy for the struts, but everything went fine in the end :

 

 

Even though the glue is 5-minute epoxy, I let it harden for 24 hours before removing the side jigs. I will leave the upper jig in place until comes the time to glue the upper wing. The struts are solidly fixed, but I’d rather avoid risking knocking them off in all the coming manipulations.

Then I started applying masks to prepare he painting stages. The fin pennant, and the « BZ 65 » code mask are in place, as are the lower sesquiplane roundels.

No pic of the lower sesquiplane. I have in fact started to spray them, as the underside of the main wing, and I will show them when I have progressed a bit further on this. The rudder is also masked for the tricolor stripes. Whilst we mention the roundels and rudder masks, I have also mixed the colors for the underwing « light blue-grey », the fuselage and upper wings « dark blue gray », and the elusive « French roundel blue ». These colors do not really exist as ready-made references from major paint brands, unfortunately (TBH, there is a good match of the French roundel blue in the Humbrol range, TBH, but I have given up using enamels with an airbrush). I am not really a specialist of French interwar colors, so I lifted the tips for color mixing from the specialists operating on the (dreaded by me, because of the bullying and French language massacre taking place constantly) French modelling forum « Master 194 »

I am also almost finished painting the figures and « fuel bowsers ». Some small touching up needed still, but almost there  

Meet Countess De Laborde :

Her husband Admiral de Laborde in typical French pilots’ gear (the blue background makes his coverall seem a lot more orange than IRL by the way) :

… the two « fuel bowsers », with their protective covers in place, and a harness :

 

The covers are thin packing paper rectangles with stripes painted with various Posca pens, then made to conform to the hump by wetting them with a large brush dipped into diluted white PVA glue. There are two layers of covers, if you look closely, as per original practice.

And finally their « drivers » :

(Muhamad has lost a finger, apparently  )

And a beduin to steer them in the Sahara :

 

TTFN

Hubert

PS : the figures are close-ups in artificial light, and not very sharp. I’ll try better ones tomorrow.