SPA Modeler

During me move back to NY, my finished MiG suffered a tail wheel, and gear door loss. After much fruitless searching, I decided to jump back in the hobby by scratchbuilding new ones. The only thing not created, was the tail wheel yoke. The kind Luftwaffe were nice enough to give me the one off of the Me109, that is missing too much to repair. (Potential wheels up landing dio?), here's some pics. Not my best work, but acceptable, considering it was my first build back.



I started with 2 disks from my parts stash, glued them back to back, and sanded them.



Then ran some sprue through the center.



I then attached the tail wheel yoke, and to strengthen it, ran a small brass rod through the yoke and wheel.

I also decided to be safe and insterted a small steel rod in the shaft, and drilled a hole in the nub left inside the fuselage. Next set of pics will be the gear door.

As always, thanks for looking.

Good work and also thanks for posting this! I have a 109, the first kit I built since returning to the hobby, exhibit was accidentally dropped in the floor by my seven year-old nephew. Tail wheel is gone... I’ve been trying to figure out how to go about fixing it, and this post helped steer my thoughts in the right direction.

Glad to help. If this hobby has taught me nothing else, it has taught me to check the forums for solutions and KEEP ALL YOUR EXTRA PARTS!!



The disks are actually kit supplied inner wheel hubs for my Special Hobby Fiat G50, that I used detailed resin on instead. You just never know...

Nice work with that tailwheel Joe!

- Kari

The spares bin can work miracles in the long run... save all extra parts! And strip your old builds that are off to the afterlife! You never know when and where such parts will come in handy again...

And Joe, very nice work coming up with the replacement!

As mentioned previously, one of the gear doors made it's way to the Bermuda Triangle, so I had to scratch up another one. In this case, I had nothing suitable to salvage, so armed with varying thicknesses of styrene sheet scraps, a pencil, knife and many other tools, I used the one door I had to create a mirror image as best I could. I only wish I had thought to take more than 2 pictures. Grrrr



Here is an in progress picture. I've made the lower section, to include the support skeleton. I took a short metal ruler, and measured everything in millimeters, to get it as accurate as possible.



Here it is completed, without paint. To create the bulge in the door, I stacked styrene to the correct height, then slowly trimmed it with first a chisel blade, then a #11 in my Xacto. After that came much sanding, filling and sanding again. When I was satisfied, I then smoothed everything out with 12k grit polishing cloth. Lastly, I scribed the details and created "rivets" with a model railroad track nail held in a pin vise.



Here she is, finished. I'm happy with the results. Enough so, I've been slowly working on building a partial canopy for my PCM Macchi Mc200. The original canopy is keeping the MiG's gear door company, wherever that is....

Thanks for looking.

Wow! Nice fix!!

- Kari

Nice scratch build parts! So what is next, a whole plane?

BorgR3mc0 wrote:Nice scratch build parts! So what is next, a whole plane?

Funny you should ask...

Actually, I might try my hand at scratchbuilding an A7V WWI tank. But first I need to create the MC200 canopy and restart the HS129.