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Dynavector Wyvern - Finally Finished! 25 Oct 2015


Nik W

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Evening all!

Inspired by the awesome work on here by Tom Probert on his magnificent Shackleton and then the Superfortress and Rich's B-17 I thought that I ought to take the plunge and have a go at the dark art that is a vacform kit.

Armed with a bit of knowledge gleaned from t'interweb I decided to start on something fairly straight forward and having heard Dynavector are up there among the Rolls Royce of vacforms and the Wyvern is one of the easier of their kits to build, when one came up cheap on eBay it was a golden opportunity.

By the way, apologies for the photos, they were taken on my iPad, so may not be the greatest.

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A rather pleasant little surprise came in the form of a resin cockpit tub, which looks to me like it may be part of the Compass Rose resin set for this kit (I could be completely wrong of course, but I've not been able to find any other details of resin sets for this kit). Sadly it was just the tub itself and not the full set, but beggars can't be choosers I suppose.

No shots of the cutting process, but following John Aero's vacform guide which is on the site somewhere, the parts were drawn around with a felt pen, scored with a new scalpel and snapped from the backing plastic. Definitely one of the scariest parts of vacform building, but not too bad once you've practised on a few corners of scrap backing sheet.

A little bit of Tamiya NATO Black for the cockpit and some drybrushing really brought the detail in the resin tub out quite nicely. Because I only had the tub itself from the resin set, the IP is the Dynavector metal part with some Airscale instrument decals from the RAF WWII and Early Allied Jets sheets, just to give it a little more interest.

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The metal seat supplied with the kit is pretty crude...

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Since my scratchbuilding skills are nowhere near on a par with Tom or Rich I took the easy option and grabbed an ejector seat from Pavla to replace the kit part.

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Once all the appropriate prep work for the parts had been done (LOTS of sanding!) construction of the main fuselage and wings went together really quite quickly after a fair bit of dry-fitting to make sure I'd sanded to the correct line and thinned the trailing edges of the wings enough (which still look a little clunky, but it's my first attempt at a vacform kit so don't be too harsh on me! :-) ) The plastic itself is quite soft, so it responds well to Plastic Weld, which has really helped in avoiding seam lines between the fuselage halves and other parts.

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The detail in the undercarriage bays is a little soft so I added a couple of strips of evergreen to sharpen it up a little bit. Thankfully the inner halves of the u/c doors remain shut, so I didn't have to do too much, just a little bit of wire to add some visual interest and the two ribs.

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I decided not to go too nuts with adding wires and detail to the u/c bays, as this was mainly to try out the techniques involved in constructing the kit itself and not an exercise in super detailing.

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Here it is, taped together just to make sure everything fits. The join underneath the fuselage between the wings and the fuselage itself required a bit of fettling, I took too much plastic off of the fuselage halves so had to add some off-cuts into the gap I'd created and smother it in glue in an attempt to get it even. I'm currently working on the tailplane (both have been cut-out and glued together and push fitted onto the spar supplied with the kit to get the angle right.

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They just need some shaping where they meet the fuselage and then attached and filled and then I think the back of this will have been broken.

Well there it is, nowhere near up to the standards seen elsewhere here, but I'm quite pleased with it so far, and hopefully posting a build on here will work as a bit of motivation to actually keep making progress on it.

Any tips or constructive criticism would be greatly appreciated though guys, these are unknown waters for me and while I'm enjoying it very much, I'm eager to learn from those of you who know better!

Cheers!

Nik

Edited by Nik W
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Hi Nick

I haven't taken the plunge yet and started any of my vacforms I wasn't sure whether to start with a 1/72 or go bigger scale as you have done. I'll keep following your build so you can give me the courage to start my own. scared of removing too much plastic so really glad to read that's fixable as you have done.

Keep up the good work :thumbsup:

Cheers Pat

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Hi Nick,

It looks like you've got this vacform-malarkey down to a fine art! :thumbsup:

Great choice of manufacturer too, Dynavector are really up there with the best in my opinion.

From your pictures it looks like you have made fantastic progress and you'd never guess this was your first vac effort.

You mentioned the trailing edges - there are two ways to get them nice and thin:

1) Scrape away the trailing edge with a new scalpel blade and then finish the process of with sandpaper. I used to make the mistake of only doing this on perhaps the 5-10mm only nearest the trailing edge itself, but if you go further in towards the centre of the wing to don't get the chamfered edge which can create a gap where the two wing halves meet (hope that makes sense!?)

2) Sometimes I reduce the trailing edges on the top and bottom halves of the wings in terms of chord, and then insert some thin plastic card between the two halves along the entire trailing edge. I then blend this in with filler, leaving a razor sharp edge to the wing. This works well with larger models.

Anyway, from your pics it seems to me you've done just fine, and I look forward to watching your build progress. It's good to see it going together without the problems many imagine vacforms to have - see... they're really not that hard... more should join our mad little modelling world...

Tom

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Great start, I have this in my collection, I think I only paid £12, I think they were £50 new, but I could be wrong, there certainly is allot of resin, and no worries about scratch building those things such as wheels and Propellers

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Hi Nick

I haven't taken the plunge yet and started any of my vacforms I wasn't sure whether to start with a 1/72 or go bigger scale as you have done. I'll keep following your build so you can give me the courage to start my own. scared of removing too much plastic so really glad to read that's fixable as you have done.

Keep up the good work :thumbsup:

Cheers Pat

Hi Pat, definitely worth taking the plunge, having built only injection moulded stuff with the odd resin kit here and there I wouldn't consider myself an expert modeller by any means, but this has been great fun and a good challenge!

Hi Nick,

It looks like you've got this vacform-malarkey down to a fine art! :thumbsup:

Great choice of manufacturer too, Dynavector are really up there with the best in my opinion.

From your pictures it looks like you have made fantastic progress and you'd never guess this was your first vac effort.

You mentioned the trailing edges - there are two ways to get them nice and thin:

1) Scrape away the trailing edge with a new scalpel blade and then finish the process of with sandpaper. I used to make the mistake of only doing this on perhaps the 5-10mm only nearest the trailing edge itself, but if you go further in towards the centre of the wing to don't get the chamfered edge which can create a gap where the two wing halves meet (hope that makes sense!?)

2) Sometimes I reduce the trailing edges on the top and bottom halves of the wings in terms of chord, and then insert some thin plastic card between the two halves along the entire trailing edge. I then blend this in with filler, leaving a razor sharp edge to the wing. This works well with larger models.

Anyway, from your pics it seems to me you've done just fine, and I look forward to watching your build progress. It's good to see it going together without the problems many imagine vacforms to have - see... they're really not that hard... more should join our mad little modelling world...

Tom

Tom, thanks for the kind words of encouragement, coming from a 'Vac-master' like yourself (that sounds like a Hoover manufacturer...) it is high praise indeed! Thanks for the tips about the trailing edges, I went down the route of your first tip and thinned the trailing edge a good deal in from the edge itself as I discovered early on it was just creating a chamfer as you described. The suggesting of reducing the chord along the trailing edges and blending in a piece of plasticard is a brilliant idea which I think I may end up stealing on my next vacform build! I just need to decide what that will be, although I have got a Dynavector Scimitar in the stash, which would fit in nicely with the Fleet Air Arm theme I seem to be leaning towards at the moment.

You've definitely converted me to The Dark Side!

That sure is a lot of aircraft for the one pilot! Love the racing stripe :)

Nice progress though. Is that a resin nose, eh.. ring?

Michael - Yeah it's some racing stripe eh? ;) Nose ring thingy is indeed resin, it's a bulkhead for mounting the contra-rotating props on, the spinners for which are also resin with whit metal props.

Next update coming soon! Watch this space as they say!

Nik

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As promised above, here is tonight's update.

Only a relatively small amount of work done today, I planned to get a huge pile done, but I had to pick up a car from the garage and then as I went to get a coat of primer on it I discovered I'd run out of Halfords Grey, so cue a trip to Halfords for 3 cans of the stuff (I'll not be running out for a while now ;) ) and I'm back in business.

So, cockpit and wheel wells were masked up and a coat of grey was sprayed straight from the rattle can so I could see where I'd need to do work on any seams and blemishes.

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First impressions would suggest that I'd done a better job than expected here as apart from some panel lines which have vanished around the upper nose section due to sanding this is going to require a lot less filler than I had anticipated. Although I think this is definitely more to do with the superior quality of the kit itself rather than my skills, although I could always pass it off as all that surface prep I did before putting anything together ;)

Only area which needs any real attention is around the resin nose ring/engine bulkhead thing, which will need a bit of rescribing and under the fuselage where the front and rear of the wing section (which is an entire sub-assembly that drops into a gap in the bottom of the fuselage) meet the fuselage.

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The photo doesn't show it particularly well (using the iPad again as faffing with the camera and laptop is a pain) but you can make out the area where I had to add in a shim of off cut backing plastic to fill the gap I made. The rear of the wing section is very much the same, but a little bit of filler should hide all this I'm thinking.

At the front of the wing root there are two intakes, which if left untouched would leave the model with a rather nasty see-through appearance at the front so I decided to create a bit of false ducting to prevent that see through look using a couple of small sections of copper pipe cut to a decent length.

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The pipe itself is slightly smaller in diameter than the opening itself, but with a little bit of filler I should be able to get rid of the holes around them and it'll give a passable impression of something being there rather than just an empty cavity in the model.

Quick question for you all though before I wrap this update up for now, the kit comes with two beautifully clear vacform canopies, and I don't want to leave underneath these just flat black, so does anybody have any information (pics or otherwise) what the area under the windshield and rear sliding portion of the canopy looks like?

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As you can see from the pictures above, these areas are pretty flat straight from the kit, and will be pretty visible under the canopy, so I'd like to create a kind of semi-realistic representation of what is under there in real life. A hunt on the web turned up very little at all, so hopefully somebody on here might have some information on the matter.

That's all for now folks, back to the bench for a bit I think!

Thanks for looking guys.

Nik

Edited by Nik W
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Great start, I have this in my collection, I think I only paid £12, I think they were £50 new, but I could be wrong, there certainly is allot of resin, and no worries about scratch building those things such as wheels and Propellers

I think I paid about the same for this! Got to thank Trumpeter and Classic Airframes for driving down the prices of these, even with all the resin bits and pieces inside.

Nik

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That's going well for you Nik. Don't know there would be any info in the 4+ book as most of the photos are black & white or of the prototype. If I find it will have a quick look.

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Nice going so far Nik considering you're a "noob" to the black art.

It's just not as black as some think eh.

I've done a couple of full vacs and John Adam's (Aeroclub,John Aero on here)excellent little

Spitfire/Seafire conversions(very accurate BTW).

There's an excellent article in "Tips and Tricks"(I think)on here by John himself on bashing

vacforms,well worth a read.

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Evening folks!

Time for a small update, back to work today so sadly modelling time is now limited again :(

Managed to get a bit more done on the Wyvern tonight, a couple of bits which I wasn't looking forward to that I needn't have worried about. First up it was time to get a bit of filler on the areas under the fuselage where the wings section meets the fuselage.

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A bit of sanding has got these joints down to what seems to be an acceptable level, but I'll give it another coat of primer to check when I have more time. I was a bit heavy handed with the front joint though and managed to pop it open. Bit of a pain, but a good dose of Plastic Weld to the joint and some pressure seems to have fixed it without too much hassle.

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A little bit of sanding and some rescribing the panel lines I've removed should tidy this up not too badly.

Next up was the first of the jobs that I hadn't been looking forward to - the drop tanks. My biggest concern with these was their small size and complex shape would be difficult to remove from the backing sheet without damaging them.

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Thankfully they weren't as bad as I'd thought they would be. Thanks to Miggers for pointing me in the direction of John Adams' vacform article on here, one tip I picked up on was to extend a couple of the score lines beyond the shape of the tank itself so that when I snapped it from the backing sheet the plastic broke along the path of least resistance rather than breaking off part of the tank at the joint to the pylon. As usual it was then back to sanding and filing to prepare the two surfaces for gluing which didn't take long for me to get to this stage.

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Closely followed by it's twin brother...

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The white of the plastic doesn't photograph very well, so what you can't see in these pictures are the slightly rough parts around the joins of the two halves where the melted plastic oozed out. A quick blast with a sanding pad soon saw to this.

The other job which I really wasn't looking forward to was removing the exhaust fairings. These parts are VERY thin so needed care not to snap in half during sanding or scar them with a bit of over excited filing.

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Removing the centre section was the hardest part so far as these parts are thin and quite flimsy as it is, so removing this was just asking for trouble with somebody as clumsy as me. These took quite a lot of jiggery pokery with needle files and bits of rolled up sand paper to thin down enough to accept the white metal exhaust parts, and have been two of the most time consuming parts of this build so far. But being patient and careful with what I was doing with them and they've turned out not too badly.

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It was at this point tha I decided I didn't like how shallow the white metal exhausts looked, so chose to drill them out to give them a little bit more depth.

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It's not a huge improvement to be totally honest, but I'm satisfied with it and I think with some careful painting they should look a bit better than they would have done straight out of the box. I did toy with the idea of opening up the fuselage underneath the exhausts to add further depth but with the fuselage already fastened up I thought this might be a bit more than I'm capable of at the minute and I've not got any pipe of the correct diameter to simply extend the exhausts inside the fuselage.

Anyway, that's all for tonight, not much but I think I'm making decent progress with this one. Hopefully for the next update I'll get a bit more work done on attaching the tailplanes and detailing the areas which will be visible under the canopy, which I'm going to be posing open I think (good job Dynavector supply two canopies in case I cock one up!).

So, till next time folks, and thanks for looking!

Nik

Edited by Nik W
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You're doing a great job on this one !

And IMHO you have chosen wisely: it's a beautiful kit and a perfect introduction to vacforms even if it's not a small model.

The only thing I found a bit annoying when I built mine are the propeller blades: they are very thin (and this is good) and they bend and snap very easily (not so good)

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Evening folks, time for an update on the Wyvern.

After drilling out the bottoms of the exhausts I decided I really wasn't happy with how shallow they looked. So despite having already said I thought opening up the fuselage underneath was probably beyond my skill levels at the moment, I took a bravery pill and started drilling and hacking away to open it up.

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Rummaging around in a few drawers I managed to find an old mechanical pencil which had a 'barrel' of roughly the right diameter to match up with the exhausts and set about creating a bit of piping to go into the hole I'd just created in the fuselage.

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Whilst I was waiting for some paint to dry on the inner section on the exhaust piping, I decided to crack on with adding the metal flap link fairings and air flow fences to the wing. These required a bit of surgery to the wing to cut some holes to slot them into.

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Cutting these out wasn't particularly hard, but had I planned this build a little better, rather than jumping head first into it, I would probably have cut these out and done the extra work I've done on the exhausts before I'd got everything fastened up. By doing it at this stage in the build I had to be conscious of not pressing too hard anywhere and popping open seams or knocking bits off, whereas had I done it right at the start I wouldn't have had to worry about these things. Below you can see the flap link fairings and the airflow fences fitted and also (although it is a bit dark) the improved exhaust piping, which looks a lot more convincing than it did before.

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Last bit of work for today was to get the tailplanes fitted on. These required a fair bit of jiggery-pokery to get them on right as with this being a vac kit you need to match the mating surfaces to the contours of the rear fuselage. A bit of filing and cursing later and I think the end result isn't too bad (certainly nothing a dab of filler won't hide anyway).

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And as proof that I do learn from my mistakes you can see the holes I cut in the tailplanes before I attached them to the fuselage ready to take the fillets later on when they're less likely to get knocked off!

That just about wraps it up for this update. Next on the hit-list I'm going to have a go at adding a bit of detail to the gunsight area under the windshield and sadly this will have to be just an attempt to make it look a bit less 2 dimensional based on what looks right rather than any real relation to what this area is actually like, as despite a lot of hunting, I can't find any pictures showing any real detail here. Then it'll be time to get round to getting the windshield itself masked up and attached to the fuselage (as this is a vac canopy I'm definitely NOT looking forward to this bit) and then with a bit of luck I'll be able to start getting some paint on this soon!

Thanks for looking folks,

Nik

Edited by Nik W
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  • 1 month later...

Evening folks,

Time for a (very) small update on things with the Wyvern.

Progress has been a bit slow of late due to the nights being a little lighter so I'm more inclined to actually turn up at rugby training and getting myself to the superhuman levels of fitness I'm going to need when I start IOT at BRNC at Dartmouth in a couple of months time has taken priority.

Anyway, when I left this the next step in building was to add some detail under the windshield to create something that looked at least vaguely like a gun-sight. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any pictures or even technical drawings of this, so I had to use a bit of creative license and built it up with a few levels of evergreen strip and some copper wire from some old phone chargers (amazing where you can find modelling bits!).

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Not the prettiest looking thing ever, but it gives a rough approximation of a gunsight and with a bit of paint and some clear plastic glued in place it doesn't look too bad I don't think.

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I'm not too bothered that its a little bit rough and ready, as the canopy framing is quite heavy and I just wanted the area to look that bit more busy and I'm not one to freak about about levels of accuracy to be honest - if it looks right that's good enough for me!

Main construction is done as can be seen in the photo below, including the resin spinners which were a pain to remove from the casting blocks without damaging them too much. Not shown in this pic is the canopy which has been masked up and painted with a base layer of NATO Black. The windscreen has been added since this photo was taken, and is currently waiting a little bit of filler to blend it into the fuselage.

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Next up is a bit of rescribing some of the detail which I olbliterated during the build process, and then hopefully I can start getting some paint on it and get things moving again.

Thanks for looking folks!

Nik

Edited by Nik W
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Very nice. This brings back memories of my attempt at this kit, which are still sitting stalled not 6 feet from me :blush: I should really get going and finish it, but knowing my organisational skills, I've probably lost half of the small parts in the intervening years. In hindsight, attempting a vacform with added Compass Rose resin cockpit and flap sets as my second kit (started - none finished at that time) was a bit of a baptism of fire! :lol::dunce:

Keep up the good work :)

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Just found this thread,and it is an inspiration for people to take the plunge into a different form of modelling.......the hardest part is always actually starting....

well done,this build is coming on really well and you have shown a great deal of patience and innovation when dealing with parts of this kit .... :goodjob:

looking forward to the finished job.....

Regards Trevor...:D

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