Bandsaw Steve

Time for a bat-bump for this one Robin! 🦇 More citizens of Gotham city deserve to see this!

Nozzle and intake. Experience has taught me that when building these models there are several things that best done early on. Now is the best time to cut any rebates that are needed to hold any major structures in place and it's also the best time to complete any work that makes use of access to the centreline. In this case this means cutting the nozzle and the intake. The biggest - almost disastrous - mistake that i made on the Mirage project was when I drilled out the jet exhaust nozzle and the two halves of the fuselage slipped relative to one another causing the spade bit to almost rip out a large chunk of the rear fuselage. On this project i therefore decided to complete this high risk drilling early on in the project. This way, it goes badly I can start again with minimal loss or at least have the best possible chance of correcting it. Here's the initial mark-up. Here you can see just how useful it is to have a natural centreline to ensure that the drill is centered correctly. It even looks like a high risk operation. Next time I think I might even drill out the exhaust nozzle before cutting out the basic fuselage shape; just to be sure. The two halves of the fuselage are firmly held together with dowels and glued-on paper (which is remarkably strong) but just to be sure that nothing slips I've also bound the two halves together with wrapped layers of masking tape which you can see in this photo. When using a spade bit for delicate work like this, I aways start by running the spade bit backwards, this cuts a circular scoring mark on the surface of the wood that prevents it chipping-out when the actual drilling begins. Drill slowly and carefully and a few minutes later you will hopefully have a nice circular hole in exactly the correct spot. And it looks tidy this time. Splitting the model in half like this allows us to see how we went & I'm thinking this time things went well. At the opposite end of the aircraft is the air intake. This is a highly visible and very distinctive component of the F-100 and is likely to be the most difficult part of the entire project. Getting this right is 'make-or-break' on this model and frankly I'm not sure i can get the intake 'lips' sufficiently sharp and accurate using only wood. I do have a 'plan B' in mind, but for now, 'plan A' goes like this... Stick a paper pattern showing the required shape on the front of the jet and drill a chain of small holes about 1mm inside that perimeter as shown below. Then drill out a dense pattern of small holes scattered throughout the entire volume within the chain drilling. Once we separate the two fuselage halves we can drill more holes at 90 degrees to the first set. This creates a weakened volume of wood that is prepared for removal. The removal itself can be done with a chisel... or a Dremmel tool. At this point we have the first signs of an intake. At this point the intake's aperture has been intentionally made too small. Once the external contouring of the fuselage is complete I will return to slowly - very slowly - enlarging this aperture and sharpening its leading edges. There's been a lot more than this going on with this project, especially various rebates being cut for major structures such as the wings, tail surfaces but all that can wait for another post. For now though, this jet has a rudimentary intake and nozzle and that's enough to keep me happy. See you soon, Bandsaw Steve.

No, but my guess is it would glide just about as well as a real F-100!

Well… as a general rule I’m not a huge Lego fan, but this really is quite something! You might be forcing me to reconsider my prejudices! 🤔

‘Australian hardwood, F-100, Man-Glitter’ to be precise! 👍

If you go to the Ashbuton Aviation museum on the South Island they have both an MB-339 and an Airtruk. True story! 👍

MB-339. ? Only because it’s Italian… 🤔

That’s spectacular ! What a great model!

Over to you @Karearea but be quick because once @cmatthewbacon comes back he has the ball!

Excellent! Well done. And well done to 75 squadron too. This unique honour was paid for most dearly.

Which commonwealth airforce squadron was awarded its number, colours and battle honours by the Royal Air Force and, even though now inactive, remains unique in this regard?

Blocking-out For me scratchbuilding a model is a bit like drawing a picture. Typically an artist creating a drawing will 'block-out' the biggest shapes first and then, once the basic structure is established, will add details. Not all artists work that way, but many do, and it's a good analogy for how I attack making models. I start with the biggest shapes and try to cut out the blocks that will represent them. Later on I can contour those shapes and move on to finer details. I also tend to start at the center, in this case the fuselage, and work outward. Since the fuselage is already 'blocked-out' it's time to start cutting out the wings, tailplanes and tail. Using the 'biggest to littlest' rule of thumb, lets start with the wings. Here I have one sheet of 6mm thick MDF with a topside and bottomside view of the wings glued on. Here I've used the bandsaw to make an initial cut-out of both the top and lower half of the wing structure. The next step will be to cut in much more closely to the final shape and then finish with a bench-mounted belt sander. Unfortunately I took no photos for either of those two stages but I'm sure you get the idea. It's a good idea to make the wing in two pieces, an upper and lower half, because then you can contour each independently of the other and ensure that the flat plane between upper and lower remains completely consistent. For the vertical tail I spot-glued two sheets of 3mm MDF together and stuck on an outline of the tail plus a deep 'root' or 'base' to the tail that will set into the fuselage and will be used to attach the whole structure. I then cut the tail outline out using a scroll-saw. You do not need a scroll-saw for this kind of work - a coping saw would handle this easily - but using a power-tool does save time. Note that when I glued the two sheets together I ensured that none of the glue was within the area defined by the tail outline. This way, once the cut was complete, the tail naturally split into two 3mm thick halves. This - once again - creates a centreline for me to work to. For the tailplanes I chose to use a single layer of high-quality plywood. The F-100's tailplane was a very thin structure, so to ensure that it was strong enough to withstand handling, I chose plywood, which is much better than MDF in this regard. There could be some minor complications with this choice when I come to taper this structure but I'm confident I can manage. Here is the empennage as it currently stands. Obviously the tail looks weird because it has not yet been set into the center of the fuselage. Here's the current state of play of this project. The biggest shapes are now 'blocked out'. The next step will be to cut rebates into the fuselage so that each of these pieces fit together in the correct way making a rudimentary 3D 'picture' of an F-100. In the meantime, if you blur your eyes and stand well back it's almost starting to look like... something. 👍 Stay with me NATO potatoes! Best Regards, Bandsaw Steve

It is worth noting that this may be the first time in human history that the word ‘subtle’ has ever been used in any discussion regarding Super Sabres.

Well you know me @Corsairfoxfouruncle One way or another I’ve always got the hump!

Both good suggestions, worthy of my consideration. I should have thought of that myself! 🤔

We need a bigger bandsaw! 🦈 At the end of the first post I had managed to cut one half of the fuselage into this 2D outline. I generally make my fuselages by temporarily joining two blocks of wood and then making just one cut around the side view shape. Doing this way ensures that there is a natural centerline running through the middle of the project since the joining surface acts as a permanent reference line which helps me ensure symmetry later on. Generally I can cut both halves at the same time but since this fuselage is so chunky I couldn’t fit both bits of wood into the bandsaw at the same time and had to work on the two halves separately. We need a bigger bandsaw! 🦈 Here's the second half cut out and laid up against the first half. Now I hold the two together in a vice and drill out holes for a series of small dowels that will ensure that the two halves go together in exactly the same way each time the model is assembled. Since the two halves were not cut out at the same moment there were inevitably slight differences between the two shapes and there was quite a bit of rasp and file work required to get them both the same size and shape. There was also a fair bit of sanding required to really eliminate the differences. Which gave me this. The next phase of work was just too ugly to photograph. Suffice to say that the plan view shape was defined by a paper cut out of the underside view stuck on the lower half of the fuselage. Then a great deal of sawing and rasping and sanding was completed to get the plan view shape correct. The problem was that the height of the fuselage (distance from bottom-most to the top-most surface) was too great to fit in the cutting throat of the bandsaw so I had to do this work manually using hand-saws and other such contemptible primitive methods. Consequently, a job that should have taken about 15 minutes took a couple of hours. We need a bigger bandsaw! 🦈 I got there in the end though! Here is the progress to date shot showing the F-100 parked up against the Mirage III. Both are 1/32 scale but I think you can already see just how much bigger the F-100 is. BTW the paper on top is just normal photocopier paper held in place with spray on photo adhesive. I've found this makes a really strong really tight 'lock' between the two halves that's easily removed at any time just by wiping it with white spirits. In the photo below, between the paper template on the bottom side and the paper on top and the handful of small dowels the whole structure is absolutely rigid; it's as if it's just one block of wood at the moment. Anyway -all of that sawing and rasping and sanding has made me think... ‘We’re gonna need a bigger bandsaw if we want to build something as big and sharky as this!’ 🦈 Well - maybe not. The fuselage is probably the only part that is really going to punish us for lack of bandsaw capacity on this project. The biggest bit is under control now. From here on it's just little details like wings and tails and tailplanes and stuff that need to be built. Stay tuned folks there's plenty more NATO action to follow. Best Regards, Bandsaw Steve

There is old fashioned solid modelling too which I have been known to dabble in on these pages and I think is entirely do-able by the average enthusiast. Have a poke about for my Mig-15, Avro 504 and Mirage lll WIP threads as they are complete end to end records of each project.

Outstanding - anyone could easily mistake those photos for the real thing. 👍

I think the seventies must have been a sort of ‘golden age’ for jet enthusiasts. Back then you could probably spot everything from the odd Korean War era jet all the way through to types that are still in service (sometimes even still in production! ) today… …and they weren’t all painted grey either!

That still might just be the best looking combination of airframe and markings ever seen on an airliner (excepting Concorde as a special case).

Ditto!

That would have been a thing to see!

Rile away, I don’t really take any of this that seriously! 👍

By the way, if you are enjoying this project then you might like my contribution to the NATO 75 Anniversary Group build. Here's the link...

Rapid progress. Sometimes I just get a bit reckless with these projects and when I do I find things go much faster. Perhaps I've just been 'needled' by the somewhat pointed and entirely valid comments above regarding my lack of speed. 😄 In any case, I do seem to have put a few runs on the board recently. 🤔 Earlier this week I decided that ready-or-not the time has come to stick the missing cockpit wall in place. In order to do that I had to start by squirting some black Tamiya rattle-can paint about as shown below. While waiting for the paint to dry I thought to myself 'I wonder how the rest of this blotchy and uneven-colored thing will look when finally painted? So - before I knew it - I had masked off some of the black paint, cleaned off the metal with a cloth dampened with few drops of isopropyl alcohol and sprayed a couple of coats of grey metal etching primer. Here's the result. I think it looks quite encouraging! I only sprayed the top half though because there's still a bunch of detailing to go in the wheel wells and it will probably be much easier to work on unpainted surfaces. Here she is from another angle. It's obvious that the big hole in the side of the cockpit really does need to be filled, but it's equally obvious that it's far easier to put the final components of the cockpit into their final position before closing up that sidewall. The last components are an ejection seat, an instrument panel, an instrument panel shroud and all of the 'guff' that sits above the shroud ahead of the pilot. Here's the result. This is probably sufficiently inaccurate to make any Mirage III guru cry; but to hell with it - I'm trying to make rapid progress! Blading putty and sanding was used to conceal the join where the new wall met the rest of the fuselage and with a squirt of more black paint the result was satisfactory. I think it looks OK from a distance. Now I rolled the thing on it's back and started working on the guns. How to deal with the guns has worried me for a while because I really was not sure how I was going to position and align the gun barrels so they weren't aimed point-blank at the underside of the nose. As you can see I carved out two big trenches where the guns can sit... and then epoxied and milli-putted the short visible lengths of gun-barrel into position carefully lining them up so that they can just be seen from directly in front of the aircraft, thereby proving that firing them is not an act of suicide. Now came the really tricky bit. How to make the extremely elongated oval reinforced housings that surround the gun troughs. @hendie once said something like 'ovals are hard to make' and I would have to agree with him on that. These look shocking! So bad in fact that the top one got re-made and the bottom one (about 80% complete in this photo) probably should have been scrapped as well. it was only saved because I was running low on out of copper and still did not really know how to make the next one any better. Here a bit of folded / rolled-up sandpaper is being used to 'ovalise' the gun troughs. These are far from perfect but I'm pressing on regardless. I used copper for this because I figured it would take the slight compound curves better than Aluminum lithoplate and, being a bit thicker, might withstand the handling better. I think it was the right choice as in the end the result is not toooooo baaaaaaddd.... as long as you don't look closely. Hopefully the overall 'racy' appearance of the jet from this angle will distract the eye from the rather 'agricultural' gun troughs. Right now I'm pretty happy with how this is looking. Next comes the canopy. The canopy's vac-forming molding 'buck' is already well underway and will be the subject of the next update. Like I say - I'm putting a few runs on the board at the moment! Best Regards, Bandsaw Steve