cloggydog

Now that brings back some memories. I must have put together a dozen or more of those F3s in my teens. 'ware the fit of the airbrakes, I could never get them closed and sitting decently flush. IIRC, the Airfix F3 was modified from the earlier 'snap-together' F1A tooling (hence the optional glue!) which makes the canopy quite thick with obvious fixing lugs.

I do recall reading a 'alternative history' novel some 25+ years ago in which the Argentine navy secretly amassed and used a sizeable fleet of Vought F4U Corsairs during the Falklands campaign in both air-to-air and air-to-surface roles. Can't for the life of me remember the title...

A slight 'Oh b....r' at the weekend when I noticed that the Hasegawa's main canopy was a short-shot, thus incomplete. As this kit has been sculling round my stash for about 25 years, I'd not noticed the flaw previously. Somewhere, I know I have half-a-dozen Aeroclub vacform canopies for the single-seater Lightning, so I'll need to rummage through the many, many crates in the shed and find the box with all the aircraft detailing bits in. Said rummage will also hopefully turn up the decal stash.

Just be wary of using PVA to secure the fine lead shot (aka 'Liquid lead') into enclosed/sealed spaces - over time the lead recacts with the pva and will expand. A chap at my model railway club used a lot of lead in the boiler of one of his expensive O Gauge (1:43) steam locos kits. After 6-9 months the lead expanded and split the boiler longditudionally - thing was pretty much a write-off. I've experienced the same with a couple of railway wagon kits where the lead/pva mix definitely expanded - luckily mine wasn't sealed and I'd left space (unintentionally) for the stuff to expand into without 'exploding' Thin CA is what I now use to secure liquid lead, though obviously that can have it's issues, especially around transparencies.

Ta! The problem with NMF is that, personally (and other than BAC/BAe's XP693), I never saw Lightnings in it - by the time I started doing airshows and taking an interest in them, live Lightnings were all camo/ASG.

Okey-dokey, the basic airframes have all been put together - of the 3 I have to say my fave is the little 1:144 F-Toys one, the finesse of detail and the overall shape, not to mention fit, is just lovely. Next job is to tidy up the joins, fit the airbrakes to the big 'un (and I vaguely recall from the last Hasegawa one I did some 30 years ago what a pita that will be), missile rails to the big and little 'uns, then a thin primer coat to check if anything needs titivating further before I make my mind up about which scheme each will carry. Ducks by Alan Monk, on Flickr and their eventual 'home' ('scuse the detritus on the mantle...)

Thanks Rob. Scales - I did consider going larger, but decided that the 48th one would stick out just a bit too much and be at much higher risk of being dinged and clobbered. Colours - I saw the 1:1 chromed Jag at the Tate Britain a few years back and it was tempting... however Nan's ducks were 'realistically' coloured and I just prefer to finish them in proper schemes. Of course... there's the second 1/144 one in the box and I know I have a Novo F6 or two still in a stash box somewhere, so I might give an all-chrome one a punt.

Having recently bought and moved into our own house, I was rather taken by the remaining Victorian fireplace in the front (spare) bedroom, complete with mantelpiece and chimneybreast. Initial plan was to source a vintage mirror, but in a flash of inspiration I recalled the 3 flying ducks that my nan had over her fireplace, flying in echelon across the chimneybreast and growing in size from small, through medium, to large. Hmmm.... Could I recreate something similar, but with model aircraft? HMMMM.... A quick search of various threads on here and elsewhere, along with a well-known auction site (and my remaining kit stash) produced 3 BAC Lightning F6 kits - a F-Toys/Gashapon 1/144 F6, a Tamiya 1/100 F6 and a Hasegawa 1/72 F6. Perfect. Plan is to build them pretty much OOB 'in flight' (as this is a 'fun' project, I'm not going the whole hog with aftermarket stuff, that's all saved for the 'serious' and growing stash of Airfix and Sword 72nd Lightnings). The trio will need to be slightly modded to enable fixing across the chimneybreast in a suitable formation (smallest lower left diagonally up to largest top right). Basic construction started last evening, with the cleaning up/fettling of parts, filling of superflouous holes and slots for the unrequired overburgers, dry-fittings and working out the best was of displaying/fixing to the wall, which entailed the decision to leave off/remove the left ventral strake and file/cut a slightly angled flat into each belly tank. One outstanding decision is colour schemes... different on each, or the same repeated thrice. I'm minded to go with different, 1 camo and 2 variants of air-superiority grey, all from the final years of 5sqn, 11sqn and the LTF (as I remember them). Current faves would be a camo 5sqn machine (XS921 AB is a contender), XS903 as 11sqn 'BA' (black fin and large eagles) and lastly XR728 'JS' with LTF markings. I'll chuck some pics up in due course, if the phone plays ball.

Cracking job thus far. Will be referring back to this very useful thread when I get round to building the one I picked up at SMW yesterday.

Not sure - these plug ins are simply allowing other's PB-hosted photos to appear in historic forum threads, rather than the clock of doom. As Mike points out, better to use an alternative hosting site for any photos going forward, but this does at least 'fix' many older threads and posts for users of Firefox and Chrome

I've lurked here a wee while now, admiring everyone's models. In my childhood days (1970s and 80s) I built umpteen 1/72 Airfix, Matchbox and Frog aircraft kits, pretty much all OOTB and mostly WW2 subjects, along with some AFVs, ships and even the odd blue tit. By my mid-late teens I grew a little more discerning and focussed mainly on RAF/FAA Cold War, amassing a sizeable fleet of EE Lightnings amongst everything else (including a few wifs) before my long-standing other interest in model railways took precedence for the next few decades. However, in recent years, lured by the exquisite new releases and after-market additions for many of my childhood faves, I've re-entered the world of aircraft modelling. A small (but growing) kit stash has been established, various resin bits, decals and paint acquired and I'm looking forward to spending the darker evenings of the autumn and winter at my workbench building a Lighting or three, maybe even a Shack.

Apologies if this is old news, but I found a solution to the PB issue for Firefox and Chrome users via another forum. There are plug-ins available for Mozilla Firefox and Chrome browsers which will reinstate the PB images on any forum you view (assuming the poster hasn't taken them down/deleted their PB account) - I've downloaded and tried the Chrome one and can say it definitely works. I did check the plug-in for malware/viruses/etc and it's clean. FF: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/photobucket-embedded-fix/?src=search Chrome: chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/photobucket-embed-fix/naolkcpnnlofnnghnmfegnfnflicjjgj?hl=en