Building the Piper Super Cub 95 (Kit 602)

[Mfezi]

Now, for the custom registration. I needed it in blue to fit with the rest of my chosen colour scheme, so the decals that came with the kit were not going to work. In one of the pictures in the previous post, you will notice that I drew the registration letters on the CAD drawing and in the correct scale. These were then printed separately using a thin outline. The "ZU" part of the registration is used in South Africa for Non Type Certified Aircraft (similar to US LSA) and the KIR is simply the first three letters of my son's first name:


The little circles are for the wheels, but those I will show in my next update.

You can actually print directly on tissue paper, but a few previous projects had taught me that it only works for small details. If you try to print on a big sheet of tissue, it always tends to get crumpled up in the printer. That is the reason why I did not print the blue tissue pattern in my previous post directly.

I work on A4 paper, in the US you will obviously do this on Letter size. The previous paper print served two purposes:
1) It was a test and I could check the size, etc. against the model.
2) It showed me exactly where on the paper the printed image was going to come out, so I could align the tissue correctly.


The next step is to cut a small piece of the blue tissue that is just big enough for the letters. Once again, too big a piece of tissue and you are likely to end up with disaster as your printer eats it up. I placed this tissue over the letters and taped all the edges carefully down with clear sellotape. The type of tape is not very important, but it is a good idea to use something thin (in other words, not masking tape) so it won't interfere with your printer's feeder. In the photograph below, you can just make out the previous test print showing through the thin tissue:


This prepared sheet of paper with tissue stuck to it was then put into my printer. By the way, the printer is a simple inkjet printer. It probably would work just as well in a laser printer, but I haven't tried that before. Of course you need to make sure the paper goes in exactly the same orientation it went the first time. To make sure I didn't stuff that up, I actually drew a small arrow on the paper before I sent it through the printer the first time.

I was lucky and everything went well the first time, so this is what I ended up with - a nicely printed outline ready to cut out:


Before cutting the letters out, I removed the tissue, chalked the back and sealed it again with some sprayed on clear dope, exactly as I had done with the earlier blue tissue patterns. The dope also helped to stiffen the tissue slightly, making cutting a bit easier.

In order to apply the letters, I took a small piece of low-tack Tamiya masking tape and marked the location of each letter from my original paper template. I also cut out the paper template at this point, held it where I wanted it on the model and then used that to place the masking tape. Once the masking tape was placed, I started gluing each letter, one at a time. Again the dope was simply re-activated by flooding clean thinners through using a small brush. The picture below should explain how the masking tape helped to place the letters:


And with the masking tape guide removed:


By the way, the cowl was not painted blue, but also covered in blue tissue paper. That is a process that needs a bit of patience, but nothing particularly difficult. I used a few pieces of wet tissue to cover the cowling, using the normal dope and thinners approach. The picture also shows the canopy already glued on. I used a very cheap acrylic glue that works well as it dries completely clear. You should be able to recognize acrylic glue (as opposed to PVA glue) by the fact that it looks milky white with a slight blue tint in the bottle. At least, all acrylic glues I have seen here looked like that.

[Mfezi]

Thanks, David!

Here is a small update:

As most of you know, you get these little dinky red wheels in the kit. Of course they look nothing like the wheels you typically see on a Piper Cub. I had some of the nicer Guillows wheels lying around, but I thought I might be able to improve the kit wheels a little. So, what I did was to paint the wheels black: I think I used Tamiya rubber black, which is a slightly dirty black and that works better to simulate the colour of tyres than "normal" black. Next I cut out smaller disks from the blue tissue - these are the disks that you saw earlier when I showed how I did the registration letters. Once the black had properly dried, the blue disks were "glued" on, using "Future" floor polish - a clear acrylic that is often used as a gloss coat on plastic models. It works well as a glue, and because it is acrylic, I was sure it wouldn't attack the black paint underneath. By soaking the tissue disks, they easily complied with the raised areas of the wheels as they dried.

The idea was to use smaller disks - giving the illusion of smaller wheels and bigger tyres. To help with the contrast, the tyres were given a matt clear coat, while the hubs were kept in the glossy finish obtained by several coats of the floor polish. At a distance it seems to work ok - at least, I think it is much better than the plain red plastic of the unpainted wheels:


As I mentioned before, instead of painting the cowl, I opted to also cover it in tissue. The process was to give it a few coats of thinned dope and to let that cure. The thinners will obviously attack the ABS plastic, so take care not to touch the cowl until the dope had fully cured! Once cured, I covered the cowl using a few smaller pieces of wet Esaki tissue. Once dry, the overlaps were gently sanded and re-coated in dope a few times. Obviously you must be very careful not to sand through the tissue. The final result was pretty good. The black oil cooler intake is simply a small strip of black tissue:


On the picture above, you will notice an intentional buildup of the acrylic glue to fill the space between the windscreen and the nose of the aeroplane. The texture of the glue is overemphasized by the flash, and in normal light you don't really see the line of the transparent, rubbery glue. However, here a bit of trial-and-error cutting and fitting could have improved the fit of the windscreen, so that the extra glue would not have been needed. This particular point is probably the worst area of my build.

One thing that I forgot to describe, is what I did with the tailwheel assembly. What you get in the kit is just a balsa piece that is glued to a balsa stick, which vaguely looks like a tailwheel in outline. To improve it a little, I covered the whole assembly in black tissue. I then masked the wheel itself, and sprayed the strut in silver. Finally, I made a small dot where the centre of the wheel is supposed to be. Once again I think the final effect is a nice improvement on just the bare wood:


At this point, everything was essentially ready for final assembly:

[Billy Mc]

Looking good! I'm interested to see how your CG comes out. Mine is tail heavy.

[davidchoate]

thats beautiful. i hope mine turns out as good