TheBaron

Attending a S. London comprehensive in the 70s, our school motto was somewhat more gynaecological in character and generally rendered in Anglo-Saxon. The tuck shop vodka used to be reasonably priced though: 10p a swig, or 15p if you wanted the neck of the bottle wiped first.

The photons smile upon on your paintwork Giorgio, such is the visual richness developing there already. Everyone's a critic Giorgio. Should've heard what he said about the Sistine Chapel: 'Bodies everywhere - a right old mess.'

Aah. I feel your pain on those lines but don't worry, its completely recoverable. I'd simply strip of the paint off and respray, adding the pencil lines in afterwards. I find rulers roo big and bulky so use some thin scraps of brass to draw straight lines as they work for both flat and curved surfaces. You can vary the weight of the lines afterwards by going back over them with gentle strokes from an eraser, then seal with a coat of varnish. Hth, Tony

You are clearly in your element with this work Martian - the quality of what you're producing must make it immensely satisfying each time you sit back and look at the latest progress. Hugely impressive in length, girth, and surface detail.

The finish on that paintwork looks top notch and impressively smooth Mark. Should have bought the new Italeri Decal Generator!

You cannot beat their random sparks of revelation Bill. I'm lucky in having a full institutional access to JSTOR through my job, which is basically having acess to ideas in methamphetamine form... I knew you'd be the one to give the the correct information here Pete - in fact I remember you mentioning PX7 some time back and I'd neglected to make a note of this material. I'd done some trial runs with various red pigments dissolved in Aqua Klear and this seems to work well in terms of reproducing the glisten and translucency of the coloured grease in response to light. Applied with a paintbrush though it's a little too textured at this scale on top of the wingfold details, so reckon it will look better lightly airbrushed on, possibly with a stipple here and there from a cotton bud. As well as the period red colour, I see PX-7 is still available today in a kind of honey colour: this might well account for the green-gold appearances of some wingfolds when applied over the top of Light Admiralty Grey. No wonder they move so fast! Manic visions of Sea Vixen firing off molluscs instead of chaff and flares.... Although rubbery feeling limbs deny me the bench currently, I have been making further headway in terms of further identifying the function of various parts of the aircraft, by a more careful rereading of Molly Neal's excellent article 'Sea Vixen: The Royal Navy's Strike Fighter' in the Feb 5th, 1960 edition of Flight magazine. Even more so than Tony Buttler's book on the Vixen, Neal's article concentrates a superb technical description of the aircraft into just a few pages, augmented by A.Bowbeer's peerless cutaway drawing of the aircraft which contains so much detail I'd previously failed to notice all of its detail. Regarding the small set of intakes on the underside of the wing root (the smaller sets below the main engine intakes), this sentence on p.186 caught my eye; - and had me scurrying back to the cutaway: A zoom in on the partially obscured stbd intake: -reveals the functions of 81 + 82 as: I'd previously misidentified this feature as something to do with cooling the oil system but this explains the functional nature of the split intake quite clearly. @perdu had previously drawn my attention to the small vents on the inboard trailing edges of the wings - a featurethat scouring of the maintenance manuals could only throw up a graphic of an inspection panel nearby on this section of the flap shroud: However I think I've solved the mystery of the function of these small vents: Or rather, Bowbeer's graphic is the only source I found that explicitly singles this feature out: Feature 104 is identified in the Flight index as a 'Wheelcase Breather Vent' At least I know what to call it now, and can emphatically confirm that it's venting something from somewhere.... Harking back to my comments above about random sparks of revelation: you never know what's going to pop out from a book seemingly unconnected to something like the Sea Vixen but in currently reading Mark Mazower's: - the Rolls Royce Avon puts in a sudden appearance on p.27: Hope this finds you all hygienic and non-hallucinatory. It's the best you can hope for these days... Tony

Well. (Sips laconically from tumbler in style of Dave Allen)... Currently bedridden and self isolating with an eager cast of symptoms all vying to take centre stage as the bastid pox of CV-19 has a lash at the Baronial carcass. Ugly stuff, but it seems to be burning through the various stages quite rapidly since waking up with it on Tuesday, ameliorated by caring comments from sons and heirs such as: 'How will he know if he has brain fog?' In hindsight the missing wing fence episode may have been the onset... Ho, if not an outright hum. Thanks G: I just have to figure out whether it will be best to stick them on before or after mounting the outer wings onto the aircraft.... It was indeed graphite Steve - varying grades from HB to 8B. Doing that caused me to realize there isn't a working pencil sharpener in the house between us, so I've just ordered a classic schooldays-nostalgia version: Anyone else remember that petrichor-like aroma of wood-shaving and chemical-tang which these things produced when cranked in hot summer classrooms...? Id est quod est. Nick away Terry , the graphite is nothing more than pencils, water, eraser, fingertip, and a flamboyant sense of the random. It's a splendid feeling isn't it at this cycle of the season Chris when you keep popping out to check how much the stuff has grown overnight? The mung beans I'd previoualy planted to have bean sprouts for salads have gone over so potted them on now to experiment with growing them on to harvest as beans instead. Presumably just like growing peas or Broad beans.... Definitely not one for an apartment balcony in the urban environment! Pt. 2 to follow after some Panadol....

The whole ensemble is beautifully produced Rob. Congratulations on such a fantastic piece of work.

I suspect you will too Adrian knowing the quality of your work. That photo above looks like a still from an animation of the drawings coming to life as shapes....spooky.

If only. 'Tis but shameless padding to try and make this one as long as a @Fritag thread Bill.

Duplicate post.

Evening everyone - a Monday update before the week gavottes away again. Either will do for me on a good day Bill. It's the thought that counts. Thanks CJ. Amazing how much more you still find there is to do at this stage of proceedings... Only recently discovered the existence of Saxony Handsteine as a form of modelling Terry and feel compelled to make you aware of this now as well! Wind-up merchant.... Hat doffed to a kindred spirit Chris. Afraid I pong a bit tonight as Mrs B. has recently switched over to making natural plant fertilizer from nettles fermented in buckets of water. After about two weeks, to say these mixtures niff a bit when stirred is an understatement... There used to be a superb one at the top of the High Street in Guildford back in the 80s (called Thorpe's iirc) which used to be like entering an enchanted forest of the early 20th C as much of the stock appeared to have been cleared from country house libraries in the area. To this day I still have many of the books I picked up there on visits, like this volume of Durer's etchings and woodcuts published in Ansbach in 1910, complete with Gothic typeface: No-one will mourn Amazon warehouses when they're gone, but I mourn the loss of such places as that.... That is, and I have to say it Pete, a most timely find for which I'm most grateful. Amazing what grubby fingers can do Giorgio! The bench had become so chaotic even by my standards so it got tidied recently. Can you see the brass wing fences there? No. Me neither. They'd been there when I started and i spent a whole hour scouring shelves and flooring to no avail. Guess where they where? Yeah, that's right. I'd dry fitted them to the wings previously and forgotten about it... Is this how senility starts? Anyways, before any further stupidity could occur they were promptly tucked away into the dwindling box of bits that are waiting their turn to be added to the ensemble: In keeping with my usual modus operandi, I'd made sure to break off the locating lugs ffrom both the Microcell containers so had to drill out and add replacements from brass tubing, which along with the cable trays, got a final coat of LAG and some Aqua Klear to seal: Followed by some graphite treatment on the front to match the grimy/smoke-stained look that appears in a couple of reference photos I have showing this fetaure in enough detail: Whilst the LAG and Aqua Klear were in the airbrush I also finished painting up the RAT sub-assembly: The view below showing the minimum effective print resolution of the Mars 2 as the turbine blades visible here are 0.02mm thick: Then before they could cause any further mayhem, he fences got GG'd into position: I'll come back to them next time and wick a little more diluted GG along the rear portion of them for extra bonding strength: Wingfold colour. Period colour photography of operational FAW.1s is not exactly abundant regarding such matters (and you can safely ignore contemporary museum/static display items beyond the basic grey) but nonetheless I have been able to collate a bunch of characteristic views of the protective lubricant used in service: James has previously commented on the nature of such colour variations here: -whilst some additional hands-on information about the wingfold is provided by the third comment here (ignore the racist gobshite posting after it) to whit: 'the Wing Fold mechanism had to be cleaned and lubricated regularly otherwise it would corrode and the Latch Pins wouldn't lock the wings down unless you jumped up and down on the outer Wings.' (!) Playing around in Photoshop by turning some of those colour shots into grayscales to compare with the original Pathe bw film stock provided a stunningly ambiguous tonal comparison: I did read recently that some very early production FAW.1 wingfolds did receive a coating of zinc chromate (and at least one photo seems to clearly show this) so the labelling above adds a question as to whether the gold/green hue seen sometimes (allowing for fading dyes in period colour photographic film) on this feature may be a weathered version of that. It's a possibility of course, but not conclusive. I'm going to go with the red though. I doing so I freely acknowledge I've no exact reference to show XN708 did use this colour of protective application - and conversely that she didn't - so this is one of those circumstances where you just sometimes have to go on the balance of probabilities from what visual information you do have. I think the red will look lovely and pretty and nice. Last of the parts to get its visuals finalized in this session were tthe two 150 gall. tanks: Since doing these for XJ481 I'd noticed that in many shots the rivets holding the sections together would often gain individual grime streaks of their own so added these here along with other representative levels of griming. That's it this time around. Slowly facing the reality that I have to work out what sequence to start sticking all this stuff onto the airframe in a way that minimizes my capacity to break things off at a rate faster than I'm adding them... Hope your weeks got off to a good start and speak soon, Tony

'Joan Crawford Has Risen From The Grave'.......

Two Penguin volumes on the go currently. Norman Ohler's: - is fast-paced, full of surprises, and a stark reminder of how important it is to avoid narrow simplifications of the past. An irony lost on the Daily Mail's endorsement of course.... Jeanette Winterson's phrase: 'Reality is not made of parts but formed of patterns' could apply to the above as much as to the subject of Artificial Intelligence that she brings a novelist's sensibility to here: It also contains chapters entitled 'Hot for a Bot' and 'Coal-Fired Vampire' which, quite honestly, was enough to make me buy it in the first place....

For several deeply unsettling moments I was confronted by the prospect that this was going to be a representation of the little known Pringle night-camouflage scheme, responsible for causing such havoc amongst the 3rd Argyle Anti-Aircraft Rgt. on the night of 17th-18th October 1917 that the entire unit had to be removed from front-line service due to shattered morale occasioned by visions of 'The Great Sky Sock'. Many military historians consider this the first modern use of psyops. Except Max Hastings: he maintains it was a semi-religious hallucination on a par with 'The Ankle of Mons'.