Westland Whirlwind (fighter plane) part 1

Hi friends. There I am again. Firstly, a very prosperous 2019 for you all. All the best wishes and let's hope this year will be better than last year.

One day after my birthday, which was the 27th of October, I started working on Gerard Methorst’s Westland Whirlwind. The first thing I did was rescaling it to 1/48 to get a more common scale size, better fitting with my other big planes.

The end result it finally here, but it has been a long story. Click on 'the rest' if you're up for it. Lots of pictures too! I can tell you it was interesting, frustrating and yet also a lot of fun. This is the most intense build in the sense of working and changing and reshaping things I have ever done but it was certainly worth it.

A pretty little Whirly.

The fuselage gave me no problems in ways of fit or shape. But I soon saw the canopy was not correctly shaped, it was way too flat and needed a thorough re-design. Now I am able to do a little reshaping on canopies, using the flat parts and a pencil to redraw lines and test them out and then integrate them into a new better fitting design on the model sheet. I used gerard’s canopy as a starting point for a better fitting one. The curvature of the nose was not shaped well either but that didn’t bother me that much yet. 
What was really weird, was that the engine nacelles were pointing awkwardly downward when holding the plane level. These shapes, oval and conical, are too complex for me to redo, I am just a simple builder, not a designer. I should learn and use CAD one day...

I messaged Gerard about the bad fitting parts and he first, kindly and unasked, provided me with a new, much better shaped nose. After another week or so, he got me a whole new engine nacelle design. Wow, great! He created this model 8 years ago and willing to go back to it, I think is a very nice gesture. I learnt this model has a special place in his heart because of the connection to his artistic friend, the late Serge Stone who made really very nice drawings and paintings of aircraft, amongst them the Whirlwind, which inspired Gerard to create the model. (here's a link to Gerard's story (in Dutch).)

Top: old nose; Bottom, new nose. a big improvement!

I spent a couple of days refitting the new shape with Gerard’s colour scheme and integrating them into the original model. And although I started in 1/48 originally, I decided to reduce my build to 1/72 to fit in with the rest of my WW2 planes. The first fit of the new nose was perfect and it looked wonderful. A great improvement, The fuselage was ready for building. This is actually a no-brainer, very easy, good fit, and the new canopy looked great too.

New canopy

I have to admit, I didn’t use Gerard’s formers. They act as both formers and connectors between parts but I really dislike those kind of methods. I used self-made glue strips. In 1/72 you don’t really need the formers anyway, I use my glue strips as reinforcements and I shape them in the right way when they dry.

But the engine nacelles were still causing troubles. First, there was this curved cowling part that went over the wing It was one of two versuins of the mdoel I had, the other had a loose top wing cover. Both had fitting problems. The two ring-shaped parts in front of the wing were too small to reach over the wing’s surface. The loose top part was not in a right shape and the nacelle itself was too small to fully extend to the end of the wing. It needed to be bigger. 

On the right the original cowling top wing cover, on the left the desired shape.

Also, the cowling didn't line uo with the wing. I just cut this one off to a straight line.

I tried and tried and tried. Finally, an umpteenth try on the Whirly’s nacelles seemed to give me some succes. I carefully printed out just a wing root and a couple of redesigned nacelle parts I copied to a separate sheet instead of a complete plane. It looked a perfect fit, although a little bigger than the original design. It’s not that much, it was 102% of the original. It isn’t just the cross section of the two forward rings. It also had to stick a little further out at the trailing edge of the wing.

Oh yes.. That is what I mean. This looks good.

Yes. This definitely is how it should look.

And this too is exactly right. Great.

So I build the nacelle for the actual model I was creating and it looked just as good.

Errrrrrm.... Wait. What. Is. This.

But when I added it to the wing, something happened. Hey.. Wait a minute. No… Noo.. Noooooooo…. What the -! (insert a lot of nasty words) Still off by a big amount! And when I measured the trial wing it turned out to be two millimetres wider than the original wing.
Apparently, the printer settings weren’t correct after all. Even though I double checked. 
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!1!1!!!!eleven!1!!1

Grmbl.

Grmbl. (pt. 2)

Anyway, now I had five failures in a row. Three fuselages and five wings, more than half a dozen tried versions of nacelles and three cockpits. A big pile of rubbish, of which some hopefully still was salvageable. It was time for taking a break. Before I would stomp them all into a useless crumpled paper mess. So I left the Whirly alone for a while and built Gary Pilsworth’s Westland P.12 Delanne, which gave me some much needed result and satisfaction. 

A Result. Great. Now back to the Whirly.

A couple of days later, I tried again. And this time I took very precise measurements of wing and nacelle length. I think I figured out where the trouble was and I corrected it. But I left the two forward rings larger (102%), so they stuck out over the wing. I compared it with previous efforts and I thought this would be the final try and that this time it hopefully would be good.

Yes, it protrudes above the wing sufficiently for the top part to catch on to. So far so good.

And the protrusion behind the trailing edge is well enough too.

And it was. Phew.

So from there it was going smoothly. The nacelles went together quickly, since I already made them a couple of times. The props were made so that they could spin, using my regular methods of beads and pins. I used two bulkheads with some space between them  in the nacelle to guide the pin through to stabilise the propeller for a smooth spin.

The bead is carefully glued with CA to the punched-out hole. Any glue residue in the bead's hole would prevent the propeller from spinning smoothly so one has to be careful with the CA.

These sort of tools are so indispensable for creating nice curves.

Finally. Result. I am glad.

 

With just the outer wing parts the Whirly looks like some kind of British last resort kamikaze rocket plane..

The only thing left to do is the landing gear, which is actually a little disappointing. Just because I know that Gerard takes a lot of time to painstakingly measure the almost exact dimensions of a plane. I just always think the lack of a real wheel bay makes a plane missing, well, depth. It is after all, just an almost rectangular box. Well, this one was proof of concept, so I left it as is and just used the black covers for the gear bay doors area. The struts were made from ø1mm welding iron rod around which I wrapped a strip of 80 gpm paper which I coloured silver.

And yes, both props spin very well. Just a breath will make them turn.

Up next is a recolour in fictitious winter camouflage, a scheme I quite like. That one has got to have wheel wells. That wil follow in the next post.

For now, thanks for your visit and til next time.
--PK