A pair of Airfix Hawks in 1/72. Finished.

[xffw45343tg]

I love this thread. You're all bonkers.

And I'm glad you persisted with the rivets, Steve.

Edited November 24, 2016 by Kirk

[Ascoteer]

14 hours ago, Miggers said:

I smell a very,very,very minor fib there Miss Evans,I recall you mentioned something a tad like an over and under shotgun(cobblers,I can't access smilies on my phone);-)

 

I meant as First Pilot / Captain as opposed to passenger...

[LongMan2]

Hi Mr Fritag,

 

Would test Archer rivets on scrap plastic. Use Tamiya extra thin to suck them down if needed. When dry in 72hrs seal them down with fine primer paint. You shouldn't see any decal film if done right. Importantly never ever mask over them......or they will lift.

 

If they won't hold, oddly I use an old Hasegawa decal (stickers) sheet for an F-86 to provide the extra sticky glue...to hold them uncooperative decals down. Hasegawa decal glue seem to be extra tacky....like a beef and mushroom pie it sticks to your  ribs. Note to one self ...I shouldn't right when hungry....#:o{=

 

Phil.

[Fritag]

12 hours ago, Miggers said:

I'd love to have you lot over for a few,but I don't think Mrs M would quite approve of a mob of BM'ers(with a tall red head in tow)rolling up and demanding free beer

 

Mob?  That's a rather pejorative term Miggers.  You mean a muster of BM'ers surley?  

 

The annual Miggers BM muster with Giorgio supplementing the beer.  It's a concept with merit......

 

11 hours ago, Cheshiretaurus said:

What was it? looks like you hit a turkey....of the frozen variety. 

 

It was startled CT.  Really quite startled.  Albeit only very briefly.

 

I had a bit of a run of incidents - greater or lesser - at the back end of 85.  I arrived on a Jag squadron as a baby faced 22 year old in the August, had the mid-air collision in the October, the above bird strike in November, a catastrophic break up of the cockpit cold air unit causing fumes in the cockpit in December and another bird strike requiring a diversion into Leeming later that same month.  I remember that my Mum was bit upset.

 

10 hours ago, Ascoteer said:

Fortunately I never flew anything fast enough to warrant an armoured windscreen coupled with the fear of avian incursion into the flight deck...

Oh, ah, hmmm....

 

9 hours ago, Miggers said:

I smell a very,very,very minor fib there Miss Evans,I recall you mentioned something a tad like an over and under shotgun

 

I have decided to become like our American cousins and so have dumped my irony detector (apologies for the crass and inapplicable stereotype to our honourable pals Bill (Navy Bird), PC et all).

 

9 hours ago, Kirk said:

And I'm glad you persisted with the rivets, Steve.

 

I glossed the second set of tailplanes as per CT's suggestion - and the rivets adhered well.
 

 

It's hard to say if this is a solution or simply another example of the apparently random nature of success with the HGW rivets.

 

The ones I've been successful with on the four tailplanes are in fact the smaller 1/72 rivets (0.15mm diameter vs 0.2mm for the 1/48 ones) and I think they look adequately scale like and not too 'in yer face' even without a covering of paint.

 

I think I won't bother doing the undersides of the tailplanes on the principle of  'quit while you're ahead'.

 

I also think I'll at least have a test go on the fuselages.

 

 

[Hamden]

 

 

I do like your determination to beat those rivets into submission! - I would have given up long long ago!

 

  Roger

[CedB]

... and they do add a certain je ne sais quoi, don't they? Nice job Steve and well done for persevering.

 

55 minutes ago, Fritag said:

Mob?  That's a rather pejorative term Miggers.  You mean a muster of BM'ers surley?

 

"...BM'ers surley?" Only some of them and stop calling me Shirley.

 

'85 sounds like your 'Annus horribilis' Steve, what a chain of events, crikey! Would have made me distinctly wobbly...

 

Please don't drop the irony detector as, if you do, most of my posts will appear to be inane rather than subtly humorous as is intended, especially with my current emojiphobia (it won't last). I personally think our US BMer pals are well used to it and certainly PC has developed a good line in irony, sarcasm, hyperbole and many of the other things that make our use of language so irritating rich and entertaining. (That was irony by the way in case your detector's still off. Smiley face.)

[giemme]

1 hour ago, Fritag said:

I also think I'll at least have a test go on the fuselages.

You're a brave man. I also have to say that this procrastination of the painting stage is making me feel slightly impatient, but no pressure intended ...   

 

1 hour ago, Fritag said:

The annual Miggers BM muster with Giorgio supplementing the beer.  It's a concept with merit......

Alright, when is that going to be?  

 

9 minutes ago, CedB said:

I personally think our US BMer pals are well used to it and certainly PC has developed a good line in irony, sarcasm, hyperbole and many of the other things that make our use of language so irritating rich and entertaining. (That was irony by the way in case your detector's still off. Smiley face.)

How about the Italian pals? Never mind, sometimes I just feel so at lost when you guys start with slang-ish expressions that understanding the sarcasm is the last of my problems (not meant as a complaint, just self-irony, here  )

 

Ciao

[CedB]

Giorgio your use of language is so good I, for one, forget that you're lucky enough to live in Bergamo.

I'd be up for a 'BM muster' if invited  

[giemme]

1 hour ago, CedB said:

you're lucky enough to live in Bergamo

Moist Bergamo, at the mo.  

[Leonl]

It looks like your perseverance is paying off.

 

Yes Archers are on a strip of decal film but I could not see the film after painting. They also held in place during masking/painting.

 

I may have some left over, I can DX them to chambers if you'd like? (not enough to complete the Hawks, but certainly enough to test....) 

[keefr22]

9 hours ago, giemme said:

How about the Italian pals? Never mind, sometimes I just feel so at lost when you guys start with slang-ish expressions that understanding the sarcasm is the last of my problems

 

Giorgio, you should respond in Italian - then have a good laugh as you watch us all flounder around trying to understand what google translate is telling us...!! 

 

Keith

[giemme]

59 minutes ago, keefr22 said:

 

Giorgio, you should respond in Italian - then have a good laugh as you watch us all flounder around trying to understand what google translate is telling us...!! 

I might as well try sometimes ... just for the sake of fun  

 

Ciao

[LongMan2]

Hi Mr Fritag,

 

Yeah them rivets...Hope you don't mind me posting this as it might take up your thread here. If it is a problem you can remove it.

 

 

It begins....

 

 

Sorry about the big hands....most would know this...I move on.

 

 

I'm not sure where you could get similar tool like the window scraper in the UK but I'm sure someone here can add to this...

 

 

I'm not a salesman for NWSL but it is a must if scratchbuilding. There may be a similar tool in the UK hobby stores...

 

 

 

 

Yeah making the time to do this pays off in the end. I've used this for all size rivets....anything smaller than 10thou seems to disappear with liquid glue and want to drift out of position for some reason. Others here may have some hints on how to stop the smaller rivets from becoming a flat nothingness...

 

 

 

Here are the little jewels.........

 

 

 

 

 

Other tools for making rivets...need to get working on part two....

 

 

 

The glues I use for rivets....

 

Thanks all.....

 

PHIL.

 

 

 

 

 

[Jessica]

Another option, if you're really, really brave, is to drill holes in your rivet lines, carefully snip off about 1 mm lengths of plastic rod, glue them in place, and then mushroom the heads with a heat source such as a soldering iron. The longer the rod, the larger the mushroom head will be. Obviously you want to do this slowly, to prevent the surrounding plastic from overheating. Practise a lot on a scrap model before risking this on your pride and joy.

[LongMan2]

Hi Jessica,

 

Your suggestion would work if you pre-drilled a brass sheet and inserted lengths of plastic rod. Then you would need to let them stand proud of the brass surface so the tips could be flared. Unfortunately uniformity is necessary and its very hard to achieve it with styrene. With your suggestion the amount of heat required to flare the rod tip would melt most kit surface plastic. Its even hard to control the distortion of the rod given the way styrene performs when heat is applied. It would have to be some other material other than styrene....that is used.

 

The Tichy Train Group has cast styrene rivets in 1/87 scale (US HO train scale) and in many sizes. I personally would only use them if large rivets are required for aircraft engine and armoured vehicles in 1/72. Actual rivets in the aero industry are quite small, as you know, and would be tough to reproduce to scale. I see modellers reproduce whole airframes covered with rivets....but if true to scale most rivets wouldn't be seen. Well at least in 1/72 scale...Yet artistic license is always encouraged and I for one wouldn't discourage it if that is what the modeller wants.

 

Even in 1/24th most rivets shouldn't be reproduced...its one of my gripes with the Airfix Typhoon....IMHO.

 

PHIL.

[Col.]

Just think gang, Airfix used to splatter the surface of their kits with spurious rivets (anyone remember their Meteor III?), wonder if they can re-employ that lad with his centre punch and hammer for kits such as the Sea King and Hawk that actually need them?

[fatalbert]

Happy new year to you Fritag,any progress on your Hawks?........

fatalbert.

[Fritag]

On 03/01/2017 at 3:14 PM, fatalbert said:

Happy new year to you Fritag,any progress on your Hawks?........

fatalbert.

 

Belated Happy New Year to you too fatalbert and to all on BM.

 

Hmm; seems like not far off a couple of months since last I posted.  Apologies to them as stop by this rather sluggish and discursive thread - and it'll be a matter of supreme indifference to the majority that don't 

 

I more or less put the modelling tools away for the month before christmas - and mostly since then too - because of other competing demands on time.  And cos I wasn't gone be getting any bench time in thought it best not to check in on BM and see what was happening on my favourite threads - too frustrating.  So I've got a lot of catching up to do.

 

I 'spect @CedB will have started and finished a few kits whilst I've been idle - so I know there'll be a few threads to catch up on!!!

 

Anyways - having been prodded gently by @T-21 and @AlexN I thought It best to prove the build was still extant and post a few pics. 

 

It's a bit cheeky really - cos I'm immediately going to stop working on the Hawks again for at least a week now because I'm following the example of @giemme and going skiing for a week from Saturday 

 

I gave my home made early Mk 10 election seats (no more 'Wallace & Grommit' gags @keefr22 (or was it @Cheshiretaurus?) a light dusting of a lighter grey to introduce some contrast/shadow:

 

 

And then promptly lost enthusiasm for the detailed painting/harness work and so put them back into storage 

 

So I turned to another job I'd been putting off - the nose light.  The Airfix offering is too pointy, doesn't fit all that well and the location lug at the back of it shows up through the front as looking rather like a large air bubble:

 

 

 

I has pondered replacing it wth a little-lens lens.  But on test fitting it wasn't the correct contour and looked way to brightly reflective. A noticeable feature of Hawks in service is that the cover of the nose light often looks heavily abraded, sometime to point of almost opaqueness.  Which if you think about it is good news for the poor modeller as a few swipes with some not-too-fine micomesh does the trick and hides a multitude of sins 

 

Anyways:

 

I cut off the locating lug and splurged a bit of any-old silver on the back of the light so that there was something vaguely reflector like to see through the semi opaque cover:

 

 

 

I did say the fit left something to be desired didn't I?:

 

 

But after a (seemingly endless) few rounds of Mr Surfacer and sanding, plus a bit of rounding off of the profile, the result was ok:

 

 

 

 

And a quick masking-off and squirt of Alclad White primer confirmed it:

 

 

So then it was back to thinking about the domed rivets on the rear fuselage (cue groans from any audience that has stuck with it this far).  My travails with the HGW rivets are over-documented above  But being too stupid to give in (and unwilling to cede literally every single possible bragging right to @Ex-FAAWAFU and the senior service) I tried again.

 

HGW's website does warn that its testing was done with Gunze products - so I (belatedly) thought to try laying the rivets down on an undercoat of thinned Mr Surfacer 1000 (which I think is a Gunze-Sangyo product) and all-of-a sudden the rivets started to adhere as they had never done before on Alclad primer or any other surface finish I'd tried.  I suppose the motto is read-the-instructions stupid.

 

After all of my trial-and-eror attempts I decided on using the 0.2mm rivets (same as @Ex-FAAWAFU I think) rather than the 0.15mm rivets advertised by HGW as being 1/72 (the smaller rivets just disappeared completely underneath paint).  I also decided to simplify the rivets and so laid down all single lines of rivets rather than the double lines that appear in several places on the 1-1 version.

 

So.  Mr Surfacer primed and pencil guidelines:

 

 

Horizontal rivets in place with decal sheet still on.  NB  LOTS of Micro Sol before and after application - including using a Micro Sol wetted Tamiya cotton swab to burnish the rivets in place:

 

 

Next morning with decal sheet removed.  100% (yes 100%) of rivets stayed stuck:

 

 

One more session on the vertical rivets and hey-presto (although that term implies a way-too immediate result given that I've been faffing about for weeks):

 

 

 

I've done both Hawks now.  The one on the left has had a light overspray of very thinned Alclad white primer.  The rivets seem to disappear at first but as @Ex-FAAWAFU has said they reappear with a gentle polish.

 

I've found that a polish with an eyeglass cloth makes the rivets subtly prominent again and a very gentle polish with 8000 or 12000 micro mesh gives an additional bit of colour contrast by cutting through the topcoat over the rivets.  To my mind there is no danger of a disfiguring over-scale effect with these rivets - even in 1/72 as here - as long as you aim for a sensible simplification.  If anything the question to be addressed is whether the subtlety of the effect is worth all of the work....

 

 

 

And there we are.  Hopefully I will be back at the bench more regularly after my ski trip

 

 

Edited January 19, 2017 by Fritag

[keefr22]

4 minutes ago, Fritag said:

 

(no more 'Wallace & Grommit' gags @keefr22 (or was it @Cheshiretaurus?) 

 

 

Guilty as charged m'lud (at least of starting it!) - but c'mon, the resemblance is uncanny...!!  

 

Great to see the thread isn't dead & some neat progress being made Steve! The rivets are looking very nice, but I guess the answer to your 'is it worth it?' question won't really become readily apparent until after final paint is on? At present I'd say the answer is definately yes!

 

Enjoy the snow!

 

Keith

[Ex-FAAWAFU]

Is it worth it?  Hell yes!  [But then i have to say that, really, don't I, in view of the amount of time and money I have invested...?]

 

Welcome back!

 

P.S. I too am still discovering things about the HGW rivets (though I'd missed that thing about Mr Surfacer; could be useful).  As an experiment to replace a few that had been lost during surface prep & painting on the Sea King tail pylon, I replaced some ON TOP of the base RAF Blue Grey paint layer.  And yes, just like you, every one of them stayed in place.  Food for thought for future builds...

 

Like this:

Edited January 19, 2017 by Ex-FAAWAFU

[giemme]

Thank Goodness, he's back!  

 

I'm so glad the rivet thing worked out for you, I think it will be 100% worth it, in the end.   Enjoy your skiing trip, I certainly did mine (although it was only two days  )

 

Ciao

 

BTW: do I spot a compass cutter in one of your pics?    

 

Edited January 19, 2017 by giemme

[fewr9fkr9595]

Really good work that mate, very inspirational 👍🏿

[Cheshiretaurus]

 

 

Welcome back Steve

 

42 minutes ago, Fritag said:

 

 

I gave my home made early Mk 10 election seats (no more 'Wallace & Grommit' gags @keefr22 (or was it @Cheshiretaurus?)

 

 

 

And its safe and sound in the Hawk bits box, even produced a small clone army!

 

Need to get it back to you sometime, will you be at any shows or should I just pop it in the post?

 

 

Glad the rivets are sorted, Need to do this on my own hawks too now you've found the way I'll get some Mr S on then give it a try. Might then make a mould of the back end save doing the rivets again on future builds. 

 

Hawks looking very hawk like now and the light looks good, (would you like an LED for it?)

 

Keep up that good work

 

CT

[perdu]

Good to have this back Steve

 

Goodbye

 

(Re Cheshiretaurus's query, will you be back in time for a trip to Huddy?)

 

 

 

 

 

OK ok the rivets look great but I hope you all forget about that by the time I get started on my HC4 Sea King, I don't think I'll be any good with the transfer rivets...

[keefr22]

26 minutes ago, Cheshiretaurus said:

 

 

And its safe and sound in the Hawk bits box, even produced a small clone army!

 

Ooohhh, if two of those happen to be looking for a new home in exchange for some beer tokens, I know of an early 'awk that will gladly give them a new home (one day!)

 

Keith