Looking good, Jeff
This build has me wondering about two (future?) possibilities:
- 1: Has anyone ever done a Tigercat whif with longer-span outer wing panels? (Some extra wing area would seem handy for the attack role.)
- 2: The opposite seems true for a dedicated attack Tracker. Could the outer wing panels be cropped slightly? (Easier to pull off in 1/72nd scale as you suggested for your S-2/F7F hybrid build.) I'm attaching a rough retouch to show the revised wingspan I had in mind.
Hi Stephen.
That was the adjunct of the wing swapping with the Tracker and Tigercat. The airfoil is identical and only the wing span is different. Well, wingspan and engines (R-2800 vs R-1820).
My initial attempt was to mate the Tigercat wings to the Tracker fuselage. Direct replacement was not possible since the Tracker wing had a fillet added to get the wing to conform with/match up with the curve of the Tracker fuselage. I cut this curved portion of this fillet away in order to use it with the Tigercat wings on the Tracker fuselage. It kind of sort of worked but not quite. Getting the multiple parts at this point to all cooperate was well out of my comfort zone and lack of extra hands/arms to keep it all under control also made it difficult to deal with. It would definitely be a much easier project in 1/72nd scale as I realized while working on this in the larger scale.
So what had been a single what-if project suddenly became two what-if projects by accident or default. The Tracker wing without the inboard fillet fit quite easily on the Tigercat fuselage which made me realize I could create a long-wing Tigercat without much effort. With the longer wings of the Tracker attached to the Tigercat it could have become an ersatz reconnaissance or surveillance platform perhaps.
Also, propeller clearance was also not an issue with the modified Tracker wings on the Tigercat fuselage. The smaller diameter Tracker propellers had plenty of clearance. Same with the Tigercat propellers on the Tracker since the fillet cut from the Tracker wing was to be added to the inboard section of the Tigercat wings the propeller clearance issues were null.