What I described earlier in the articles was the general structure of the landing gear and the damped leg. The next step is to “dress” the inner legs and add scale details to make it look similar as was the real plane
To do this, I used 4 mm balsa wood, which is first drawn and cut around the welded part.
The 2 parts are grooved to allow the insertion of piano wires. These balsa pieces come to “sandwich” the train leg. The same is done for the rest of the legs. Tracing, cutting, grooving the location of the piano wire, and the legs were wrapped and glued by the balsa pieces.
Once dry, I shaped the fairings by mechanical and manual sanding to reproduce the rounded part of the leading edge and pointed part of the trailing edge.
The next step was to apply a coat of cellulose dope, followed by a light dry sanding to remove balsa fibers that appeared rough after coating.
Thereafter, I remained faithful to Pascal Kroll’s technique (see his site the “coin maquette” in the links), that is to say, a cutting of coupons in fiberglass at 25 g/m2 which is glued with cellulose dope.
Once dry, the excess fiber is easily removed with a sanding block. Then, I applied a second coat of cellulose dope.
I then started finishing with a coat of car filler applied with a brush.
Water sanding with a strong grit at the beginning and a fine paper to finish. The pieces are ready to be painted.
To begin, I used the technique of wood glue dots to reproduce the rivets.
Then passage to the paint workshop to apply one coat of primer and two thin coats of polyurethane silver paint identical to that of the fuselage.
Once dry, I noticed that the rivets were not visible enough. I had diluted the glue too much. So I put some more on top of the previous ones.
Here is the result after drying