Spitfire

Some of you may have noticed a sad looking Guillows balsa and paper Supermarine Spitfire sat on the worktop by my printer.
I built this after I broke my heel in a motorcycle accident with my then step doughter Isabella when she was a toddler. Over the years it has collected a fair few curious finger holes, plenty of dust/ spider poops from storage in my mums garage and damage from moving about.
As it has a fair few fond memories atached to it I decided to give her a little tidy up so she looked a bit less sorry for herself. Seeing as I have a nice 3D printer, why not print some bits out myself?

Undercarriage

The wire undercarriage had collapsed a long time ago. The string holding it in place had slipped and the surrounding paper was damaged. I could have just repaired this as the white painted balsa doors still looked okay but where is the fun in that?

I found some main gear by Ocminimotto on Thingaverse for a Hurricane. These would work well enugh and would just need swapping sides so they appeared to close outwards as apposed to inwards like on a hurricane. My first print failed as one of the wheels detached from the bed but what had printed was too small anyway. I then scaled these up to 125% and tried again with the same result only at least they were big enough now so I opted to print the legs alone. This worked and seeing as the kit injection mounlded wheels looked pretty good, I drilled them out and used them rather than printing new ones out. The wheels fit on the spindles nicely and were retained with as R-02 seal to.

I atached the undercarriage legs with UHU glue and a little pressure. this soaked through the paper bunding the legs, paper and balsa together for a pretty sturdy fit.

Propeller

The propeller wasn't broken (well the spinner was pretty cracked) but without a rubber band it didn't sit tight to the nose and looked a bit silly in bright red.

I couldn't find a 3 blade prop that was detailed enough without being a 3 part RC prop so I instead printed out a Spinner by DU2RK designed for an RC plane with 3 propellers and Propeller blades by Kiyopi which also needed scaling up to 150% I think it was but they at leasy had roughly the right shape.

The spinner printed out pretty easily with 10% infill (it isn't flying anywhere like this).

The blades needed support to print but also came out well with a nice wood grain like look to them. As the blades were for a display model rather than flying, the didnt fit to the spinner properly so I plastic welded them in then bolted the spinner together as normal. A long m4 bolt was also added to mount it to the nose cowling which was then reglued onto the airframe.

That was the bulk of the major parts required so all I had to do was let the glue set and then get on with the next part.

Things coming together

Airframe repairs

The horizontal stabiliser was quite badly damaged and the HF wire was dangling in the breeze along with various other battle scars.
A good amount of adhesives and clothes pegs soon got things back into shape and a general wipe down helped the paint look a bit livelier (and got some of the spider poo off of it too).