Hi Phlatheads, Admiring the awesome EPP SloP-51 by Robert Viskil, I wanted to have one, but decided since everybody and his mother already has a P51 I thought there needed to be another icon of the Allied forces of WWII. So what better choice than the famous P-40 with it's aggressive "I'll have you for breakfast anytime!" sharkmouth livery. The build is quite standard, if you look at Robert's topics about the SloP-51 and the SuperSlo28 (either on this forum and/or over at the RCGroups) you'll get all the ins and outs. The spinner in the pictures was made from a piece of milled foam (a piece of poolsnake actually), and glued on the prop, but it proved to be too wobbly, so I took it off, and replaced it with a plastic DuBro electric 1,75" spinner. (No pictures of that yet) The way I did the canopy and windshield is by using a piece of wide clear heatshrink tubing, and shrinking it over a simple mold from depron. Make the mold longer and wider, so the heatshrink just fits over it, and start blowing away with the heatgun. When shrunk tight, use scissors to cut it to size, leaving a little overlap to glue it later to the fuselage (using heatglue). The black lines are narrow black tape. The pilot is simply a 2 dimensional cartoonesque picture glued back to back. In combination with the width of the canopy the whole thing gives a remarkably 3 dimensional depth perception! The servos are taped in place with fiberglass reinforced tape, and since I did not like the white patches, I later put some green colored ducttape over it. (not yet in the pictures or video) The only problem I ran into was that the clear hingetape I used, let loose very easily over the spraypainted fuselage parts. The only tape that seemed to stuck (and I even have to respress it about every week) was the reinforced fiberglasstape you see in the video. (The underside of the aircraft is not painted, so the regular hingetape does stick there okay. (not Blenderm, that does not stick on EPP very well) I cut the sharkmouth with a UScutter (another CNC machine !;-), using 3 layers of vinyl, the bottom layer is black, over that goes the white (shown in grey on the picture to improve visibilty), and on top of that go the red and black serrated pieces to form the teeth and tongue of the beast. The motor covers on which the eyes are taped on is just a bent rectangular piece of 3mm depron. Here is a short video, I did not manage to make a nicer one because of the deteriorating weather conditions, but you'll get the idea anyway The Sketchup file has all the parts with the tabs and everything, but since the actual cut pattern is dependant of the size of your foam sheet, I will not supply the CNC file, but that's easy enough to do after you moved the parts around to your liking. ;-) The underside, pretty standard here: A big thank you goes out to Robert Viskil, since he got me started with EPP when he released his Superslo28, and of course to Mark and Trish, who made the Phlatprinter at all possible in the first place! Have fun, and keep that routerbit spinning and those steppermotors stepping ! Martin Attached files tle="IMG_0867.JPG" style="max-width:300px" /> Phlat-40 SloWarhawk.skp (3.1 MB)Â VB/converted_files/22747=8303-Sharkmouth separated for cutter.jpg" class="gc-images" title="Sharkmouth separated for cutter.jpg" style="max-width:300px" />
Wow now that's an awesome post Martin! Way to go this is one great looking build graphics and all. Thank you for sharing Mark and Trish
Martin, thank you for documenting this build so well. It's surely going to help others when the build it as well. Also, thank you for the shout out at the end Mark and Trish
After talking to martin I changed his plans slighty I hope you like it. I have included the sketchup file of my version. 28" winspan and a made the fuse a little longer. Attached files p40.skp (1 MB)Â
