VQ models 110" B-24 Liberator rolling door tools

thingiverse

VQ models recently released a 1/12 scale model of the B-24 Liberator. The plane is described at: https://vqwarbirds.com/product/vq-b-24-liberator-110-arf-olive-gray/ The plane comes with nice rolling doors, except they don’t operate – this is left to the modeler. So I will post a few things related to actuating the doors. A blog on the rolling door construction can be found at: https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?3321299-VQ-110-B-24-rolling-bomb-bay-doors So let’s start with the simplest thing – the door channels need to be sanded in order to be anywhere near smooth enough to operate. So here are some sanding tools I used for that purpose. I found that the channels are not equal in width, and the farthest back one requires a slightly narrower sander, I made them 10.7mm wide. I guess you could just use that for all the channels, but I also have a slightly fatter 12mm wide version for the slots where that fits. Also note that your extrusion multiplier will make things slightly narrower or wider. I printed these with two layers bottom/top/side, and 30% infill. PLA is fine, they are just disposable tools. I have two curvatures – 140mm arc will fit nicely in the most curved part of the channel. The tools with 280mm arc are flatter and are more suitable for the flatter parts of the channel. The latter are asymmetric because this is required to fit in the highest parts of the channel better (farthest away from the door opening). So between the two widths (12mm and 10.7mm) and the two curvatures (140mm and 280mm diameters), there are 4 tools. The file names should be self explanatory. See "Post-Printing" for advice on finishing.