Two guys at my club have the Freewing F-5, and it seems to be a great flying plane. I have always liked the F-5/T-38 family of planes. I think they are just sexy little jets. So I took the plunge and got one from Motion. I've been sitting on it for a while trying to find a way to make it different from the other two at the field. I finally decided what better way than to add a second seat!?
I'm a retired cop not an engineer, and fortunately this hasn't been a massively complicated kit bash. I have accepted that it will not be a perfect T-38, but from a few feet and especially in the air, I hope it will fool a couple of people.
I am also wrapping the plane with Oracal vinyl. It protects the foam, won't chip or peel off of the foam and it hides a lot of less than perfect work.
The three major things I am doing are, shaving the top of the tail flat and adding a piece of plastic for the "T" on the T-38, removing the wing root fillets and making plugs to fill the gap in the side of the fuselage and last but not least, extending the cockpit forward and adding a second seat. I also removed the flat inboard panels of the intake and beveled them, wrapped them and reinstalled them.
The first two were pretty easy, the cockpit hasn't been what I would call hard, but it has turned out to time consuming. There has been a lot of trial and error, but I think I have most of the problems worked out.
I spliced two cockpits together, trying to maintain the constant taper of the forward portion of the cockpit. I used the front of the original cockpit as a template to mark how much to cut our of the nose area. I am only moving forward about 1 3/4 inches. I am pretty sure the structural integrity of the nose gear will be okay. I didn't disturb the gear support and the foam I removed from above the nose gear is only about 1/2 inch think and I don't think it can actually support much weight.
I guess if the nose gear pops up through the top of the nose on the first landing, I'll know I was wrong about that;-)
I am using the original canopy for the forward half of the cockpit and plastic cut from a 2 liter bottle for the back half.
Callie made the decals for me. For the sides of the front fuselage area I had her just print everything on white vinyl and applied it as a single piece. It looks a lot cleaner. There is a very minor color difference between the 3M film Callie uses and the Oracal film I use, but I doubt most folks will notice.
More later.
Jim
I'm a retired cop not an engineer, and fortunately this hasn't been a massively complicated kit bash. I have accepted that it will not be a perfect T-38, but from a few feet and especially in the air, I hope it will fool a couple of people.
I am also wrapping the plane with Oracal vinyl. It protects the foam, won't chip or peel off of the foam and it hides a lot of less than perfect work.
The three major things I am doing are, shaving the top of the tail flat and adding a piece of plastic for the "T" on the T-38, removing the wing root fillets and making plugs to fill the gap in the side of the fuselage and last but not least, extending the cockpit forward and adding a second seat. I also removed the flat inboard panels of the intake and beveled them, wrapped them and reinstalled them.
The first two were pretty easy, the cockpit hasn't been what I would call hard, but it has turned out to time consuming. There has been a lot of trial and error, but I think I have most of the problems worked out.
I spliced two cockpits together, trying to maintain the constant taper of the forward portion of the cockpit. I used the front of the original cockpit as a template to mark how much to cut our of the nose area. I am only moving forward about 1 3/4 inches. I am pretty sure the structural integrity of the nose gear will be okay. I didn't disturb the gear support and the foam I removed from above the nose gear is only about 1/2 inch think and I don't think it can actually support much weight.
I guess if the nose gear pops up through the top of the nose on the first landing, I'll know I was wrong about that;-)
I am using the original canopy for the forward half of the cockpit and plastic cut from a 2 liter bottle for the back half.
Callie made the decals for me. For the sides of the front fuselage area I had her just print everything on white vinyl and applied it as a single piece. It looks a lot cleaner. There is a very minor color difference between the 3M film Callie uses and the Oracal film I use, but I doubt most folks will notice.
More later.
Jim
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