Search the Community

Hi, Here's our most recently finished model. This was made as a commission for a good friend who worked as a technician on Merlins. He wanted Hotel in particular as he remembers working on it. This model is also a team effort between my husband David and myself. David did most of the construction and all of the exterior. I did the interior. The model has a few additions to the kit. On the exterior several aerials were replaced with wire (using some very handy banjo strings that we always have spares of!). The bar HF aerial on the rear left hand side is deleted on operational aircraft. The gun set up an operational one, the left hand side door is always removed when the side door gun is fitted as it wouldn't close anyway. The kit instructions also show you fitting a right hand side gun, however this is not fitted as it is apparently inconvenient to use and affects seating capacity. In the cockpit I added the sun shades which I made out of folded paper, to the roof, these are noticeably absent on the kit and very evident in photographs. I also added some seat belts to the pilot seats made out of tamiya tape. Moving aft, I made a curtain out of toilet paper for the door between the cockpit and the cabin. This was just folded, tied with tamiya tape and painted black. Inside the cabin and cockpit there are a lot of curly headset wires that are usually left hanging out instead of being stowed. For these we got the banjo wire out again and used a G string and curled it around a D string. I had to do a considerable amount of work on the cabin seats. Our friend wanted the seats stowed up apart from the very back aircrew seats which he wanted down. This is because the back seats are stowed up using velcro, which rather inconveniently leads the seats opening up during flight anyway! Of course Airfix have you model the seats down with the back seats up, which means I had lots of work to do! I took all of the seat backs bar two and cut them down and flattened them so they'd fit, I then built two more to replace the ones I wasn't attacking. Then I had to make seat belts out of tamiya tape for all of them, on the real thing these seat belts are stowed very untidily so I tried my best to replicate that. Back to the exterior, I made up a mix of Tamiya XF58 and XF59 for the base colour. David then weathered the panels in several stages with varying amounts of thinned XF20 and XF51 depending on the panel shade on the real thing. The shades are made to match 'Hotel' specifically. David was not happy with the decals supplied for the walkways so he painted them in Nato Black. All the metals are sprayed using varying shades of alclad. David shaded the rotor blades to simulate wear. Overall this kit was a pretty touch build, it wasn't the easiest fitting model, the top assembly is awkward and the nose area requires considerable work to fit. All the little fiddly bits need trimming before fitting. The decals took a fair amount of persuasion to fit without silvering. We also managed to add an extra month to the build by dropping it, this destroyed the undercarriage and knocked both pilot seats out. This meant removal of the side windows (after the model had been painted!) and the purchase of metal undercarriage parts. After that David also contrived to knock off one of the wire cutters so we had to take another one off to make a resin cast to replace it. It was a 6 month long build for both of us and we're both relieved that it's finally done, well not quite! We have yet to build an airfield base and a tempered glass case for it. For anyone that would like to see even more photos at full size, here's the link to the album. I'll be adding some photos of the build in progress to this album soon as well. http://s240.photobucket.com/user/amandaphotomeow/library/Andys%20Merlin?sort=3&page=1