hawker tornado prototype build/conversion suggestion

[brewerjerry]

Hi

   Thinking of a winter project

 

  a hawker tornado prototype the one with the underbelly rad,

    any suggestions on which kit i could steal a suitable rad housing from ? 

  would a hurricane nose and belly rad be a suitable starting point  ? 

 

any thoughts or better suggestions for sources anyone ? 

   

   cheers 

      jerry 

[stevehnz]

Jerry, a Hurricane nose is going to be much too slim. If you would like tp PM me an email address I will send you a copy of an article on the Tornado from Air Classics magazine, it's got cross sections on all versions including the 1st prototype You could maybe start with a Typhoon  for the necessary nose width & add the Vulture cylinder bank fairings at the front, a bit like a Hurricane's ones but top & bottom on the Tornado prototype. You'll also need to remember to mount the wing 4 " lower with respect to the fuselage than on the Typhoon, the rear of the Vulture got in the way apparently.

Steve.

[Ossington 2]

I've been tempted to try this in 1/24, now that the car-door version is out. As far as I can tell, the ventral rad fairing was hand made and bespoke to it. The Vulture (and Sabre) were 1500 hp engines rather than the 1000 of the Merlin, so there is a lot of extra heat to get rid of. Is it possible that it contained an enlarged Hurricane radiator? Like you, P5219 is the machine to go for, the others, with the re-positioned chin radiators, look too similar to the Typhoon, making it one of those unsatisfying projects where one changes a lot of plastic but don't gain sufficient visible difference to justify the effort (Harrier to Kestrel is another one)

At a push, I might consider the contra-rotating R7936 though. Is there a Hawker archive somewhere we can peruse, because I hate guess-work i.e. someone brings out a photo just after the decals have set, to prove us wrong. If the archive has been destroyed, and we only have Arthur Bentley's drawings to go by, I might be tempted one day. If the info is out there and we can get at it, then I will give it a go sooner. In the meantime, I'm sure that I read somewhere that the wing was mounted lower on the Tornado than the Typhoon- just the kind of thing to trip us up!

[72modeler]

I have always wanted to do P5219 as well- a very purposeful-looking beast! I was not aware that the wings were mounted 4" lower than a Typhoon's, but I also have read that the fuselage forward of the wing root was 12" longer than a Typhoon's, but you might want to get confirmation on that. Not sure how easy it would be to move the wings. I have attached some links below that might be useful. IIRC, Maintrack or somebody else did a resin conversion for this one as well as some others; I have the Centaurus Tornado conversion and it's very, very nice!

Mike

 

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4b/Hawker_Tornado.svg

 

http://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.php?/topic/234941028-hawker-tornado-details/

 

http://i103.photobucket.com/albums/m150/438cityofmontreal/tornado.jpg

 

http://i262.photobucket.com/albums/ii120/Duggy009/Hawker-Tornado-P5219-1.jpg

 

http://www.aviation-history.com/hawker/tornado.html

 

 

[Graham Boak]

If the Tornado had a longer nose than the Typhoon, than that will only have been because the Vulture and its installation was longer than the Sabre.  If that was the case...  However, I have also seen the comment about the wings being lower in several sources, and also photos of the respective underside illustrating the resulting differences.  I strongly suspect that this discussion was carried out on this board - although possibly some years ago now.  Bingo.  This one.  Which I found in the second link above, so thank you 72modeler.

 

[brewerjerry]

Hi All

         Thanks for the input

i forgot about the 4" , presumably a slow taper to the front from the rear 

  the hasegawa looks a good option then, due to the way the wings fit. 

   but i havent checked how the revell kit goes together must look at it tomorrow

    cheers

      jerry

[brewerjerry]

12 hours ago, Ossington said:

I've been tempted to try this in 1/24, now that the car-door version is out. As far as I can tell, the ventral rad fairing was hand made and bespoke to it. The Vulture (and Sabre) were 1500 hp engines rather than the 1000 of the Merlin, so there is a lot of extra heat to get rid of. Is it possible that it contained an enlarged Hurricane radiator? Like you, P5219 is the machine to go for, the others, with the re-positioned chin radiators, look too similar to the Typhoon, making it one of those unsatisfying projects where one changes a lot of plastic but don't gain sufficient visible difference to justify the effort (Harrier to Kestrel is another one)

At a push, I might consider the contra-rotating R7936 though. Is there a Hawker archive somewhere we can peruse, because I hate guess-work i.e. someone brings out a photo just after the decals have set, to prove us wrong. If the archive has been destroyed, and we only have Arthur Bentley's drawings to go by, I might be tempted one day. If the info is out there and we can get at it, then I will give it a go sooner. In the meantime, I'm sure that I read somewhere that the wing was mounted lower on the Tornado than the Typhoon- just the kind of thing to trip us up!

Hi

    1:24 that would be a beast, and an awesome model

  a bit beyond my skills 

   cheers

      jerry     

[Ossington 2]

And to be honest, beyond mine. I can talk and plan a great model, but they always end up on the shelf of doom. I shudder at the thought of how many part-started kits I own, hence the call for all the available facts before I start. I've bought the kit already...

[gingerbob]

1 hour ago, Ossington said:

I've bought the kit already...

 

Ah, so it is already doomed!  My wife has referred to these initial starts of grand ideas as "You're ruining another kit!"  My retort: "I'm making it so I won't be able to resell it."

 

Jerry, I didn't quite follow your "slow taper" concerning the lowered wing?  The aft fuselage should be the same, but I haven't yet studied photos to see how the "intersection" looks between the two variants.

[72modeler]

17 hours ago, brewerjerry said:

Hi All

         Thanks for the input

i forgot about the 4" , presumably a slow taper to the front from the rear 

  the hasegawa looks a good option then, due to the way the wings fit. 

   but i havent checked how the revell kit goes together must look at it tomorrow

    cheers

      jerry

See if these shed any more light on the subject.

Mike

 

https://www.scalenews.de/hawker-typhoon-tempest-tornado-zeichnungen/

[Nachtwulf]

13 minutes ago, 72modeler said:

See if these shed any more light on the subject.

Mike

 

https://www.scalenews.de/hawker-typhoon-tempest-tornado-zeichnungen/

I am not all that familiar with the Tornado prototypes but the drawings in that link appear to show a shallower belly to the fuselage rather than a lowered wing. I know, they are just drawings.

Warning! What follows is opinion! Not fact:

 

I can't see a wing being lowered with respect to the fuselage unless the engine interferes with the main spar.

[Troy Smith]

 

Tornado

 

compare

 

 

EDIT - note the roundel stripes are 5 inch wide, and look at the demarcation line from fillet, as roundel look to be in same place.

 

wing looks lower

 

PS @Chris Thomas  would probably know

[Work In Progress]

Yes. It's not inserting some sort of wedge into the length of the fuselage. It's a case of cut out the wing root fairings, insert spacers along the top of them to move the whole wing fillet down, and the wing with it. The spacer is constant thickness because you're not changing the angle of incidence. Then you just have to cut the belly section out of the Typhoon underwing centre-section and replace it with something that follows the lower airfoil contours.

[Graham Boak]

Troy, Chris Thomas does know.  In  The Typhoon and Tempest story, by CT and Christopher Shores, "A less obvious difference was in the mounting of the wings on the fuselage - three inches lower on the Tornado because the Vulture could not be mounted over the front wing spar in the same way as the Sabre."  I suspect this is a matter of the crankcase position and resulting size and shape of the gearbox at the rear of the engine.

 

Also, I don't understand why the Vulture should require a larger propeller than the Sabre, when both engines have much the same power output.  I think this argument is both wrong and irrelevant anyway. 

[gingerbob]

1 minute ago, Graham Boak said:

Also, I don't understand why the Vulture should require a larger propeller than the Sabre, when both engines have much the same power output.  I think this argument is both wrong and irrelevant anyway. 

Perhaps the gearing was different, but it would be more likely, perhaps, that Mr. Camm would say, "This is how big the prop can be," and the engine manufacturer would tailor the gear ratio accordingly.  So, right idea, wrong sequence?

 

[Graham Boak]

In the earliest design stages there's be some mutual discussion between interested parties,  before the aircraft undercarriage was sized around the recommended propeller size from the engine manufacturer, plus input from the prop design company (perhaps).  Only once the basic design was established would the prop size become a limiting factor.  Or in the case of the Tornado, oh whoopee we can fit a larger prop if we want to.  I did find a reference to a different prop being tried on the Tornado, early on, but don't have a reference to the initial size nor to that on the Typhoon (OK, I'm sure I have the last somewhere...)

 

PS later in its career one Tornado prototype was used for comparative prop trials, but that's another story.

 

PPS  RR do claim to have solved the major problem with the Vulture before it was cancelled, which makes it somewhat of a shame that it had to go.  The Hawker fighter story might have been somewhat happier in its early service days if the Tornado had been around.  The Tornado lost out again when the forward collector ring Centaurus was knocked on the head, after Kurt Tank showed everyone how to combine a fat radial engine and a narrow fuselage fighter.

[72modeler]

3 hours ago, Troy Smith said:

 

Tornado

 

compare

 

 

EDIT - note the roundel stripes are 5 inch wide, and look at the demarcation line from fillet, as roundel look to be in same place.

 

wing looks lower

 

PS @Chris Thomas  would probably know

Troy,

 

Those were the very Tornado and Typhoon photos I had found but did not post!  It sure looks to me, by comparing the photos of the two types, that the wing was lowered and the fillet and belly fairings were modified to fair in the wing in its new position. The text I read on the reason for the change was that the Vulture was longer and would interfere with the mainspar if the wing was not lowered slightly  with respect to the engine. 

Mike

[brewerjerry]

Hi All

         thanks for all the input to the thread, it has become clearer in my mind what needs to be done

   cheers

      jerry 

[Ossington 2]

There is a file at Kew on the Tornado. AVIA 46/120. Has anyone seen it? Could it be useful?

[gingerbob]

Sorry, forgot about this question- yes, I have seen AVIA 46/120, but alas I did not take more than a very few initial notes.  I did take notes on several other files that pertain to the Tornado, but it would take some time to refresh my "knowledge".

 

bob

[Ossington 2]

Is the Kew stash 'modeller friendly' ie, contains measured drawings, or is it just one-sided correspondence about nothing in particular, as some files are? And does anyone have a scan of the Air Classics article mentioned above please?  

[gingerbob]

You can find the occasional blueprint, but most of the files I looked at were primarily memos, etc.  Not very sexy if you're only thinking of what your model looks like, but dangerously fascinating if you are willing to put in some time and attention.  I recommend doing a fair amount of study first, so that you have a better idea of what questions you really want to find answers to, and so that you can better appreciate the random gems that you will stumble upon along the way.

 

For the Air Classics article, did you contact the gent who mentioned it?

 

bob