All About the Bays
Don’t panic people, I am not going into detailed descriptions surrounding the Battle of the Bay of Biscay, Danzig Bay or even the Bay of Pigs. They’re not the type of Bays I have in mind. I am more geared towards a good discussion of the wheel bays of our new 48th scale P-51B Mustang.
All
About the Bays
Vladimír Šulc
Before leaving Most, we washed our company van,
nicknamed Mayer. Our colleagues did not hand it
over to us in a completely presentable condition.
Don’t panic people, I am not going into detailed
descriptions surrounding the Battle of the Bay
of Biscay, Danzig Bay or even the Bay of Pigs.
They’re not the type of Bays I have in mind. I am
more geared towards a good discussion of the
wheel bays of our new 48th scale P-51B Mustang.
The 3D design of our P-51B Mustang in 1:48th
was led by our chief designer Stan Archman
who worked on it together with designers Tomáš
Fikar and Robert Theiner. The construction was
completed at the beginning of last summer,
and the files were transferred over to our
technologists, elevating the project to the next
stage, allowing Stan to focus his attention on the
P-40 Warhawk project. Part of the preparation
included scanning several aircraft in Texas,
which we combined with our trip to the IPMS USA
Nationals in San Marcos. This is a town located
just north of San Antonio. The first USS Texas, an
ironclad of 1892, was renamed the San Marcos
in 1911 to allow her original name to be used for
the new USS Texas, a New York-class battleship
that survives to this day and was in for repairs
at the Galveston docks at the time of our visit.
The first USS Texas, already under the name
USS San Marcos, ended up worse, shot up as
a practice target on the shoal of Theang Strait
in Chasepeake Bay, but I already wrote about
that once. Interestingly, a significant moment in
the development of our 48th scale P-51B project
occurred at San Marcos.
Stan was showing off a 3D model of the
Mustang in San Marcos, and on that occasion
he learned from one of the modelers, John
Ferdico, that his wheel well design suffered
a major flaw. He had based it around the well of
the P-51A, or rather all Mustangs with the Alison
engine. But the P-51B did not have wheel bays
like the P-51A, in fact having more in common
with the wells of the P-51D, though not being
idential. It basically comes down to the engine.
The hoses leading from the radiator to the engine
are routed lower on the Alison powered aircraft
than those using the Packard Merlin, where they
were higher up, closer to the ceiling of the wheel
bay. Thus, it was clear that we had a problem
ARTICLES
Standa Archman constructing.
INFO Eduard14
April 2024