Its been about three weeks now, and I have been busy… but as so often the learning curve is still steep, even with all the help from the youtube channels.

I have started over from scratch … oh … about 10 times … but now, slowly I can feel that I am gaining traction. The Fusion360 commands are getting easier, and I no longer wonder what is happening (at least most of the time).

This does not mean that the sailing is smooth, its still rather choppy out there.

The general approach is to find a 3-D exploded drawing of the plane, use those as the canvas in Fusion360, scale them to size, and then start designing the plane.

If you want to see how that can easily be done, check out the youtube channel of RC CAD-2-VR. But when you want to do the same for the CL-415, you will quickly find out why he choose a “round body plane” for his tutorial. The shape of the CL-415 is way more complex, and finding the best design approach is not easy. In fact, I have been driven up the wall more than once…

This is the basic canvas setup I use:

Its difficult to see, as the three canvasses for all axis are shown simultaneously. No worry though, you can turn of visibility for each canvas separately. I usually work with only one canvas showing, depending on which axis I am working with. Btw, it is possible to have more canvasses than 3, you can have as many as you like and in fact I am using 8 in total.

Finding the right canvas is of course an exercise in and of itself. When you find a couple of drawings on the net, chances are they will be wrong, or at the least inaccurate and will have errors in them.

In the end I settled for the drawings I found on seawings.co.uk. They are far from perfect, there are distortions and a few errors. So I also use the station drawings I got from Viking Air for the actual scaling, i.e. position/size determination. But since the station drawings lack a lot of detail, I use the Seawings drawings as a general template. Not ideal, but the best I can do.

Of course before designing any details, I also look at pictures … a LOT!

A snapshot of the completion of the windows and their enclosure: