Nice tidy workshop with essential English equipment for making a Brew I espy

Cheers. M1 machine-screws are about 16p each, and I'm always dropping them - hence the green floor, which saves a small fortune in the recovery of "lost screws" nuts and washers! This is something like the 7th workshop I've built over the years, and all are pretty similar. I start by painting everything white, and installing plenty of lights and power-points. Then perforated "peg-board" is put between the vertical runners for shelving brackets over at least 9 feet or so. Shelving is arranged with one side deep at the bottom, decreasing in depth with height (heavy stuff) and one the other way around (light bulky storage). Using pegboard makes the shelves very versatile, as they can be left empty with tools on the peg-board, or stacked with stuff with no tools behind. Over time, needs change, and I've found this a great way to do it.

In the ceiling, the wooden battens athwartships carry long light stuff, and the red-coloured battens each go across one pair of joists only. At one end of the red batten is loose screw, allowing it to move, and the other end has a screw which drops into a hole in a little fitting made of angle iron. This means that the red battens can be folded out of the way to allow really long items into the "joist storage" before being folded back to support them. There's a drop-down bench-cum-drawing-board at the window, which also serves as a welding arc shield to protect the eyes of anyone in the kitchen when I'm welding.

The white board at the end of the bench is removeable, and serves as additional tool storage, but is mainly there to protect all my power-tools from debris from the angle-grinder when used at the vice. The sintered metal debris from grinding is ruinous to electric motors. The only other wrinkle, is that steel items such as the jig, the bar-stools and other obstacles have luminous tape on them, for when I blow the trip welding and am suddenly plunged into Stygian darkness! It's helpful to be able to find one's way to the door without going arse over apex in such circumstances. Other wrinkles are that every thing readily flammable is in a single box near the door, as are the CO2 and foam extinguishers, so I can quickly remove all solvents etc and then fight a fire with my back to the door. A first-aid kit is over the bench.

Not shewn, are 5 boxes screwed to the wall by the extinguishers, each containing 50 drawers, for nuts, bolts, washers, set-screws, machine-screws, carpentry screws etc.

Otherwise it's pretty straight-forwards I think. I'll attach a pictures, in case it gives any of you ideas...

Oh yeah, it'll be huge. It's much easier to build a large RC model than a small one. There's a property known as "scale weight", which is the weight at which a scale model will appear to transit the sky in the same way as a full-size one would. You've all seen small RC aircraft appearing to fly much faster than a full-size model one would. This is because the scale weight is too high, meaning the model has to fly faster to attain the required lift for that weight. The smaller the scale, the more critical becomes, as the scale-weight reduces at a much faster rate than the reduction in scale.

Put another way, if you wish to make an RC model in metal, it needs to be very large, so that a scale-weight is attainable.

Mine will come out at about 15 feet long, with a 19 foot wingspan. The real Wellington's wings are removeable immediately outboard of the nacelles, and mine will likewise come-apart at that point for transport. It'll eventually travel on a custom-made trailer, whilst the main body of the model can sit on its undercart during preparation for flight. The tailplane, fin and rudder will remain permamently attached.

Driving the propellors will be a pair of 9 cylinder radials, likely "Air-en", with suitable 3 bladed props, each developing 17 HP. So it'll be a very large model. The main construction will be geodetics, with a cantilever floating mains-spar, as per the full-size aircraft, but with slightly thicker metal than the thickness required to be scale, and a slightly different cross-section to the geodetic channel. The reasons for this are two-fold, there's a minimum thickness of metal that can be extruded, and the scale thickness is under this value, and secondly, as the bolts and rivets used in construction have to be larger than those at scale, I needed to change (increase) the distance between rivet holes to get everything to fit without introducing weaknesses to the structure. In the coming year, once the turrets are complete, I will be learning to bend the extruded alloy geodetic channel without deforming the cross-section, and then once that's mastered, commence making some test-shapes in rivetted and bolted geodetics for fatigue/max load/vibration tests before committing to building the fuselage.

The eventual aim is to produce a Wellington more or less indistinguishable from the full-size airframe, at or near scale-weight, with cameras to take footage from within at the main crew positions.

At the moment, largely due to CV19, I'm basically stalled on all fronts except CAD.

What a marvelous workshop.

Thanks. I find it's best to design them, rather than allowing them to grow "organically", which usually ends up with a lot of wasted space, muddle and mess. A really useful idea was recovering my father's Teak carpenters bench with a block-board top, edged with strap steel, and the addition of a folding leaf. The void under the rear half of the bench houses strip timber. Loads of lighting/white-painted ceiling and walls, with a moveable LED spot-lamp over the bench equivalent to a 400w spot incandescent. I also use a Dymo tape-printer to label everything on the shelves, or in the plastic "Nesquik" cans over the doors and elsewhere, which make for really useful stackable boxes for tools and mid-sized stuff that would otherwise be a messy and inefficient use of shelf-space. I also built a 12 foot by 8 foot shed in the front garden to take bicycles etc that I didn't want in the workshop, which helps a lot in keeping it all under control.

The front shed was fun to install. I built a wooden frame for the shed to rest on, then took fabric bags run up on the wife's sewing machine to fill with about a pint of ready-made concrete. A little piece of slate was put on top, then the sub-frame, hammered to level, as it sat on around 50 bags of concrete, followed by the shed. The bags were lightly watered, and then just left to take on any more water from being in the open. The result was a shed floor which, 6 years on, is completely level, and firm and dry, whilst preventing the woodwork of the shed or the subframe from resting in standing water and rotting.

The vac-forming has now been done, by a local commercial firm, and I've started cutting-up the first of the 5 "pulls" done in the 1mm polycarbonate. They've also supplied me with a lifetime's supply of the same material in sheet form, which will eventually be used to "glaze" the Wellington 1c's long fuselage windows above the wing, and the large starboard nose window, as well as the bomb-bay and bombardiers lower fuselage windows. I'll eventually need to make a similar mould for the astrodome and aforementioned bombardiers windows, and vac-form those.

Surplus turret pulls will be salted away to replace and damage or degradation of the intial turret glazing.

I love really talented people.

Freakin AMAZING!

Thankyou for the compliment, but I don't regard myself as "talented", so much as "willing to have a go". Everything from making a plaster-backed silicone mould to casting the tool shape in metallised epoxy resin, was all recently learned from you-tube and thence by talking to the purveyors of said resin and silicone so that I thoroughly understood the drill and potential pitfalls. All of it was the first time for me. So "lucky" possibly, but not "talented"! Pictures to follow after I've completed the front turret window panels and bolted them all together. So far I've made all the front panels for the front turret (5 of) Tomorrow I'll make a start on the side and top window panels, again for the front turret, whereafter bolting through the panels can begin.

After a busy two days, the front and front quarter windows for the front turret have been trimmed and fitted from the initial "pull". This involves drilling the holes through the Perspex where the metal tabs on straps will bolt through the 3d printed tabs which are in turn bolted to the stanchions. Very tedious work that's hard on the fingers. As of this evening most of the panels for the front turret are now trimmed and drilled, but here's a couple of pictures taken earlier in the day. With a little luck, the front turret cupola will be completed by Sunday evening.

Yes sir.

That is talent.

The Beeb's "Even without a butter knife, we still have talent" folks will be by soon. (Hide your knives )

Just don't say "machine gun".

After a marathon effort today, the front turret cupola is finished, bar for the ventilators in the quarter right and left window panels, the position of which I need to research. In the cup2.jpg note the 3 M1 machine screws and nuts per attachment. Each nut was started with my cocktail-stick with a blob of blutak, and has to be placed on the thread end, then very gently teased with the stick until the nut starts on the thread, whereafter I can go on in with nut-spinner and jeweller's screw-driver to finish it. Once the cupola is complete, I'll put a little locktite on the exposed threads to prevent the nuts unwinding with vibration. Once the cupolas are completed I'll post some pictures with them on the turrets. The front of each cupola engages with "feet" on the turret assembly, and then is held down at the back by two screws which go down through the cupola and through the alloy plate on which most of the turret mechanism is built.

And the now near complete front turret. Still to add are the front tub for the gunner's feet, and some fittings for the ventilators.

Amazing...

Amazing construction, engineering and detail.
If one didn't have the workshop background and knowledge it was newbuild, for context one would think it was 1:1 genuine article!

Geez! And I have an rc P-38 that I'm worrying about crashing! I wouldn't even want to Taxi THIS thing. It's going to be museum quality, from the looks of it so far.

Hehe. It remains to be seen if the geodetics can survive the vibration of the engines, taxiing, so you have a point! Had some great news last night, the chap who'd kindly offered to print the "tub" for the front-gunner's legs, has now printed and despatched this - many thanks Helimadken! - so I'll finally be able, presently, to complete both turrets and move onto prototyping the metalwork (geodetic channel and fittings).

5 years ago, I thought the turrets would take 5 months!

Out of curiosity, what might people pay for a kit to make this, or have it made - probably to be largely glued together rather than bolted? The reason for this being that the printing costs in nylon - necessary to be able to cut threads with a tap - are enormous. I'm investigating making the parts via injection-moulding so as to be able to make the "kit". Or, put another way, what would any of you be prepared to pay for a completed and painted model, bearing in mind the build time is at least 3 months, and likely more, for further turrets. (These turrets, being effectively prototypes, had much longer assembly times due to all the problems and revisions that needed to be overcome/re-worked.

I hope I'm not being "mercenary" about this, I'm just trying to gauge potential interest..

A film of the nearly complete turrets and thoughts on "window-bashing"

The front turret tub arrived today, and looks encouraging, although it'll need a lot of remedial filling and sanding to be ready for painting. In the meantime, here's a few recent pictures of the now glazed cupolas on both turrets. I'll photograph them next outside, as the lighting wasn't propitious indoors.

Well both the turrets are now complete and salted away until the fuselage is built some years hence. I've made a new film with all new stills and footage taken from within and without, as well as some new narration, Thanks to all here for the kind words and encouragement!

The last few days have been agreeable and busy in the workshop. Owing the scale change (from 1:4.5 to 1:3.7) that came after I'd built the yellow jig (pics above), I've had to extend the central black "datum bar" (a 50mm square hollow section steel tube) and the 4 "measuring bars" (30mm square hollow section steel tubes) all by exactly 300mm. And drill new holes where they attach to the rest of the structure. So lots of arc-welding, grinding and very careful measurements. The job is basically done, and all 5 bars are now longer and true to the originals.

The upshot of all this, is that the finished Wellington, not including the turrets will be exactly 200mm shorter at (4.7m long) than the workshop, meaning the mount for the turrets will need to be made removeable for transport. The length including turrets will come out at circa 5.02m!

Once the jig is square away there are a number of problems to deal with before the 1st extruded geodetic channel can be used to build some test pieces. Initially flat, but later on curved, It's great to be able to potter at completely different problems than those of the turret builds. Pics to follow once the jig is reassembled.