Up 'round Inglenook Lake, Ontario

Narrow gauge track is marked with a circled N
A man-made causeway supports the track between the docks.

In between Twin Otter construction tasks my mind drifted to possible plans for a layout where trains pick up and drop off people and cargo to floatplanes in a remote wilderness area of Ontario.

The RDC-M would be small enough to provide direct rail-to-plane service!

The standard gauge track would have a plan similar to the classic Inglenook to provide some play value (if you were wondering, there is no town called Inglenook in Ontario, or lake named Inglenook Lake). Inclusion of a parallel narrow gauge line was inspired by the old Huntsville and Lake of Bays Transportation Company. On this layout the narrow gauge line takes passengers and goods back and forth to resorts and lodges in the forest.

The build table is also a handy sketch pad :-)

Will this layout ever see the light of day? Who knows. It's fun to think about though.

How my workshop turned into an aircraft factory

 or How a Walk Down Memory Lane Became an Obsession ....

.... and a source of new ideas.

Back in May my mind started to drift back to the summer of '72 when I was 12 and obsessed with buying and building FROG brand model airplane kits from the Painted Post Smoke Shop. I recall building an Intruder, Bronco, Mohawk, and maybe a Vampire, but that one might have been an Airfix kit.

Anyway, I looked around for those kits online and didn't find any, but I did find a Sabre jet from a seller in Saskatoon that looked simple and interesting, so I bought it.

Looks fast and deadly.

It appeared to be safely cocooned in its original shrink wrapping, but maybe the wool was being pulled over my eyes.

After stripping off the wrapping and getting a strong whiff of 1972 that caused flashbacks, I opened the box and all the parts still seemed sealed in their original plastic bag.

The decals, instructions, and even a note on how to request missing parts (!) were still in there, although the decals were well past their best before date.

The instructions included some handy 60s or 70s vintage model making tips.

After opening the box and breathing in all that 70s goodness I then promptly put the kit aside while I worked on the Tintin 2001 launch + control building shell!

The Sabre jet and Repair Shop wait patiently for work to stop on the lunar launch + control building.

I picked up the Sabre jet kit again during a lull in the Tintin 2001 launch + control building work and spent some spare time assembling it. I didn't do anything fancy, sophisticated, or prototypical. I just built it box-stock with a neutral gray finish as if it were some factory test model, which I guess it was :-)

Parked high atop the Canadian Press complex !

I'm not going to explain how I built it as it was just a nostalgia project, and expert model airplane builders would be horrified. 

Ready for take off from a wooden landing strip in the backyard :-)

But, it was fun to just build it. So much fun that I looked for simple 1/72 scale model airplane kits at hobby stores and online sellers in hope of replicating that fun with some other project.

One of the ultimately 3 (!) Revell Twin Otter kits I bought.

When I visit my local hobby shop I like to wander through the entire store, not just the model railway section, to see what's what. On the airplane kit shelves I saw that Revell Twin Otter kit. For some reason it struck my fancy and I bought it. I didn't read any internet reviews, or watch YouTube videos, I just went with my gut :-)

I cut out the cockpit doors so I could make a dockside scene with open doors.

Rummaging around in the box I found out it could be built with either wheels, snow skis, or floats. I thought: yeah, floats! That word 'floats' triggered all sorts of thoughts about wilderness model railway layouts French, fictional, micro and MCM-7, float planes, forest fires, railway-based forest fire fighting equipment like CN's Poseidon train, and water bombers*. Carried away on waves of new ideas I merrily dove into building a Twin Otter float plane.

The box art leaves no doubt about what this airplane was meant to do.

I worked on the Twin Otter and kept searching for FROG kits I had built way back when. I found an online seller in Lindsay, Ontario, who had both a FROG Bronco and a Pioneer2 brand Beech C-45 Expeditor (I'll get to that one), so out came my credit card again.

Primer drying on the Bronco.
All the weapons attachments have been stripped off for conversion to a float plane.

As I looked over the Bronco's parts and started in on the build I thought that with the high wing and high engines it could be converted into a float plane. It turns out the manufacturer had this idea too and built a prototype, or maybe just a mockup, that never flew. I thought, ok, and now I'm in the process of building a bronco on floats, with those floats kitbashed from a pair included in a Revell Twin Otter kit. An extra bonus to my overall thinking is that the Bronco is used by Cal Fire in California as a command and control aircraft; not on floats, but in a fire fighting role.

Wings are drying on the second Twin Otter

So right now I have several airplane projects on the go as I'm just doing whatever feels like fun to do. I bought a second Twin Otter kit because I thought just having one example on a layout / diorama would be odd. I'm currently getting ready to add its floats. I've also got two Beechcraft Expeditor C-45s waiting for me to get started on them. 

An old RCAF Beechcraft Expeditor readies for takeoff at the 2025 Gatineau airshow.

I saw an old RCAF Expeditor at the Gatineau airshow last year and was immediately entranced. It turns out after WWII many of these airplanes became bush planes and had floats installed.

As well as the Pioneer2 version of the C-45 I bought a Hobby Craft one from that seller in Saskatoon. One or both will be equipped with floats.

So, right now I'm just following a passion and enjoying the ride. Whether the destination is a layout, diorama, or nothing I'm not too concerned about that right now. 

Well, I'm near the end of this ramble and need to turn off the workshop lights for the evening. With all this talk of Saskatoon there's always one thing that comes to mind, so I'll leave you with this video favourite I've posted once before**:

Digressions:

* What about scale mismatches you might be asking? Yeah, the airplanes are in 1/72 and the railway stuff would be in 1/87. It might not sound like a big difference, but it is. I give scale serious thought as you know, and I plan to talk more about it in future posts if a layout starts to emerge from all this noodling.

**Yes, I did see The Guess Who this summer in Ottawa. And yes, age is catching up with Burton Cummings and Randy Bachman, but they can still play with a vengeance and put on a great show. LeBreton Flats was packed cheek-to-jowl with fans old and young. The Sheepdogs opened for them, so it was a fantastic event for Ottawa's 200th anniversary celebrations. 

The Dam Busters, 1955

An image from the famous take-off scene in The Dam Busters.
Three of the nine Lancaster bombers on their way to Germany's Ruhr Dams on 16 May 1943.

I jokingly referred to the 1955 movie, The Dam Busters, in a post about busting beaver dams near the Havelock yard. I hadn't watched it in decades, so I rented a copy and sat down one blustery afternoon last week and watched again. I wasn't disappointed.

I can't comment on its historical accuracy, but I will say it's a docudrama. I don't know how it would fare with today's audiences as its dialogue is sometimes politically incorrect, the special effects are crude by today's standards, and the pacing is slow compared to modern films.

A Lancaster bomber at the Canadian Aviation & Space Museum circa 2018
Of the 133 airmen on the dam busters raid, 30 were Canadians, half didn't return.

But, that said, the aircraft scenes, the portrayal of the mission, the acting, and the emotional and psychological veracity are compelling. Also, the portrayal of real-life engineering, its ups and downs, its bureaucratic frustrations, and its sometimes exhilarating successes feel real to me as a lapsed aeronautical engineer. I was glad to see the legendary engineer Barnes Wallis portrayed in the movie, and that his role wasn't minimized.

I'd rate it 8.5 to 9 out of 10. 

Paperback version published by Abacus, 2008.

I said I'd write more about books, so here's one with a little Dam Busters spin. 

I read this one by Harry Pearson, Achtung Schweinehund!: A Boy's Own Story of Imaginary Combat, over the winter. It's an account of Pearson's lifelong involvement in the hobby of war gaming, miniature figures, and military models. It's fact filled, fascinating, sympathetic, and endlessly humorous. He has this to say about the movie:

"The Dam Busters starred Richard Todd [JDL: he plays Wing Commander Guy Gibson], a mainstay of British war films. He had also been a mainstay of the British war. The Dublin-born actor had served in the 7th Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, taken part in the Normandy Landings and had been a member of the Allied spearhead that cut through German lines to join the airborne troops, commanded by Major Howard, who had captured the Pegasus Bridge. In the film D-Day the Sixth of June Todd played his own commanding officer, while in Darryl F. Zanuck's epic The Longest Day he played the part of Major Howard, with a younger actor taking the role of Richard Todd. In the 1958 film I Was Monty's Double, meanwhile, M. E. Clifton-James, who had indeed been Monty's double, took the parts of Monty and his double, thus playing himself being himself as well as playing the man he had been playing at being. The war had already gone postmodern. Little wonder that a primary school boy [JDL: the author] could get confused between fact and fiction."

The book is full of these sorts of gems. Get it, and watch the film.

Is this the ultimate DHC-2 Beaver?

"World's best example of a DHC-2"

Whenever I'm around airplanes I'm on the lookout for de Havilland of Canada DHC-2 Beavers. If you're a longtime reader here you know it was the floatplane of choice on the Loonar Module layout.

The outline of a DHC-2 provocatively enticing me from the shadows :-)

I was at the Gatineau airshow over the weekend, and as I was wandering around the static displays before the show got started I happened to spy what looked like the vague outline of a DHC-2 in a distant hangar.  

So clean the chrome was blinding!

I was not disappointed. Venturing into the hanger I was greeted by this fine specimen. It's the most pristine one I've ever seen. The volunteer who was on hand to answer questions said it was the best example of a DHC-2 in the world! After giving it as close a look as I could from behind the black tape I'd tend to agree with her. I don't know who built or refurbished this airplane, but they did a great job.

A bit later in my wanderings I saw this fine example of a Cessna Skywagon floatplane. An excellent airplane; however, for purely sentimental reasons the DHC-2 remains my favourite.

Overall it was a great show with great weather and great airplanes. I hope to return next year.

Beaver and Cub

Back in 2016 I had a go at building the HO scale Piper Cub kit offered by Osborn Model Kits. I was charmed by that little model and several years later bought Osborn's DHC-2 Beaver floatplane kit for the Loonar Module. I found the Beaver to be a challenging build, but it does produce a striking model.

I recently discovered that Osborn produces a float kit for the Cub. I bought one because I'd like the Cub to appear in new Loonar Module photos when I can again take the layout outside for pictures. If the scaling on these models is accurate, the Beaver is quite large in comparison to the Cub. When I bring the Cub up to the dock, there isn't a lot of clearance between it's wing and the deck.

Although the float kit is rather simple, it was tricky to get it attached to the fuselage. I had filled the fuselage's mounting slots when I attached the landing gear, so I had to cut off the tabs on the float's legs and simply Weld Bond on the assembly to the fuselage's bottom. Also, when I built the Cub back in 2016 I didn't attach the wing properly and it had a bit of anhedral. I think the Cub has a flat wing. I snapped off the wing to flatten it, but in the end wound up giving it a bit of dihedral as I thought that gave the model a little jauntier look out on the Loonar Module's lake. 

While I wait for the Loonar Module's Tranquility Lake to unfreeze, I'll leave you with Frank.

The Immortal Beaver

Last night we were once again talking about floatplanes, and it got me thinking about the de Havilland Beaver. My subsequent wanderings turned up this history of that legendary plane. If you were wondering, there is a railway angle: take a look at that picture I snipped from the video of a boxed up Beaver ready to ship to a customer on a flatcar - that would make for an interesting and unique little project.

On the mystery of computing area with a balance

My dustcover-less copy of the 1960 classic, The Scientific American Book of Projects for the Amateur Scientist

Imagine that we have drawn a simple closed curve on a sheet of writing paper. (Simple means that the curve does not cross itself.) This curve marks out an area on our paper. How many ways can you think of to find this area?

...

I saw a very clever (and most significant) solution to this problem at a model-airplane meet some years ago. The contest rules required that the models have a fuselage whose cross-sectional area was not less than a certain minimum. This area was easy to check in the good old days when all the models had rectangular cross sections, but with the advent of more streamlined shapes the judges began to have trouble making sure the rules were being followed.

They finally decided to find the required area by first having an accurate drawing of it, and then cutting out the drawing and weighing it. Since the weight per unit area of the paper was known, the area of the cut-out drawing was easy to obtain. Now this solution to the area problem is a splendid example of applied integral calculus. It is a little surprising, then, that people who have actually studied calculus will laugh at the method, or dismiss it as impractical. Yet when an accurate balance or scale is at hand it is the quickest way to determine area.

F. W. Niedenfuhr, Professor of Engineering Mechanics at Ohio State University, from The Pleasures of Mathematics in C. L. Strong's The Scientific American Book of Projects for the Amateur Scientist, 1960. Mr. Strong notes this about Prof. Niedenfuhr's chapter in the table of contents, "The amateur scientist is lured into an encounter with integral calculus." Come for the model airplanes, stay for the integral calculus :-)

Rare photo of DoLF CF-046 as seen from chase plane

While sorting through the archives of the Department of Lands and Forests railway I came across this rare photo of the Horten Go229 flying wing the group obtained in 1946 when DoLF was still part of the Department of Lands, Forests and Skies. This 1965 overhead photo of a low altitude pass was taken from the chase plane escorting the newly refurbished and freshly painted CF-046 back to its home base at Lake Timothy. It's thought the photo was shot somewhere over the area where NASA was training its astronauts in lunar surface operations. Normally all one sees of this rare bird is its distinctive shadow skimming across the landscape.

An air sign?

I'm informed that this sign says, "Meet your float plane here." 

Meeting the Plane

It's been the sunniest and mildest day so far this year, so staying in the house is a nonstarter. I took the Loonar Module outside for some test photos as a layout can look quite different in the light of day through the lens of a digital camera. I see quite a few things that need correction, but this is a test layout, so that's to be expected.

Overall, things are shaping up as I had hoped, although the vegetation density needs to increase a lot to fully get the feeling I'm after. Well, it looks like there're some questions about the fuel supply, so I bet get going and see what the problem is :-)

Float plane accessories

All images courtesy 30Squares' Far North Adventurer

The 30Squares Media Empire's Layout Design Board has been chatting with our consulting Far North Adventurer about his float plane experiences. It became clear that one can't just plop down a float plane on a layout and be done with it. There are associated details to consider.

There might need to be a sign to indicate where one meets their float plane, as there usually isn't a cushy departure lounge to hang out in.

And near the sign one might find stashes of supplies and aviation fuel. As our adventurer notes, "these guys cache fuel all over the place."

A conveniently placed rock might be needed to stop these drums from rolling away.

And the Dehaviland Beaver might not be the only float plane to appear on the layout. The Beaver is an old, iconic bush plane, and I wanted one to appear on the layout in classic Department of Lands and Forests colours, but for more modern scenes a Cessna Caravan, as shown in the photo, might be more appropriate. Our adventurer tells us it's quite a good plane. 

And it turns out an HO one is available at Shapeways, so saws won't be the only thing I'll be looking for.

Rock on

Rocks, rocks, and more rocks, big, medium, and small were added to the shoreline. They were placed in several sessions, and glued down with a 50/50 mix of matte medium and water.

Once they were firmly stuck down I continued applying layers of thin paint on the landforms until I got the shades I was after. I wasn't concerned if the paint flowed onto the rock as I was attempting to blend the modelled and the real.

But I stopped painting just before I got to the cliff face and bridge. I needed to glue on some rocks, and then work them into the scene with Cell-U-Clay and coarse modelling paste. 

I thought this job would be somewhat laborious, but it turned out to be rather fun. It was sort of like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle, but in this situation I had to choose my own pieces - rather flat ones from my stash of pounded rocks - and then glue them down into some sort of interlocking pattern. Once that was done, the gaps and edges had to be blended into the overall landscape. Once the new rocks and scenery were dry, I continued painting.

It turns out the rock on the lower right of the rock face wasn't as flat as I thought, and had a corner that struck out dangerously close to the rail. I put a rock grinding tip in the Dremel and ground it back. Adds a nice touch of practical realism :-)

The floatplane is an HO scale Dehaviland of Canada DHC-2, Beaver. It's a laser cut wood kit from Osborn Model Kits. You may recall I built their Piper Cub kit back in 2016. The Beaver is awaiting paint, as is the balsa dock it's parked beside.

The dock measures 24' long by 8' wide, and is set in the water on 2, 8'x8' cribs. All the pieces of lumber are cut from balsa sized to be close to dimensional lumber. 

Neither the Beaver nor the dock are glued in place. I probably should have waited until later to build them, but I was curious to see how this scene was going to work. So far, so good. I think the bridge will be the next project.

The Pietenpol air camper is finished

Over the winter I've been very slowly finishing the Pietenpol Air Camper rubber-band powered flying model by Peck-Polymers. It's taken so long because I've hesitated at every step as each one presented me with challenges I had no experience dealing with. I know there are several issues with my build, and no doubt others I'll find later, but I like the look. 

Monday we got our first vaccination shots, and I've been feeling a bit fatigued for the last couple of days, so I decided to hold off on the next steps on the HQ conversion, and instead finished the last odds-and-ends on the air camper. The prop was installed, and the engine and radiator were added. It balances out ok, and is now waiting for some good weather for a few test glides to check trim. It snowed today, and with the enhanced pandemic restrictions in place, who knows when that will be. But, until then check out these interesting videos about the real thing. First, Ami gives a great tour:

And then there's this one from Grant with a little more history:

In the second video there's this interesting drawing of a lakeside hanger complete with some railway track for getting your float plane into the water. That building would make a great little model. Maybe enhance it with double-doors on the back wall so planes could be put in the hanger from a rail line that extends out to a parking lot, airstrip, or factory. 

Godzilla vs P-38 Lightning

I'm working away on the Revell P-38 kit. I suspect this isn't considered one of the best models of that airplane. Part fit is not that great, and I can see a lot of filling and filing and fitting on the horizon. You can see many issues in the photo. I'll need to make a decision about how far to go with that work.

Although it's not the greatest kit, this project is sort of a sentimental journey. The P-38 was one of my father's favourite planes, and in a post at the long defunct retroDynamics from back in 2009 I included a scan of one his P-38 postcards in a story about Godzilla and disk planes. It's a little hard to explain, so here's the old post.

From 29 April 2009:

Early last summer I stumbled across the comic book reprints offered by DC and Marvel in their DC Showcase Presents and Marvel Essentials series. Basically, these are 500-page volumes of reprints of selected comic books in black-and-white form. Well, I dove in and bought and read a number of titles that I either was forbidden to read as a kid or missed entirely. I readily admit there was no intellectual value in this comic reading extravaganza, but it was fun. Godzilla: King of the Monsters in the Marvel Essentials series is a one-volume collection of all the comics in Marvel’s Godzilla title published in the late ‘70s. All I can say is that it is one weird, absurd and hilarious read. The storyline does appear to run out of steam near the end of the series, but it was probably tough to dream up things to do for two years for a character whose main attributes are stomping around and breaking big things.

[The cockpit is huge]

There’s an incredible collection of strange flying machines in Godzilla, but the ones that caught my eye were the seemingly circular wing interceptors used by S.H.I.E.L.D. From my haphazard reading of comics, it seems that flying things whose primary feature is a disk are usually some sort of alien spacecraft: classic flying saucers. Atmospheric airplanes flown by human beings whose wing is a disk or circle seem almost nonexistent, so I was surprised to see these.

[The wing planform looks elliptical - that's gotta hurt !]

When I was looking up the pictures for this post, closer examination suggested that the wing may be actually a rather fat ellipse and not a circle at all. I think I jumped to the circular wing conclusion because I was biased that way, and I figured the perspective views of the planes were just distorting the circular planforms into ellipses, but they really do look like rather fat elliptical planforms when you study the drawings more carefully.

[A P-38 postcard, from the 1940's I think] 

As well, their twin boom design and large cowls instantly reminded me of the Lockheed P-38 Lightning. However, unlike the P-38s, these S.H.I.E.L.D disk-planes can also hover. How they might do this is obviously a quirk in the physics of the Marvel universe.

[It can somehow hover - and no downwash!] 

Mr. Herb Trimpe and Mr. Tom Sutton are attributed as the Pencillers or Artists in this series, so I assume they invented these airplanes. They did a great job; the planes have a ring of truth to them.