One of the models I am working on is a Revell of Germany Arado 240C . Knowing my 4 year-olds desire to play with models and looking at some scrap wood in my garage, I hit upon the idea to build him a similar aircraft out of wood that would be durable. So at 9:30 PM on Friday night, I started my project.
Next step was to transfer the plan to the wood which was pretty simple since I was using pine scraps: I just placed the plan on the wood, and traced it -- it made a nice indention for the me to trace directly on the wood.
Next up was to do the rough cutting with my trusty 12" Craftsman bandsaw: I first cut the wing, then the tail wing, followed by the engines, the tail fins and then the body. Notice I left some room around the tracings so as I worked the wood toward the finish it would be become more true. I also did not do the cut down on the rear fuselage or the engines as this is easy enough to do with pine (as it is a very soft wood) when run against the Craftsman bench sander.
All told, the cutting probably took 30 minutes.
For the initial work on the wings, tail assembly and body, I used the belt sander which is running 60 grit. You'll notice that the rear section now tapers. What can't be seen in the photo is that I sanded down the tail fins about 40% from their original thickness, and on the wings, they are tapered to be thicker from front to back. I had to do this because Levi knows that airplane wings are thicker from front to back and he would question me incessantly why this airplane didn't have "real" wings. I used the disc sander (120 grit) to do 'finish' sanding on the everything, and to shaper down the engines to that they have a slight taper in the front, and sharp taper in the back. All told, this took about 45 minutes of work.
As with this type of project I took a couple of liberties: (1) I put the engines on top of the wing as this would make the bottom level and more sturdy to withstand the turbulent flights it would experience; (2) I didn't put the fin on the rear of the fuselage either -- didn't feel like taking the time.
With everything pretty much good to go, it was back to the band saw to cut out the notch on the bottom of the engines. I did this nifty trick when you make a series of vertical cuts, close to together, and then you break out the pieces by rubbing them on a sharp edge (should take a picture) and clean it up with a chisel. All told, in 10 minutes, both engines were notched and ready for permanent fitting.I then cut two "flying" propellers out of the 1" dowel about 1/8 in thickness, and drilled holes in the middle.
Then it was time for gluing the parts together, and to help keep everything in its place, I used 5/8 in brads from my nail gun to help hold the parts together (most nerve wracking part was nailing the tail fins in place and expecting to see a brad come through the tail wing, but all went perfect). At the end of Friday night at 12:30 AM, the aircraft was set to dry.
Saturday morning, there was an excited Levi with the aircraft. Barely was it in his hands and then he was asking to paint it black, as he knew from looking at the Arado 240C model that this plane was black on one side "so it is invisible at night" as Levi told me.
Levis is a very good and exacting painter (especially for a 4 year old). Here he is with the bottom of the plane painted black waiting to dry so the top can be painted grey. We used some spare black house paint (don't ask, but it deals with a teenage boy) for the bottom, and then mixed the black with some exterior tan paint to make the grey. Levi had me paint the top as he didn't want the grey to run on to the black, and it is nothing like painting as fast, yet carefully, as you can with a 4 year old task master. After the grey was put it, then we mixed more black into the grey to make a darker grey so we could apply "polka dots" as Levi called them. I had Levi paint them on after showing him how to dip the brush in the paint, dab it on a paper towel, and then dab his plane.
As the paint dried, we went through my collection of decals from planes long gone. Levi decided he wanted stars and picked out some red stars from a long gone MiG-21 kit, to which he added some red 4's (because he is 4) from a Panzer IV kit, some yellow stripes from a F-86 Saber kit, and then on the nose he picked out a bat/card motif from a F-111 kit. After I applied these for him, we had to take a detour and have me paint a place for the pilots to sit, so on went the white paint for the cockpit (extra from some wood projects the girls do).
Final touch was to seal the decals and the paint with Testors semi-gloss paint. After about an hour of drying, Levi's plane was finally permanently in the skies.
All told, the aircraft took about 4 hours of human effort with about 12 hours of various drying times. Levi is already lining up the next airplane he wants me to build, which he promises will be BIG!
