So I’ve been turning my attention to the ailerons and the wing. My original plan was to use flaperons on this model (ailerons whose resting position can be changed so they act as flaps for low speed flight but still work as ailerons. I did this by routing the aileron motion through a differential in each wing. The cage of the diff is attached to the inboard flaps and as they lower it rotates the diff cage and that is multiplied onto the axle which controls the ailerons. It works pretty well but there’s an issue: the Hog doesn’t use flaperons, it uses ailerons that split into an upper and lower half. I’ve now built ailerons that are 2 studs thick and split using a tiny pneumatic cylinder. The return to close is done via an elastic band so the cylinder only requires one input and that can be hidden behind one of the many and varied instruments of death that this plane carries (probably not gonna submit this to Lego ideas)
It seems to work well so I’m sticking with this solution. This also means I can ditch the differentials and build more strength into the wing root. I can see a final strip down and rebuild of the whole plane when I’ve worked all this out. No biggie though, I only began building it a bees-dick over 4 years ago!
https://flic.kr/p/2qfnyaF
https://flic.kr/p/2qfnydm
Apologies for the mix of links and pics, I did exactly the same thing with each but half have embedded the image and half have not.