WV908

Weeeeeell, I do have more than one of these in the stash Handily the sparrows that I've been given from the Revell F2 are 'low relief' i.e only half cylindrical so I can fit the F2 with sparrows and scratch build the fuselage extension, then the F3 can have the resin extensions and sparrow recess insert Hi Max, Ouch - there's barely anything left of that is there? I guess it saves mucking about with the gear leg attachment points and you get a nice looking gear bay Cheers, WV908

Hi @galgos Thanks for the input and photos I have had a bit of a play with how the cockpit will fit and the next step for me is to remove the casting block. Certainly the most awkward bit looks to be getting it to fit into the spine. At present, I'm still using the kit intake bullet / forward gear bay but it's good to see that the Aires item does fit Cheers, WV908

Thanks Anthony Any further progress with the other Phantom bits? Cheers, WV908

No progress this week or planned progress this weekend sadly as we're having some work done on the house. What I would like to do is thank two very kind and generous members of this forum @Foghorn Leghorn and @Alan P who have provided me with parts and decals to help with the Tornado project. If I put the F2 parts in the photo it would just be too big to be able to see anything, but Thankyou guys, really. The Meindert decals in particular are something I never thought I would see and I'm now practically drowning in F3 decals. Cheers, WV908 Oh and I decided on the radomes. I'm going to use both

It's the same story with the Hasegawa B-26. I think I paid £40 for mine three or four years back. I've managed to end up with two Academy B-24's - one was the Liberating Beauties Eduard boxing (I forget the cost but it was reasonable) and another was an absolutely battered one from Telford six years ago that I managed to get for £23 I recall. Whilst the Eduard Boxing came with some goodies and a rendition of @Procopius's better half on the box (why do I remember this?), opening the academy box was akin to opening a packet of walker's (Lay's) crisps and finding you've been had even by their standards. Cheers, WV908

@exdraken As an addition to this, there are finally decals available in 1/48! They are from a company called 'Series Espanolas' - Google that name plus 'decals' and you'll find their website. First thing to note is for the shipping, UK is Reino Unido Second thing is that including postage they are £16. I have ordered so I'll see if / when the decals turn up and report back. Cheers, WV908

A bit long in tooth now, but the patches are finally available through their Facebook page - I ended up getting three so all of us in my usual RIAT troop have one

Stunning, absolutely stunning. I have one of these to build, hopefully as the example at Yeovilton. Now I have both yours and Mike's excellent builds to draw on. Cheers, WV908

Well I'm glad you pointed it out for @Head in the clouds. as I'd forgotten there was the spare Cheers, WV908

@dogsbody Sadly this in incorrect as both parts on sprue 'C' are for the lower fuselage. There are three blanks for the lower fuselage radar / belly turret 'hole' The first is flat (as fitted to PA474), the second is round to match the profile and the third (on a different sprue) is flat with a mounting hole for the H2S radar dish. Only the Dambuster sprue (not included in this boxing) has an upper turret blank sadly. @Head in the clouds. I don't doubt that the spare of the two parts above can be made to fit mind, but you absolutely have to use the flat one for PA474's belly. Although not having dove into the box of one of my Dambuster kits for a while, the four holes in the cockpit floor are, I imagine, the attachment points through the floor for the payload bay mounted motor used to spin up the upkeeps. This obviously is neither included in your kit or needed on your build so they can be filled

Thanks to the resin Wizard himself @Ali62 The Typhoon can join the Frey as we now finally have useable (that's an understatement btw) canopies for the Revell kit. These things are perfect. Gonna have to dig out my photos of ZK353 now! Oh, I also picked up his equally excellent Phantom canopy set for XV408 Cheers, WV908

Morning all, The Much maligned Revell 1/32 Eurofighter Typhoon canopies are prone to cracking and have a really awkward seam line. My original set that came with my kit had a small crack at the upper sprue attachment point and the mould was slightly misaligned. I emailed Revell for replacements and when they turned up they were even worse. So, about a month back I sent a request to Ali and sent him the the canopies for pattern and a few days ago these arrived on my doorstep. For anyone building the 1/32 Revell Typhoon I highly recommend this canopy set as it's simply flawless. No affiliation except being one extremely happy customer Thanks @Ali62! Cheers, WV908

So, I find fault with most of what you have written, but I would mainly like to discuss the points above. Is it more expensive and complex to tool an SR-71 compared to an A400? No. If you were tooling them during the same time period and to the same standard the A400 would probably be more expensive. The A400 kit was tooled in 2010/2011. At that time there were only the prototypes and possibly the pre-prod airframes in existence so it's not going to be terribly accurate to a production machine. It will have been made to a tight budget to get it out the door quickly and both detail and accuracy will have been compromised. Look how bare the payload bay is for example. 'Today to produce a plastic kit has never been cheaper' What? Wages have gone up, production costs have gone up, design costs have gone up. Let's assume by 100% reduction in cost you are getting factors mixed up. Something may go up by 100% in cost but when it is reduced by that same monetary amount it then becomes a 50% reduction, so I'll go with that. Have design and production costs reduced by 50% over the past five years? No. Not. At. All. Have you seen the cost of the licences for that design software? You can take the wages of a design office full of highly qualified, suitably paid Cad engineers and effectively add on another equivalent full wage to cover the licence cost for that office for that year. It renews every year so you have to pay it again and again. That's just for the design software itself. The cost of everything else prior to tooling adds up and tooling costs now eclipse those of 20 and even 10 years ago. I'll say it again. Please don't use the Revell A400 as a benchmark or comparison for a 2021 tooled, full fat SR-71. Lastly, can we please stop bashing Revell over the price? It's getting silly when even the kit itself is still vapourware. Cheers, WV908

Hi @Anthony in NZ The Phantom is eagerly waiting for the new speys to arrive so I can make the fuselage fit them exactly It's been one step forward and two steps back with this Tornado. Feels a bit like I wasted the evening yesterday. I'm still on the fence about which radome to modify and use for it. Cheers, WV908

It's very annoying haha. It's too late at night now to make any serious decisions but the problems I now have are; Up until the transition collar, the Revell F2 radome looks better. A lot better. But, from there backwards it doesn't fit as it's too wide and the profile is wrong. The Heritage radome is not great in shape, but it does fit the nose in it's present state. Both radomes will require filler to blend in and a slight bit of re-profiling to suit, but the heritage resin may possibly be less work as all the work on that is exterior, not interior as well like the F2 radome would be. Final point of consideration is that I can get a much stronger join of plastic to plastic with the F2 radome and I won't have a huge weight hanging off the end of the aircraft that I don't need anyway as I'm fitting a full resin cockpit. Hmm. Cheers, WV908

Stupidly after all this work to fit the F.2 nose cone and modifying the extra collar pieces and attaching those, the Heritage nose now fits 🤬 I'm going to look at my options and decide which nose to choose for this build. Cheers, WV908

I didn't realise my chosen aircraft was a 'T' until way too late so I kept the little joystick on it's podium as the the stick 😔 Cheers, WV908

Firstly, sorry @Anthony in NZ it's the committee designed replacement for you precious old bus of a Phantom this week! Mwa ha ha! Oh wait, the F3 turned like a brick too..... Onto the plastic; Kindly donated by @Foghorn Leghorn, I now have a Revell F2 nose cone! Wahey! Thanks Neil! He sent it as part of a lovely care packing confusing many little Tornado bits and those magic decal things, so this may, just may, end up as F2 ZD938 yet. This is the only Tornado I have sat in so far and it's cockpit is preserved at my local museum in Doncaster. So, first impressions. Here it is with the Heritage item; That's the first battle won. It's actually cylindrical for starters! You can see though that the transitioning collar is part of the cone which sadly means, it's too short. Not to worry! As it's actually the same length as the heritage item I can use @Alan P's method of attachment, just modified for purpose. So, next photo; A part of the extreme end of the fuselage that had previously been removed on both sides has been reattached, hence the dodgy seam - this had previously been re-profiled to give the correct angle for the radome. As you'll see from the next few photos, due to the radome having the transitioning collar as part of the (too short) moulding, it is too wide at this junction and the wrong shape at the bottom. None of this is any issue as I can pack the radome inside with plastic card and re-profile that part. Here is my frame of reference, the Revell 1/48 F3. With a measurement taken from the back of the windscreen and scaled up to 1/32, the nose as shown is 4mm too short. I have spare collar pieces from the Revell 1/32 GR.1 that are the right diameter (the same pieces Alan used) that can be used to make up the length. If I'd actually never cut anything in the first place when trying to get the heritage radome to fit and done exactly what Alan did then it would already be the right length haha. We live and learn! Oh and since people like to see what is behind the masking and so I can prove I do actually get *something* done, here is the 1/48 F-3's tub - compete with correct-ish F.3(T) fit - the same as the 1/32 will be; Cheers, WV908

@Alan P Those tail code letters look brilliant Incidentally, do you happen to have the rest of the decal sheet from the Heritage set spare? I'm thinking squadron markings etc. My kit came with none Cheers, WV908

The SR-71 is far from a simple shape and is not a simple tooling exercise, especially where the engines, intakes and nose are concerned. There are multiple variants such as twin sticker and drone carrier and a good handful of different sensor noses, which I expect Revell to have tooled up for. Our resident Blackbird expert @JeffreyK of Hypersonic is designing his own kit so knows how complex it is to design, even with his own 3D scans of the example at Duxford. I hope to get one eventually, if I can actually get one into the country after this Brexit debacle, then I will have the Hypersonic one for myself and I'll build the Revell one for my Dad. I also wouldn't use either of the kits mentioned in comparison as tooling costs were significantly cheaper when they were done. Cheers, WV908

Firstly I must apologise as I did not intend for my post to be read that way. I am not amazed / gobsmacked that people are saying a kit is too expensive for them, far from it even. There is plenty that is too expensive for me. I would love to have a 1/32 Viggen for instance (regardless of medium) - am I going to pay £220 for one? No chance. In the norm, those who do say a kit is too expensive for them will just say 'nice kit, too much for me so I'll leave it' and that's that. What we seem to have here though is people actively complaining at the price (before even seeing full cads or any plastic), and it's as if they expect that because it is Revell it SHOULD be cheaper. £75 already is cheap for a kit of this size and detail and it's this mid-range, to be honest lower than I expected price that I am gobsmacked people are complaining about. We have come to expect large aircraft in 1/48 to be £100+ now and we are about to see a Phantom (about half the size of the SR-71) hit the market for £90. Cheers, WV908

@Head in the clouds. correct, that is the H2S scanner display. PA474 has never been fitted with this display so it needs removing from the kit part Cheers, WV908

IIRC the post was from the guy who previously had the contract. He had the Culdrose engine failure under his belt and explained a lot of the goings on around that. He was certainly displeased about the situation and, as it's not fair to speculate, all we can do is sit back and wait to see what comes out in the report. Cheers, WV908

I am amazed about the comments saying this is too expensive. Gobsmacked even. We all have our set modelling budget - some can afford £20 a month, others can happily splash out on an HPH Monstrosity at £500+ You can't deny that a 1/48 Blackbird will be big and £75-ish for a big 1/48 kit is about right. People happily chuck nearly that amount at old Hasegawa Phantoms so I don't see why a 1/48 Blackbird is being criticised for having this price at all. A quick look on eBay shows that the old Testors kit is still going for £90-£110. It's mad. Cheers, WV908

A real shame to see G-RNHF suffer with another engine failure, but of course it is great news that the pilots got out ok. From a post I read last year (but can no longer find) I understand that the contract for maintaining the Centaurus switched to a new company prior to this last winter maintenance, if anyone can confirm? Cheers, WV908