Another act of canopy procrastination was to fit all the gussets and cap strips to the wings, followed by making a start on the nose block and tow release fitting. I then realised that the canopy frame needed to be painted before trying to fit the canopy itself.

I was now approaching the point where I needed to see how much lead was going to have to be built into the nose, so a battery tray was fabricated to accommodate a 3s x 800mah LiPo. Like the binnacle, this was made removable, just in case access to the tow release servo was needed some time in the future.

It was clear that, with the binnacle and pilot in place, it was not practical to connect and disconnect the battery between flights. As it happened, I had a spare magnetic switch so this was wired into the circuit between the battery and voltage regulator. Even though the ‘off’ current drawn by the switch is tiny, I was sufficiently paranoid that I fitted a Jeti MuLi6 sensor which enables remote monitoring of the LiPo via its balance connector. Both the MuLi6 and magnetic switch are visible in the above right picture. I want to use a vario in this model too, so that meant incorporating a Jeti expander unit to enable the vario and MULi6 to be connected into the telemetry port of the receiver. All of a sudden, there seemed to be an awful lot of electrical bits and pieces, and associated wiring, to be stowed out of sight.

The recommended canopy for this model is actually one for the 1/3 scale Flamingo so it is huge. And of course, there are no guide marks to help you decide where to cut it. So there then followed a lot of cautious cutting, offering up, trimming, offering up, trimming etc. to home in on the piece of the canopy that blended best with the rest of the model. I admit to being very pleased with the outcome, even if this picture does also reveal that, at this stage, the fit of the canopy frame onto the fuselage is less than perfect!

Early August now, and time for the traditional fully assembled naked photo shoot, before the airframe was prepared for covering.

Unfortunately, while sanding down prior to covering, a problem arose. Attentive readers may remember my two stage process for attaching leading edge sheeting, first glueing the sheeting to the spar and then pulling it down onto the false leading edge. It seems that during this second operation, I failed to get the glue to run right back along some of the ribs towards the spar or didn’t manage to weigh the sheeting down well enough to bond to the ribs.

The result was a spanwise bulge in the sheeting, about 12in long. Another period of cogitation and consultation followed and I eventually took the scalpel to the offending bulge, and inserted some wedges to enable glue to be applied to the ribs. The wedges were then reversed to enable glue to be applied to the rest of the ribs before the sheeting was pressed back down and firmly weighted in position. Happily this operation proved reasonably successful

After a few more rounds of sanding, two coats of Eze-Kote were applied to the sheeted surfaces and, after one more round of sanding, the workshop was cleaned up to make a start on covering.

The colour scheme is based on the full size F-CEED but, in recognition that my model is merely based on this, rather than a detailed scale replica, I changed the registration to something which hopefully will remind me what the model is called when searching for it in my overcrowded transmitter model directory! Thanks to Barry for cutting the lettering.

As the model neared completion, it began to fight back. Looking at the three view of the full size, I realised that the rudder, one of the first items to be covered should be red, not white, so that had to be stripped and re-covered. Then, when it came to fitting the closed loop wires, I couldn’t find the guide tube exits at the rear and ended up with wire coiled up inside the rear fuselage and wrapped around the tailplane crank. Much patience and fine tweezer work was required to recover from that one - needless to say, there are no photos!

With the film all put away, I began fitting the various bits and pieces and came across the wing tip plates, so it was out with the film and iron again to cover those. Meanwhile, my wife had been kindly working on some tailor-made wing bags which also accommodate the tailplane and wing joiners, which otherwise are all too easy to get left behind.

The model was then fully assembled for a radio programming session and a cg check. This revealed that the cg had migrated rearwards during the covering process by rather more than anticipated so the battery tray had to be removed and re-built to take a 3s x 2200mah battery in place of the original 800mah.

The last job was to give the pilot some instruments then assemble the model one more time for the final pre-flight photo shoot.

One advantage of the wing fixing arrangement on this model is that access to fit the rubber bands and connect the wing servo wires is excellent. The wing fairing slots in at the rear and is held at the front by the magnets you see at the bottom of the picture on the right. The cockpit canopy locates by a peg at the front and is held at the rear by the other two magnets, also just visible in this picture.

So here it is at the end of October, at last hopefully ready to go when the weather permits.

Stop Press: By happy coincidence, I have arrived at the end of this long overdue diary entry just 24hrs after the Topaze had its maiden flight. The maiden happily went without drama, and a second flight was also undertaken successfully after a few tweaks to aileron differential and aileron-rudder coupling. No thermal action was apparent but the model flew steadily and, to my delight and relief, the home-made brakes seem to work well, with no elevator compensation required. All-in-all a very promising start after such a protracted build. My thanks to Barry Cole for the tows and to Martin Hardy for the first four pictures. . . .

. . . and to Chris Williams for these four: