Wings, fins and tails
All the flying control surfaces are two-piece assemblies, a major upper or outer part, with a minor inner or under insert. Take care to remove all the injection pin marks as they will protrude and prevent a flush surface.
Beginning with the back end, on fitting the vertical and horizontal stabilizers I was surprised to find I needed a little filler round the joins, not much but after the fit so far, disappointing.
Further disappointment follows, the main wings have a little issue to consider… read on!
Kitty Hawk have followed the recent trend of engineering the wings into a stronger assembly by incorporating part of the join into the fuselage, versus the old fashioned two halves of a wing making a tab and slot into the fuselage (old Airfix style). In this case the lower fuselage extends the wing roots and creates a stable platform to fix the wings too, nicely thought out and should be very strong… wrong.
This only works if you have tangible locating pins to prevent movement laterally, usually with a male / female combination. In their wisdom Kitty Hawk have moulded a female/female joint post, giving you no support laterally whatsoever.
To compound the problem the mounts are raised, as the wing itself has little contact between surfaces around the edges to allow for the slats and flaps to slot in.
Solution? Well you could scratchbuild some male parts? This would entail drilling out the centre of one post and inserting wire rod, but my suggestion is forget that idea and insert some struts.
Let me try and explain… if the two raised female pins are together they form a post of sorts. If we insert a strut thicker than the raised post in front of the forward one and behind the rear one, they can’t go anywhere.
As the wing seam to the fuselage is so neat, alignment is not an issue. The struts are 1.5mm flat styrene sheet trimmed to around 5mm wide and about 2 inch long.
They extend through the wing from the leading and trailing edges at about 45 degrees, butting up against the posts we talked about front and rear. Once flooded with liquid poly, let it dry then just trim back to match the edges.
As it turns out this works two fold, as when the wings are fitted there is a little misalignment on the surface levels that the strut now takes care of.
Both our lower wing surfaces are now even.
The last chapters of major construction are the flaps and slats on the wing leading and trailing edges. With our extra struts in place inside the wings, we need to measure up and take out a slot in the locating tabs on the flaps and slats to accommodate.
