Monogram 1/48 Voodoo hints and tips

[pigsty]

As promised here, I've compiled a list of what I hope will be helpful tips if you fancy building Monogram's big Voodoo. Don't let this little lot (and others that you'll find on the interweb) put you off - it's actually a nice kit, well detailed and impressive, that just happens to be slightly let down by Monogram's habitual engineering flaws. And their decals.

Tip 1: run! run away!

No, it’s not quite that bad, but a lot of the fit is toss and there are some odd areas of engineering that could be better.

Nosegear

The well has no front wall. You can blank it if you can find references and fancy a bit of microscopic scratch-building. You can instead paint the ends of the nosecone halves green, since they cover most of the open end, although a blanking panel will still be needed for the uppermost part, since the nosecone has a hollow end. I’d also recommend painting the inside of the nosecone black, to avoid any chance of unpainted plastic showing up, especially if you have the white “Lynx One” version.

The nosegear leg comes in two parts that are supposed to meet half-way along the retraction strut. This takes some doing. The upper part will go well enough into the well, but the lower part needs a bit of persuasion to get it into the pick-up points and meet the upper part. Even then the upper end of the lower half of the retraction strut (still with me?) may need to be shortened, and it may also be necessary to saw part-way through the lower hinge to allow the strut to be bent into position. If you have an example with mould slip, the parts of the leg where the upper end is meant to locate may need trimming. After all this the springs may not meet the leg anywhere, in which they can be clamped at a small angle to hug the leg on either side as they’re meant to.

Once the cockpit is in place, the forward fuselage halves may be too far apart. This can be solved by clamping it shut across the nosewheel well once that’s been slid in. Best if you use very strong glue and attach one side of the well at a time. If you’ve dry-fitted before now and think the nosecone is too narrow for the fuselage, don’t worry. It may not be once you’ve pinched the forward fuselage a bit.

The landing lights on the nosegear leg are slightly too large. As a result their attachment points are too small and they crowd each other. You might want to add small brackets first.

Cockpit

The little bit of deck behind the rear seat is likely to need some trimming to get it to fit. Don’t be surprised if there seems to be a gap in the items sitting on the deck. It doesn’t seem right but it is the way the kit’s designed. Personally, this was one reason I decided to close the canopy.

The internal windscreen behind the pilot’s seat is mostly metal. Only the large flat panels on either side should be left transparent. The windscreen fills the peculiar gap in the navigator’s panel that you may have been wondering about.

Good luck finding room to stow the navigator’s radar hood if you intend to close the canopy. It’s very long and the seat fouls it. A sneaky solution is to attach it to the radar scope.

The ID light under the rear cockpit on the left side fits poorly - it's a wider radius than the fuselage, and it's slightly too small all round. But you can sand it flush fairly readily. I managed to get glue behind mine because I didn't think to seal it with PVA.

Canopy

The clear parts are lovely but the windscreen is too small, while the canopy is too wide, and the whole lot is too short.

The real problem with the windscreen is the gunsight. If you gently sand it down, the screen can be made to fit over it. (This is the only option, as the sight is in one piece and can’t be mounted any lower.)

The best solution on the canopy - which will sort out both length and width - is to fix it open. Refer back to cockpit for the invidious choice this leaves you.

Strakes

You may have read that they don’t fit very well. They don’t.

Wing - fuselage joint

The engineering here is very attractive but an error has crept in. The idea is that you close up the fuselage then drop it onto the completed wing - good, because it gives you an uninterrupted lower section and sets the dihedral. However, the wing is very rigid because by now you’ll have installed the intakes, and I wouldn’t recommend removing the bar that joins them, since aligning them properly will be murder.

This means that you can’t, as the design has it, slip one wing root onto its locating tab and then flex the wing to allow the other tab to engage the opposite wing. My solution was to open out the slot on one side all the way down to the bottom of the box section and inwards a little. This ensures that, instead of the tab going into it from the side, the slot simply drops down onto the tab. There’s a bit of fore-aft play in the fit of fuselage to wing, so if you’re careful with this, you can shape the slot to lock the wing in place once it’s in the right position.

You may find also that the fuselage is too narrow for the gap between the wing roots. This can be solved by adding a shim of plastic card between the bits that meet at the keel. They need to be about a millimetre further apart. Believe it or not, the points just ahead and aft of the wing where the fuselage joins together can still be made to meet if you do this.

Incidentally, the intakes are slightly oval while the engine faces are round. I have no idea how to fix this. The engines have three vanes attached to the intake bullet. Two are in a line, not quite centred on the bullet, and the third is at right-angles to them. The engines should be fitted so that the first two are on a diagonal, with the inner end pointing up at the middle of the aircraft’s spine, and the third vane pointing in and down towards its keel. Or, if you like, a T shape leaning away from the centreline.

When the fuselage and the wings are joined, there’s a wide gap inboard of the intakes. This needs filling. Also, for some reason the boundary-layer channel doesn’t terminate in a point as it should. Both can be fixed with a triangular shim of thin card. If you feel really masochistic - I didn’t - you could add three braces between intake and fuselage side.

Afterburners

The real thing’s afterburner shrouds were fairly crude bits of welding, with prominent seams. The poor fit of the kit parts can help you here. The joint of the two cylindrical sections can be left slightly proud to represent a weld. The joint where these meet the end-cone can help you out as well. Although there may all sorts of moulding flaws, the end-cone has three prominent seams that should be retained. These align at the 2, 6 and 10 o’clock positions as you look into the engines from behind. The longer seams are at the 3 and 9 o’clock positions, so that when you look at either engine from the outer side, the seam on the end-cone is slightly higher than the long one.

You may find that, try what you can, one long seam is worse than the other. You can exploit the shape of the aircraft by hiding this one against the keel, but this may mean that one afterburner has to be mounted upside-down. If you don’t attach the end-cones until after you’ve decided which way up each goes, you can turn them so that the seams are correctly aligned.

The kit gives the slight impression that the afterburners should be mounted tail-high. They shouldn’t. Attaching one upside-down may make it look as though one is misaligned, but in fact they probably both are. A little bit of sanding of both fuselage and afterburner, to remove any chamfer, will sort this out.

Arrester hook

The hook is meant to sit between the upper parts of the afterburners. As moulded the hook end is too wide to fit. You’ll want to file off the sides, and then the easier way to attach it is to slip the hook into place and only then attach the arm to the rear fuselage. Shortening the locating pin may be helpful.

Tailplane

The tailplane is cunningly engineered with half-round locating pins that ensure that the two sides are aligned correctly with each other. Unfortunately the pins are too long and too narrow, resulting in sloppy fit and a strong risk that the whole tailplane will be slightly off-centre. At the very least it will be wise to shorten the pins slightly, so that the tailplane roots press comfortably against the fin on either side.

The gap in the fin represents a swash-plate that’s moved out of its neutral position with the tailplane. You can fill this if you want the tailplane level (in incidence, that is - remember it has considerable dihedral). Alternatively, the gap is correct if you mount the tailplane about 15^o nose-up. This was quite common on parked aircraft.

Tailfin

The rear extremity is actually a light. It’s fairly easy to replace with a bit of clear sprue, although you’ll need a pretty big one. There should be two bulbs visible inside it, one above the other. Mine were made by drilling two holes and inserting bits of fine wire to reinforce the joint, which had the happy side-effect of looking quite like switched-off bulbs. I’ve read that the rear light cover got cloudier with age, so you may not need to achieve a perfectly clear finish (that was lucky!).

Hollow parts

There are two points where painting the insides of parts black is a good idea. One is the missile pallet. If you have it Falcon side out, it has slots for the missiles, and if you don’t mount them (they’re not very good), you can see into the inside of the pallet. The other is the fin: that gap by the swash plate lets you see right inside. Depending on how you manage to mount the missile pallet, you may also want to paint the inside of the well above it, in case the gaps round the sides allow light in. I ditched the well and used braces instead, which I thought would enable me to sort out those gaps. Well, if I were doing it again, that bit might go a little better.

Decals

I used Belcher Bits’ Voodoo set (BD9). These are very good decals, well printed with nice dense colour, and very nearly comprehensive. There are some points to watch for, though. Some are a bit delicate - as you might expect, the lightning flashes came apart as they were lifting off the backing paper. The walkways aren’t quite the right shape for the intakes so they may wrinkle and split where the curves are tightest.

Some are missing. Most importantly, there aren’t enough zeros, so if you want to do a serial number like mine, you need to improvise. There are technically too few for the 18” underwing serial, although there’s actually enough to do (only) one airframe; there’s enough for the 12” nose serial; and there are definitely not enough for the 6” tail serial. I resorted to taking two red zeros from the EF-101B and drawing over them. If you want to do a first-series airframe, you may find there aren’t enough sevens as well. In fact, any serial number with a duplicated numeral is going to be troublesome. (Answer: don’t do one! Except that I was committed to 101050.)

The fuselage flash is slightly too short at the section under the rear cockpit. If you’re doing the right scheme, though, you’ll have to shorten the foremost portion under the front cockpit, which leaves enough spare to extend the other section. The printing is so good that you needn’t see the join.

I suspect the “C A N A D A” lettering above the flash is too closely spaced. However, references vary on this. (I lost heart and gave up on aligning six letters individually.)

There are no red warning stripes around the engines - these need come from the kit.

If you’re doing the EF-101B, you have a slight problem. The instructions say “I am guessing there were no underwing markings” – unfortunately, there were, the same style as normal but in red.

Some tiny stencils are included on the sheet with no clue as to where they go. In fact, the instructions are rather poor all round. There are also some quite prominent stencils on the real thing that aren’t provided, which is an odd omission given how good the rest is.

Now all you need to do is set several months aside and have at it!

Edited April 11, 2012 by pigsty

[Scott Hemsley]

As promised here, I've compiled a list of what I hope will be helpful tips if you fancy building Monogram's big Voodoo. Don't let this little lot (and others that you'll find on the interweb) put you off - it's actually a nice kit, well detailed and impressive, that just happens to be slightly let down by Monogram's habitual engineering flaws. And their decals.

The engineering here is very attractive but an error has crept in. The idea is that you close up the fuselage then drop it onto the completed wing - good, because it gives you an uninterrupted lower section and sets the dihedral. However, the wing is very rigid because by now you’ll have installed the intakes, and I wouldn’t recommend removing the bar that joins them, since aligning them properly will be murder.

What I underlined is exactly what I and others would recommend. In fact it was a friend of mine, while building one of the first releases of the Monograqm Voodoo, came to our club meeting and excitedly announced that's exactly how he overcame the problem. As proof, his was there for all to see and an exquisite build it was. Since the Revell 1/72 Voodoo had a similar breakdown, he suggested I do the same thing for my build.

When I built the kit, I found the same OOB problem with the wings as you did on the Monogram kit. Sliced the bar between the intake trunks, problem solved. Easy to individually install them as well. I imagine it's just as easy on the Monogram kit since the two kits have the same locating features.

Scott

[David H]

As promised here, I've compiled a list of what I hope will be helpful tips if you fancy building Monogram's big Voodoo. Don't let this little lot (and others that you'll find on the interweb) put you off - it's actually a nice kit, well detailed and impressive, that just happens to be slightly let down by Monogram's habitual engineering flaws. And their decals.

Hi Sean,

i too have an F-101B restoration project going on, over on Zone-Five.net.

I'm backdating my F-101B to 1961 vintage. It might have a few slightly useful bits of information. Just look for "Escape from the Shelf of Doom".

david

Edited March 26, 2012 by David H

[pigsty]

What I underlined is exactly what I and others would recommend. In fact it was a friend of mine, while building one of the first releases of the Monograqm Voodoo, came to our club meeting and excitedly announced that's exactly how he overcame the problem. As proof, his was there for all to see and an exquisite build it was. Since the Revell 1/72 Voodoo had a similar breakdown, he suggested I do the same thing for my build.

When I built the kit, I found the same OOB problem with the wings as you did on the Monogram kit. Sliced the bar between the intake trunks, problem solved. Easy to individually install them as well. I imagine it's just as easy on the Monogram kit since the two kits have the same locating features.

Scott

You know, it's just occurred to me that there's a way of doing this that makes both assembly routes work.

My worry was that unless the intakes remained connected, their fit wouldn't be brilliant* because on each side you'd have only a single locating pin and the contact between the intake and the wing section to align them. But the connecting bar sits above the inside of the lower fuselage, so it should be possible to attach it as one piece (to improve the alignment) and then to saw through it (to allow the lower wing to flex).

And if not, well, at least we have a choice of methods!

* worse than it needs to be, at any rate

Edited March 30, 2012 by pigsty

[upnorth]

Unless I missed something in your list of tips, you didn't mention needing to build some sort of anchoring structure into the main gear wells for the tops of the main gear legs as there is absolutely no positive locating devices molded in there.

I've built that kit twice, going through the frustrations of trying to get the main gear legs set up properly in the wells the first time through taught me to build at least some rudimentary locating structures with stock styrene the second time around.

[pigsty]

I left that bit out because I was trying not to repeat other people's advice. But you're quite right, they're awful. Not only the legs but the retraction jacks, which are attached to frames that have to be sanded thinner to get them in, and they still won't align right; and if they do align right, they're too long! It's pretty poor stuff in that area. I did eventually persuade my Voodoo's legs to sit right, but I don't let it rest on its wheels while it's in storage - I just don't trust them.

Edited March 30, 2012 by pigsty

[David H]

I left that bit out because I was trying not to repeat other people's advice. But you're quite right, they're awful. Not only the legs but the retraction jacks, which are attached to frames that have to be sanded thinner to get them in, and they still won't align right; and if they do align right, they're too long! It's pretty poor stuff in that area. I did eventually persuade my Voodoo's legs to sit right, but I don't let it rest on its wheels while it's in storage - I just don't trust them.

Yeah, i was test fitting F-101 struts the other night, and to say the location is "a bit vague" is an understatement.

The strut trunnion is supposed to be located OUTBOARD of that funny looking ellipsoid thing molded into the wheel well. The attachment points of the gear door to the strut is positive, and the upper gear door folds 90 degrees to rest against the lower wing skin. While its not authentic, drilling a hole through this door up and into the lower wing skin, and inserting a plastic rod, sanded flush with the door surface, would in theory make for a much stronger joint.

The more photographs i look at, the more convinced i am that the F-101B landing gear struts have a slight outward "stance", in addition to the forward rake when viewed in profile.

david