TheBaron

Exquisite as always pheonix.

Woke up on Saturday morning and logging on to the forum over coffee was disconcerted to be presented with a large message saying that I'd been banned from BM. Doubtless to everyone's surprise it wasn't anything to do with my sense of humour but the fact that my account had been hijacked by a swinish cohort of spammers and so, quite reasonably, my account had been blocked. I must at this point pay tribute to @Mike for responding so rapidly in a) explaining what had happened, b) reinstating my account under new credentials, and c) repairing the affected threads. My respect for the workload that himself and others take on behind the scenes to keep the forum going under such cyberattacks has grown enormously. Thanks Mike. Someone should write a song about it..... https://mrbthegentlemanrhymer.bandcamp.com/track/how-many-brilliant-minds-are-lost-to-work This morning's 'getting to know you/getting to know all about you' session with the Formbox has proven fruitful on a number of fronts: For 0.5mm transparency of the PETG variety, Mayku reccomend a heat setting of 5 for anywhere between 1 minute and 1.20 in their instructions. For large, individual objects that seems to work fine from what I've seen in various demonstration videos, but not for the range of variables involved in the transparent sections on a Wasp. With the range of shapes/scales you can see above, that heat setting turned out to be too high. Duration-wise, shapes like the roof also require a shorter (20 seconds less) heating period than that for the smaller windows (mumble mumble thermal properties mumble dimensionality): Also - and predictably if you think about it - overfilling the plate area yields poorer results. An example of this is again the large roof window section whereby a single instance and the vacform is fine, putting two or more of the same buck on and quality drops off. I'd mentioned before that there is still some minor cloudiness in one or two places (very shallow compound curve profiles) when using cast resin bucks. This is nowehere near as bad as that produced on the dental vacformer and a swab with a cotton bud dipped in white spirit is enough to remove it. I know it's been excruciating getting this far with vacforming but it has to be an easily repeatable process that gives good clarity. Not only that, but finding the right heat setting to reproduce surface detail such as the bolts around the APX site collar seen here at 1/32 scale: All that data has now been entered into the studio notebook: a final vacforming session at the weekend to produce finished parts to build with and then it's on to actually sticking bits together. Why am I nervous about starting that? I've never used Mr.Paint colours before but having read some good things about them, decided to try some out on this build: I've kept some of the old Wasp airframe test prints to use as mules to try out various visual treatments when the time comes. All the best for now, Tony

Morning all, No pictures this time around but good manners dictate a reply to your replies. Powered by AI, all will bow before it, though it will have six fingers instead of rotor blades... I see there's now a Wasp cabin-themed nightclub opening Ced! This you pal? I have no hair these days Terry. Could these two things be related perhaps? I see we both frequent the same type of club Colin. 🤫 Always a worrying phrase...you're...you're not a psychologist by any chance? 😁 PM sent Dm. Coincidentally that's what prompeted me to update here Pete: I'm having to do a lot of extra training on top of my day job so am often too tired to focus coherently on the Wasp during down time: there's no question of the enthusiasm waning, just the familiar 'spirit willing/body weak' scenario. I also had the combined covid/flu jab last weekend which resulted in 24hrs of fever/delirium, soundtracked by the old Paul Temple radio series which briefly I mistook for the evening news and recoiled from in horror at the fatality levels in Marlow. Some more extra casting sessions for the window bucks at both scales got done so have enough of those for the present. If I can pull a free day out the of the schedule next week I want to finess the temperature/time settings for the vacform side of things and actually get on to building something before I forget what everything is! Wishing you all a great weekend, Tony

The most disturbing title and cover image for a Country & Western album ever...

Speaks volumes about the guy building it though Alan. Enlightening and engrossing in equal measure. Some kits should certainly have a 'Caution: may contain Dead Parrot' sticker on the box, a lá the Pythons....

Thanks HitC - that makes me feel even better about spending the money! Best of luck with the bench Colin - are you building your own vacform box? Dug some time out of the schedule this morning to run a couple more tests; the main reason being to see how the smaller 1/32 transparency set would turn out: Happy enough with initial results. Being a firm adherent to the principle of testing like-with-like in pursuit of the best outcome, alongside epoxy resin casts of the smaller bucks I added the original 3d printed cockpit roof buck in alongside its cast counterpart and ( not for the first time with vacforming) surprised to see it perform much better in terms of avoiding any lingering visual 'haze' issues An odd outcome in this respect as for the smaller parts the epoxy casts (used above) perform slightly better than the 3d printed originals instead. Reminds you this process is as much art as science.... Still experimenting with (and enjoying) the Formbox in terms of temperature settings and heating times. In relation to the manufacturer's guidelines, as they quite fairly point out themselves, their guide values will vary according to the environmental setting. Certainly here on the kitchen table in Ireland high humidity is a factor for much of the year. Mayku do supply their own 0.5mm transparencies (as used above) which I think are PETG, so out of curiosity I'll run some further tests with that against PETG I got from as local supplier to see if there are any obvious differences in preparation and results. I'm not expecting there to be any great difference. For now though I couldn't resist a quick dry fit of the 1/32 canopy onto the cabin framework: @giemme it's not paint, but I do think that alcohol ink will do a better job than paint at tinting the roof without rendering it overly opaque when compared to the real life version: Good Lord! A test fit and some pigment showing so early in the thread? Have a great weekend all of you. Tony

Kind of you Pete: Hopefully my correspondence (and just as importantly my liking of other people's work!) will pick up again as the year moves on and the daytime workload dials back a bit. Very irksome this whole paying the mortgage lark ain't it? Decent of you Keith. Hopefully a little less Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Canopy and a bit more The Wasp Factory from now on! You're most welcome on board. Many thanks FL! Many thanks James. Word is he's got three already G.... An important consideration for sure Mike. Solving those recent technical problems in order to produce transparencies I could stand over in terms of quality was the last remaining part of the puzzle. With that sorted there's now a viable workflow in place for all of the various types of media being used to produce the kit parts. Thank the Gods. It's been a right old haul..... Gracious of you as always dear Ced. If my parts are going to be handled by members of the public I want them to feel that they're getting their moneysworth.

Firstly I must apologize for appearing to neglect this thread for ever longer periods of late. Between an increased workload in the day job and a few orders for the Sea Vixen trickling in, my time has, as they say, not been my own in recent weeks. Thanks for all of the above kind comments: when you're flailing around on your own battling various Krakens (Krakenii?) of Process it never ceases to raise the spirits knowing that there are others out there who appreciate the difficulties and can share in the pleasure at reaching solutions. It's one of the things I like about modelling, the camaraderie of a shared endeavour, one which only the uninitiated woud have the temerity to look askance at as social deviancy.... Less pictures to show in this update yet perhaps one of the more consequential reports on progress this year in terms of overcoming various hindrances. To start with I have now ditched the dental vacforming unit. I'll still keep it for small one off jobs as may be necesary in the futures (such as 1/72 cold cast bucks). That still works fine for the smaller, less detailed Sea Vixen transparency for example, but now abandoned for the Wasp. Why? Well, if you recall the last update indicated the superior results of using cold cast (resin/aluminium powder) bucks in terms of achieving professionally acceptable clarity for the Wasp's larger scale transparencies. Prolonged testing with a view to later production runs using the dental vacformer revealed consistency issues in the form of tiny blisters. Being a sign of overheating in PETG (doubtless due to the increased heat absorption of aluminium in the bucks) I've come to the conclusion that there's only so far you can take the use of a dental vacformer beyond occasional hobby use - their heating elements are just too intense and lack any form of temperature control, whilst the distance to the bucks is too close to consistently be able to avoid blistering across the variety of shapes and elevations involved for the Wasp. I'm not slagging off dental vacforms btw: you can find people using them very successfully with the likes of wooden or putty bucks for transparency forming. It's just that this approach won't work at this scale with this subject - primarily in terms of consistently producing acceptable results for kit production. It shouldn't be surprising I guess but the penny has only recently dropped in yours truly's rather dense noggin about getting what you pay for in terms of the difference between hobbyist and professional (ergo expensive) gear. I therefore took the plunge last week and bought one of these: A Mayku Formbox. Not cheap but in my case an investment in terms of being able to ensure I can put out good quality stuff without wasting lots of plastic. I'd first seen these a good while back when they were a Kickstarter offering and been dubious but seeing that NASA use them for lab work rather swung the issue. That and being able to pick one up in a sale from a schools equipment supplier. They're a clever design, with temperature control, timer and work happily with a domestic vacuum cleaner. Here's the clincher though: After months of heartache cold casting bucks due to heating issues with the dental vacformer, the more controlled nature of the Formbox means it works quite happily with 3d printed bucks (i.e., no necessity to cast in a different medium). If only I'd known this back in March when this whole vacforming whitewater rafting began!! You can see the transparency quality using 3d printed bucks with PETG above. A very *very* slight cloudiness is present on a hanndful of compound curves when looking at the material with a strong light directly behind it, however this is unlikely to be a problem with the viewing angles involved in the assembled kit. This is the 1/24 set btw. The nice thing about the Formbox is how, with a larger vacforming platter, the bucks all fit onto a single sheet (rather than the three it took with the dental version). I won't have time to try the 1/32 lot until next weekend but will update with results when done. The Formbox clearly isn't cheap for hobbyist purposes but would make a great group buy for a model club or local Makerspace facility. Don't look at their new pressure forming Multiplier unit btw; you really will go bankrupt... More in due course. Take care until then! Tony

Love the hues and surface textures of your paint work Steve: richly observed and convincing indeed for the scale. Tony

So: only this one to do then it's nuclear powered next then? 😄 Best of luck with this subject Adrian.

More of your epic surgery/sorcery Jerzy - superb. Tony

Neil that's a gem of a rendition of this aircraft. Totally compelling.

Good Lord G but that's breathtaking. Congratulations!

Expecting the usual lesson in what quality paint work looks like in the hands of a master. Lovely progress G.