19 Diamond 4

Build: 1997 or 1998, Pieces: 41, Steps: 11
LWH: 23/19/5 studs, 17,94/14,92/3,97 cm

Strong sandwich fixation in front, with a weaker fixation in the back designed to keep the right angle.

Technique: Instead of the usual testing of a new technique, I used this model to improve my control over the jumper technique: At the time moving from 1 x 2 to 1 x 3 was a big leap as my understanding didn't go much beyond the observation that 1 x 2 "just worked" when I managed to put the pieces together correctly.
It's actually a quite complex technique to grasp.
After experiencing how weak the connection was in my model # 16, with the wings only fixed on two studs below the wing, I turned back to model # 15 Dropnose where I had first used the technique, as the technique had seemed a lot stronger the first time.
It turned out that the wings only hung on two studs as well, but being on both sides of a much simpler and lighter wing, still made it a lot stronger. As an improvement to this approach I fixed the wings on two sides directly above each other resulting in a surprisingly strong sandwich-construction. The rear point however, had to do with one stud, as there isn't a corresponding stud beneath the 4*8 wing at this location, but luckily it turned out that the sandwich-construction alone was strong enough to secure the construction while the rear point only kept the wings from turning.

Where the hey is the gear?

Gear: Obviously the model needs some kind of support at the rear to avoid toppling over, but as I'd forgotten to enter this on my original drawings, it's not possible to know what I used originally. However a good guess would be a 6x6 webbed disc just behind the bottom of the cockpit like in model 15 Dropnose.

Returning to a more robust (looking) construction.

The end of an era: As mentioned earlier, this was my last model of the diamond style, or perhaps rather the diamond building scheme with a diamondshaped nose, a very simple cockpit with a block behind to support both the engines and wings.
This scheme had worked well to support my progressing experiments with wings:
In 13 Diamond2 with completely vertical wings and right angles.
In 14 Diamond2b I had angled the wings downwards
In 15 Dropnose, the wings were vertical but turned and fixed via the new jumpertechnique.
In model 16, I had combined both angling and turning the wings, but with a weak construction.
The models 17 and 18 were about using the wings as "feet", progressing from 90º angles to an angled configuration.
At last in this one, the 19th model I finally found an adequate way to fixate the jumper technique, making it strong enough.

But I felt a growing discontent repeating myself, and as the above repetition shows, I simply had run out of basic ways to combine wings. This, together with a few other things meant that I wouldn't make any new model for at least three years.