V-1 Rebuild 2020

I have decided to rebuild the EDF V-1 using my recently acquired 3 mm Depron. This is not quite the same as the original (2015) Depron which was a rather stiffer material but it should still be adequate.
The crash in Sep 20 effectively destroyed the fuselage but the wing, tail plane, EDF pulse jet and all the 'electrics' are perfectly reusable.

Fortunately my habit of never throwing anything away means I still have the original fuselage plan.

The fuselage of the V-1 is geometrically simple having a true circular cross section nose to tail but to create the required 'tear drop' profile does mean it has to be of a planked construction over many formers, in fact there are 21 of them and everyone is a different size.
In the first fuselage they were one piece Depron 'rings' which used up quite a bit of material but back then Depron was cheap and readily available.
Now with my fixed Depron supply it makes sense to 3D print the all the formers. The fact they are geometrically all the same but with different in diameters is something well suited to the printing process. It will take some time (several hours) to print the full set but the end result will only have a very modest weight penalty and the material cost is significantly cheaper than even Depron.

First a 'test' former of about the largest diameter required (150 mm) to get a 'feel' for its rigidity.

It has a U channel section 10 mm wide and 3 mm deep. The U base is 0.2 mm thick and the walls are 0.25 mm. it weighs 1.7 g.

The original all Depron fuselage was built with a complete skin as it was relatively easy to cut open sections to fix the one piece wing and to create access to install mountings for the battery, servos and RC gear.

This will not be the case with a printed former so some of the them will have to be printed in parts to allow fuselage areas to be cut open.
Well that's the plan.

Having generated all the formers in CAD the next problem to address is how to incorporate the one piece wing as it goes smack through the middle of the fuselage.
As it would be difficult to build the complete fuselage around the wing the decision has been made is to build just the fuselage centre section around it.

The Depron bracing strips (ex AN 124!) are temporary to hold things square and will be removed once sufficient skin planks are in place.
The font and rear fuselage portions will be built separately and added later.

The complete set of centre section formers all suitably braced up.

It will rest upright on the wing trailing edge so the planks can be added vertically in pairs on opposing sides to hopefully keep it from becoming a banana!

The planking on the centre section complete.

Just a bit of remedial work the wing leading edge and then its back to completing the last little bits on the AN 124.

In the mean time I will print off the next batch of fuselage formers, probably those for the rear fuselage as far as the tail plane.

Nice work Simon,please paint it in proper ww2 colours!

paul
Technically it was in its proper colours as a scale Republic JB2. For post war testing they used a colour scheme specifically intended to be easy to judge the orientation. On the other hand the Fieseler war time colours were intended to be just the opposite.
Then of course there is the fact that it uses white Depron and most of the JB2 scheme was white.

What I should have said is paint it as per a fieseler rather than a jb2.

If Simon repainted it as a Feisler, he'd have to rebuild it after EVERY landing! :woohoo:

Eric wrote: If Simon repainted it as a Feisler, he'd have to rebuild it after EVERY landing! :woohoo:

Not if he fitted a canopy ( the piloted version)

And THAT crashed in a swamp! Hanna Reitch (spelling?) said it was unflyable! [badass]

It appears later version of the JB2 as part of the MATADOR and MACE submarine launched missile development had a sophisticated TV based control system that allowed full remote pilot control including belly landings for recovery.

It does seem odd that all the products of the 'JB' design programme (1 to 10) were a complete failure except when using the V-1 derived airframe and pulse jet. If this video is anything to go by they still got it wrong quite a few times particularly when you consider the Germans managed to launch 6000 of the things in a bit less than a year. :woohoo:

Found a very brief clip here -

scroll through to 11 minutes 30, if you don't want to see all the guff.
As far as I can find, the film Operation Crossbow - is blocked. There are only little snippets of it.

Here's a better clip -

Thing is she did actually successfully fly it, she discovered that it had a very high stall speed.
I read her biography once, brilliant pilot but a committed Nazi, she died years after the war in mysterious circumstances, thinking is she finally chewed on a cyanide capsule given to her during the war.

But she died in 1979 at the age of 67 from a heart attack!
Her husband committed suicide in 1945.
The really sad part was the Hanna's father having escaped with the family from Silesia to Salzburg learned that the Russians would forcibly returned them to their birth place. He shot his wife, Hanna's sister and her 3 children and then himself.

She remained an expert flier right up to the year of her death gaining the female Out and Return gliding distance world record for the second time in 1979.

With the An 124 complete (just in time for the weather to change!) back to the V-1.
The set of 8 formers for the next bit of the fuselage, the wing trailing edge to the tail plane leading edge.

As a simple uninterrupted but variable taper cone it can be built vertically in one piece.