Nice work but how are you going to fly it out of the yard? Hopefully the neighbors are cool and let you take down the fences for a block or two!

Men with Hats?

For those who remarked on the lack of tires, wheels are covered and tires put on...

Good idea - hiding the rust beneath some paint always works :P

Oh, lord, you have no idea. I had to remove tons of rust a week or so ago from the wheels, and before covering them had to go back over them again to remove spots that had came up. Enough of that crap, I just painted the wheels (why not, nobody will see them) to hopefully keep the rust from coming back:



They're actually covered by scrap fabric.



Exterior latex primer paint to seal the fabric, spray paint over that.

Dude, that looks awesome! I'm still itching to start a Pup or Nieuport.

Out of curiosity, how much taildragger time do you have?

Around 50 hours in a Champ.

Because most of the WWI representational plans and kits went with a more forgiving Clark Y or similar airfoil, they behave a lot like one in the air and in landing.

But it's a short wheel base, which means it can be a lot of adventure in ground handling.

Nice!

I looking at joining the local taildragger club here tomorrow to see if I can unlearn all my bad nise gear habits!

I trained in a trike and found conventional gear aircraft much more natural, to be honest. Work into a mild flare and hold it. Let the plane settle on the runway in that position and it's a three pointer!











I learned wheel landings on a paved runway in a standard Champ, so it was a little more challenging, but not too much. It's just a little more power and flying down to and on the runway. Crazy enough, I did a lot of practice in a SPAD XVIII in Rise of Flight and it helped! Indeed, the SPAD XVIII seems like it's modeled on the Champ, right down to the glide ratios.

Like all aircraft, one isn't done flying a tailwheel until it's tied down. Then again, I managed to ground loop a tricycle gear aircraft (no, the wing didn't touch the pavement), so anything's possible.

Nice landing!

I damn near ground looped a 172 as well when I didn't fly the thing to a stop and picked up a little drift on the rollout. Not too bad really, but my first an only one of those and an eye opener!

The hardest thing I have had to get used to again is how light on the wheels these things are. Everything else might swerve or cock up on a gear somewhat, but it's amazing to be able to still lift a wheel off the pavement when you've already been on it for half a mile!

Loads of "little things" getting done - and they all take more time and thought than I think they should.

Transition piece between side sheeting and the top of the fuselage:



That's little bits of copper tubing under a rivet and a small washer, part of a long vinyl coat, and a leather boot lace.

The combing around the cockpit is the same coat cut up over pipe insulation and a black boot lace.



I cleaned up the lacing to where it doesn't have that sausage effect. I used the collar of the coat for the back of the cockpit since it fit really nice there.

Looking better and better, Dart!

My 7/8th scale Lewis gun is done! I had made a mess of the plastic gun kit I bought and rather than just mess around with it making it even more ugly, I decided to use it as a template and make another out of wood:



Yep, that's a half inch board with some big dowels I ripped with my circular saw, some epoxy, some drywall spackle, and some sanding.

On the other side I used a bit of copper tubing after figuring out it's easier than molding that bit out of epoxy putty.



Oh, and the top bit there is some left over plastic cutting board I used as reinforcement for the turtle deck stringer.

I recycled the magazine and the barrel end from the kit.



The handle and the grips were pretty easy to do - it's just some scrap and a dowel that I didn't really clean up - I just lacquered over them as they were, with little imperfections and stuff on them.



So that's done.

Now on to other stuff....

Ah, I see over in this thread you did build it! Good job.

Don't you have to paint the end of the barrel 'orange'?

I wonder, does the law require some particular instruments fitted in the cockpit or can you keep it authentic looking?

Not that you wouldn't want to have some new tech assistance, but hypothetically speaking, what if you wanted just what the origianl N11 had?

In experimental aircraft, there are no requirements for instrumentation of any kind (in the USA).

So yeah, I could put a tach in it and call it a day.

The FAA designated inspector and I would probably have to have a long conversation over it, though.

However, I like the "standard six" on the panel, even though the only thing I ever really look at in an aircraft is oil pressure and temp, and a glance at altitude and airspeed when coming into the pattern to land, and a quick peek at airspeed before turning base to final.

A compass is nice, too.

Windscreen is coming along nicely. Gotta trim the silicone sealant tomorrow and figure out a good mount system to put it on the aircraft.

[edit]

LOL at the Orange Tip. Funny thing about that - a guy restored a P-51 and got a Class III license for automatic weapons. He then purchased six .50 caliber and mounted them in the wings.* The FAA didn't care - firing from an aircraft is allowed under the "dropping objects" rule (it's only illegal if something or somebody is hurt or if there's a complaint). The ATF, however, asked where he was going to shoot them. He had some rural property and did a range fan for it, which satisfied the ATF.

I am amazed they went into combat with 47 rounds. The Foster mount was a long way in the future, so if one wanted to reload it was a matter of undoing the seat belt, standing up with the stick between the knees (which meant the engine was at full throttle), reaching over the top of the wing to the gun and replacing the magazine. And then sitting back down, putting the belt back on, and continuing on.

If one had a malfunction, it usually meant standing up to pull the charging handle.

Or just running for home.

* If one can afford to restore and fly a P-51, one needn't ask if one can afford six M2 machineguns, forty acres of remote rural land, etc.

I thought y'all might like to see the sort of thing that is inherent to home built aircraft, where there are loads of things that just aren't in the plans and are left up to the builder to figure out. What would seem to be a simple thing - the windscreen - can really make one scratch the melon and become creative.

Let's look at what was on the actual Nieuport 11:



No, no, no. It worked great for them, but we can do better. That frame blocks too much view for my liking, and it's a port hole in the middle.

This being 2015 instead of 1915, we're going to go with some nice shatter proof plexiglas and keep the general shape of what they had as a fig leaf to the original. I started with poster board, but it was too flimsy and transferred that to cardboard.



It's sort of Nieuport 11-ish, I think.

So now it's just a matter of transferring that to plexiglas and cutting it out. I read a bunch of stuff on how to cut plexiglas and some special tools folks use to do it. I went with a standard jigsaw with a standard blade. It seemed to work out just fine.



Cut out and trial fitted.



It's three pieces, and I got to scratching my head on the best way to hold them together. First thought was super glue and silicone stuff, but that seemed to be a good way to eat a section of windscreen at 60 MPH. What I need is a mechanical join using some brackets. They don't sell 7/8th scale Nieuport 11 plexiglas windscreen brackets in the store, so I'll have to make my own.

Figuring out how long they have to be is easy; the angle is another matter. Easiest way is to tape the whole thing down to the aircraft, take a scrap of sheet, and bend it until it fits. I actually have an angle measuring tool, but it would take me longer to find it than to do it this way.



Off to the aircraft section of Lowe's to get some steel stock. Apply bending brake, hack saw, and smooth corners on a band sander to make something that will work.

I do a lot of "dummy" labeling, even for simple things I'm doing right then. B is for Bend, C is for cut. It was easier to bend to the right angle and then cut off that piece and repeat than try to bend little short pieces.



Four little brackets ready for drilling and paint. They're all identical in angle to make my windscreen square with itself.



Drilled and bolted in.

I had originally though to just throw a nice bead down the seam in transparent silicone and leave it at that. The issue was I can't throw a nice little bead of transparent silicone, and my efforts at cutting it square with an exacto knife were similarly disastrous.



It occurred to me that while I've opted out of having an aluminum frame around the windscreen (as in the original), I can pay a bit of homage to that with a couple of little strips over that seam.

So I used my standard "take a piece of scrap and bend it until it looks okay" method of measurement and bent a bit of aluminum.

I didn't take pictures (I didn't know if it would work), but I found that bending a larger sheet to the correct angle and then trimming it thin on a paper cutter worked really well.

I also painted the strips using the same metallic paint as the metal joiney bits and then applied silicone stuff behind them.

To mount the windscreen to the aircraft, I made little mount brackets the same way I made the ones that hold the sides to the front, with a big rivet onto the fuselage and bolts through the wind screen. There's two in the front and two in the sides.



The scheme makes it a lot stronger than I thought it would. As the front is pushed back, the load is transferred along the sides, and there's a lot of surface area to take that stress. I grabbed the top of the center section and pulled back as hard as I could and it didn't budge.

Now, then, the upper edge of the windscreen which I had cut out with a jigsaw is great. It's smooth and flowing and there isn't a hitch on it, as I wasn't worried too much about it and just cut it with one motion.

The lower edge, where it meets the aircraft, however, is an entirely different matter. It's close and I've tweaked it on the band sander, but I didn't get the curve just right.

I could spend endless hours trimming here and there hoping for the perfect curve and the perfect beveled edge, but that's a pipe dream. Long experience tells me what I'd wind up doing it "improving" it right into the scrap bin.

What I need is something to cheat that edge, make it smooth, and keep air from travelling underneath it. I had good results using car door trim stuff on the seat for both appearance and smoothing, so I decided to go with that.

And immediately ran into a problem. The edge material is a square groove with a rounded tip of plastic/rubber material to make it rounded at the end, about 3/8" below the bottom of the square channel. Too much! And my windscreen is wider than the car door edge it was designed to go over, meaning I really had to abuse it to make it fit.

So I slapped in the remaining part of the steel I used to make the windshield mounts and put the belt sander to use.



I brought down the bottom to where I could just see the steel underneath.



Now it's about an eighth of an inch thick and flat on the bottom.



Test fitted it on the windscreen and mounted.



Since I wasn't sure this would work I cut it at the seam between pieces. I'll have to do it again, trimming down the sides at that join to make it one continuous seal, as well as hitting it with some steel wool to take the chrome appearance off of it.

And that's a glimpse at the sort of stuff I've encountered along the way to building the aircraft.

Nice looking work, Dart. Craftsmanship looks very clean with all the added details.

Did you wind test it? Maybe with a 150mph leaf blower? Or hey, I guess you structure/wind test it and by mounting it (and a camera) on top of your car and hitting the highway!

I think my tent would fall down on top of the aircraft if I did that!

Here's how it looks all done:





I also found a new term: unforseen craftsmanship.

My wife was looking at the windscreen and said "one of your screws is off."

Now, I was about to go into the necessity of drilling some of the holes a little off center of the brackets in order to counter act the Coriolis effect and sunspots (always a ready explanation of my inability to center a hole on a piece of metal), when she continued,

"That one isn't going up and down."

Huh?

Well, out of 20 machine screws on the wind screen, 19 of them wound up with the screw driver slot vertical. The 20th was off by about 30 degrees.

"Um, well one of them has to be a little different from the rest in order to ensure the stresses on the installation don't loosen them all."

She almost bought it! Then she scoffs and says "you had no idea you did that!"

Nope.