X-15A-2 Special Hobby 1/48 Part II.

I am linking to the article on my Special Hobby X-15 in 1/48 scale, which I posted on 29th 09. 2010. Here is the promised continuation of the article with a hint how the Air Brakes can be easily built (as a scratch build), especially the inner corrugated surfaces. The procedure can also be used for other areas with such wavy surfaces — inner side of the front landing gear well cover and rear area of the floating rudder.

You will need needles (or pins), a thin sheet of metal, e.g. from larger old capacitors, superglue and thin plates of polystyrene. And you can start to cook. So here is the recipe:

Construction of the layered brakes:
I tagged the brakes together using three layers. The external flat plates are made of styrene with thickness of 0,2 mm. I glued the filler onto them – I used a 0.5 mm thick plate with bevelled upper and lower edges. I made the plates inside the shields a little smaller than the outside, which allowed me to make the top and bottom edges of shields thinner. See pictures 1 and 2:

Inner surfaces:
Corrugated inner walls are made of thin capacitor metal plates. I bent these on a simple jig: I glued needles of 0.5 mm diameter and of length approx. 25 mm on a piece of cardboard, 5 needles in five equidistant groups. Needles were glued (using cyanoacrylate) parallel onto pre-drawn lines. See picture 3:

Creating the “waves”:
I cut out thin capacitor plates according to the size of the hindering shields, but only along three sides. I left the lower side longer (uncut), in order to be able to hold it in my left hand. I then put the plate onto the needles and pressed it with the fingernails of my right hand — to achieve the desired shape. See picture 4:

Flattening the edges:
I trimmed away the excess bottom part of the plate. I gently pressed down (using my fingernail) the straight top and also the arc bottom edges of the inner plate. I turned the whole metal part face side down. Then I created the “riveting,” very gently, using a pin. (Be careful not to perforate the very thin and relatively soft metal material.) See picture 5:

Completion of the brake:
I had glued the corrugated plate onto the styrene rest of brake first. Then I created the flat stripe lengthwise of the inner plate by pressing it down. I used the blunt handle edge of my scalpel, running it across the waves, pressing the waves down flat. So from the original 5 groups of ripples I created 10 this way (5 ripples above the flat bar area and 5 ripples below it). See picture 6 thereinbefore.

Notes:
Thin metal sheet is longer than the inside filler (the length of the metal sheet is equal to the length of the outer styrene sheet). This way the inner metal sheet exceeds the inner filler edge a bit — be careful not to destroy this very thin edge while connecting the air brakes onto your X-15 bird!

The great advantage of the capacitor plates is that they are sufficiently flexible and do not tear. If you miss and fail to get what you need the first time, you can flatten the plate and try again several times.

I agree that the real X-15 Air Brakes look a bit differently. I only wanted to make brakes more or less similar to the real thing.

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Here is another of my tools I used while connecting the floating horizontal control surfaces onto the rear of the fuselage. I wanted to preserve symmetry — and that is not a simple thing to achieve considering the X-15 geometry:

Picture above: Special Hobby kit instruction plan drawing.

I prepared a simple aid made of a plastic box and cardboard. I put it under the elevator for support while cementing both — one after another. The geometry was met, and only with little effort.

This is the picture where the needles can be seen – glued onto the cardboard, along predrawn lines and in one group. They helped me to make the inner surface of the nose gear cover and the floating part of the rudder too.

For more finished model-kits please see the Built Kits category. If you enjoyed this post, I’d be very grateful if you’d help it spread by sharing it on Facebook.

Model, Images and Text Copyright © 2010 by Marcel Meres