Odd'l Rockets F-104 Fuel Tank Correction

When I posted the first prototype build of the Odd'l Rockets F-104 Starfighter, I heard about it!
Most comments were positive but a few let me know the wing fuel tanks were too small.
To be honest, I didn't have many dowels and grabbed what was handy. I bought larger dowels.

Above is the first prototype. It has quite a few stable test flights.

I cut off the fuel tanks and carved two larger ones. On the left is the size comparison.

The inset shows where the paint was scraped off to glue onto the wing.

Is this better? - hope so!

Compared to the OOP Centuri kit, this version is much closer to the truth.

Now . . . more test flights.

F-104 Intake Pattern Development, Part 2

The round intake tube segment was ironed flat. My iron was set on cotton with a little bit of steam.

Here's what I ended up with. The 1" long reference lengths were added so a picture can be copied to Corel Draw and traced at full size.

With the body tube segment ironed flat I was surprised at how thin body tube walls are. Spiral rolling Kraft paper into a tube substantially increases the strength.


Some test patterns were printed up and a few more intakes cut out. The fit was perfect!







Three more edits later I have a good template for the new kit!

F-104 Intake Pattern Development, Part 1

The upcoming F-104 Starfighter kit from Odd'l Rockets had some interesting kit design challenges. One is the intakes on each side of the body.
The old Centuri kit folded card stock rectangles. They didn't look like the round intakes on the real jet.


I wish I could say the intake shape was developed using some complex geometry. I took the easy way out - I guessed.

Some BT-20 tube was cut into half wedge shapes. This picture shows how many tries it took to get the best fit.



Final shaping is done by sanding the rough cut edges with 220 grit wrapped around the BT-50H body tube.




Okay, here's a good fit!
To make a paper cutting pattern I could just wrap a paper around this intake and trace, but I wanted something more accurate.

More in next post - 

F-104 Starfighter Prototype Fix

On the first F-104 prototype I used some already cut dowels from the F-16 kit. Larger wing tanks will be used on the next build.
These larger tanks will change the C/G, I hope no nose weight is needed.

In the picture the larger new tank is set over the first one.




It's really not very difficult to shape the dowel ends. Each end takes about ten minutes of carving and sanding.

Trivia: Somewhere on line are the original plans for the the Estes Mars Snooper. The fin pods were made from just dowels, not nose cones and tubing.