TheBaron

And I have to remind myself that I thought this was going to be 'a 6-month build, tops'.... What font would the lettering have been done in? Cheers Benedikt. You sound just like my hygienist.... As predictions go, that's a pretty safe one. <thinks> There's a fog machine at work...?. 'Anson in Summer Mists' That's been my guiding principle as a parent of children also. I can't work out does that mean that the RAF had a better way of attracting the brightest recruits Rob or was it just that the Army only wanted skinny lads... Will do amigo. Quite. One of the most heartbreaking aspects of those pages is the number where 'missing' is amended to 'killed in action' in the following issue... Mrs. B will be happy to debate you regarding the level of organization I generally apply to life Roger. Knew I'd end up an interior decorator. #shoveoverllewelynbowen What sounds would be appropriate for that Bill? Soft-timbred peel of bells? A few bars of The Lark Ascending? Thanks for your comments lads: off to the dentist in a few mins to let the old fang-mangler loose on a filling that needs doing. Wonder does he have the same vacformer? Must check. Tony

Noble work your Terryship. Agreed. A shave with a scalpel and dash of cologne should have that engine ready for parade no problem I reckon. Close-up photography at 'our' scale is always such a pleasure/pain thing isn't it?

That blue face still always makes me think that it's the 'lack of oxygen' emoji Giorgio! (I'm going to have to make a 'far too kind' emoji to reply to you if this keeps up!) It sounds completely unbelievable I know Johnny. If I told you an engine was mising for three days despite me having built the blighter, then that might give an indication of the chaos that has currently enveloped the work-space. I'd post a picture but then it would only turn into the ritual 'that's not messy/you should see my bench' threads and there's only so much human squalor a sensitive soul can bear.... Several weeks of their patronising 'Bad Panda' messages when finding you cannot access your own photographs (about twice a week on average) has not been a useful service, hence the ill-humour. People too. (Just saying.) I'm not an actual doctor Anthony. To any patients who may have been given the wrong impression I say this: 'Happy to refund your money in full.' Server update entirely understandable Heather, but doesn't explain the prior issues mentioned in my reply to Johnny above. You've been a bit quiet Massimo. All well with you I hope my friend? Well ye may whistle, son of Caledonia. Away and polish yer door-handles... -which are btw by far the loveliest fittings I ever expect to see on the forum. (Until your next set!) I do hope not Ian: . it is a rather taxing business this in that any excessive filing could easily result in Disasters of the Shape Kind. For how much longer I wonder Rob? I don't have any problem paying for online hosting on the 'no-free-lunch' principle (stands to reason, nothing is free unless leveraged by exposure to intrusive advertising and data-harvesting...), but am suspicious at how vulnerable we are to a ransom situation once a body of our stuff is up there for free. Or in my case 'when I'm supposed to be doing...anything really!' I would imagine you're on the money with option B Anthony. The forum servers only handling the posts/threads/indexing side of the affair - to host images, video &etc. on the server would be ruinously expensive in terms of the required drive space (as well as complexity). Despite my current irritation with their service, the interface for Flickr is well-designed and straighforward to use. I don't know about the limitiations of space currently under their free service but I would recomend them as a paid service. It might alternatively be possible to link from your OneDrive cloud account if you use the MS service as well. Or indeed: But free never seems to last.... I cannot imagine any circumstance in which you could be remotely described as 'crude' Mr. P. Mine own periodic coarseness and vulgarity are by contrast a source of regular reprimand from Mrs. B as being 'unhelpful'. Characteristically generous of you. Tbh, I deliberately bite off more than I can chew, less out of hubris than from a genuine curiosity to test one's self and abilities when confronted by a new (and not necessarily sane) creative problem. No doubt one of my genetic ancestors was the first to satisfy his curiosity about what the inside of a sabre-toothed tiger's mouth looked like, instantly regretting his inability to think through the process sufficiently vis-a-vis said feline only being asleep and not in fact dead. My handler Yi-Fu has instructed me to say: 'No'. They've already been 'lost'. I'll have to build replacements Benedikt. Clumsy of me. Slowly we are getting closer to being able to Close the Fuselage, so in anticipation of this the last few bouts of activity have involved touring the snag list for the remaining details requiring attention on the insides, starting with the folding seat across the aisle from the WO station: Due to the small contact areas between seat hing and frame I elected to solder that in place rather than trust to a weaker bond from glue. Not overly apparent in the photo below is the fact that I've attached the Vickers gun to the gun arm in its 'ready for ops' position. There's a section in the maintenance manual that helpfully outlines this procedure, also indicating that when not in imminent need of use, said Vickers was stowed barrell-down in some spring clips in the fuselage aft of the turret. The ammunition drums I'm not going to bother with as these are invisible down inside the walls of the fuselage so far that you'll have to exercise your imagination. Oil tank added to its brackets behind the firewall: Rack of air bottles now assembled and headphones attached to the radio set: I can confirm to @Ex-FAAWAFU ( who is the divil himself in such matters) that the headset is indeed accurately plugged in to the socket at lower right.... Also glued-in is the bomb-aimers cushion and floor inside the the noseso that final test-fitting of the framework could begin: Gleaming at the back on the inside of the frame dividing the windows from the rear door of the cockpit you might just make out one of the cabin fire extinguishers: According the the manual this is a No.3 type methyl bromide affair which, I understand, were of a brass appearance at this stage of the war. There's a nice illustration of it in this equally fascinating graphic from Flight magazine, published in February of 1940, ust a few short months before this mission took place: Having made mine from plastic runner turned in the Dremel, of course I had no brass paint so experimented by using a burnt sienna oil wash over white aluminium lacquer to approximate appearances. That seems to have worked better then I'd hoped, with the oil wash/lacquer combination giving a nice optical depth to the surface that I don't think a brass paint colour alone would have yielded at such a small scale as this. Getting - as they say - 'proper busy' inside here now that the last details are coming together: Time to start gluing the internal framework into place: No - we're not all buttoned-up yet. So far in this shot the framework has only been epoxied into place against the port side of the aircraft: I've clamped it all together like this in order to keep it correctly aligned whilst the glue cures overnight. I had to glue it to the port side first as there are still the WO and Nav's chairs to add, as well as the radio and oxygen rack and these can only be fixed into place on the ports side once the framework has been attached there first. Those will be the next items to be taken care of then, and we can move on, hopefully by midweek, to finally gluing the fuselage together and whacking the windshield on. Thanks for dropping by as always! Tony

That is a most pleasant vehicle wot you have wrought Pete. I hold it in great affection. Oozes charm and character from every orifice - a sort of Point Break vibe with a whimsical hint of Scooby-Doo. it. Best wishes for a rapid return to form Pete. Ps. Some reading to go with the Lucozade: https://www.thevictorbookforboys.com/

Love your low sun-angle photography Moa - really brings out the lustre and texture of your work. Congrats on another fine aircraft.

Absolutely love your work here on the metal surfacing Rob. Inspiring.

A+ CC Congratulations: all that metal and colour looks incredible mate.

Just as well. If it was a 70s set you'd have had to go on strike during the build and picket your bench in the name of authenticity.

A good rub with some steel wool should sort such matters Giorgio. Even metal surfaces that look free of any layers of stuff can need it prior to flux. Think it was either hendie or Bill who drummed that into me and dead right too! Classy. Superb idea marking the intervals on the tape like that. Duly nicking that idea and calling it a tribute act.

Friday already! Some more fiddling around has taken place in and about; rather fired up at the moment tbhand making good progress on various little jobs as bits of time become freed up. Let's see what turned-up in and around the voting cards this morning... Kind of you dear ! And I thought my best days were behind me Giorgio! You're too kind as always. It is all made up on the bench spot of course, leavened with a large dollop of good fortune. De rigeur I would surmise young Piotr. Probably with Poirot dozing up at the front and Lady Agatha having the vapours as her Pekinese gets its tongue stuck in the relief tube... Air rage was more civilized back then.... And it's doing my eyes in and no mistake Chris! U ok hun? Should I call a doctor? You'll do your eyes in with those fancy contact lenses H. Makes you look like Wolverine. I presume that the kidnap and interrogation charges were later dropped.... One of the unreleased songs from The Sound of Music I believe Roger! Where was one? Progress was mentioned. More than I can say for those venal monkey-nuggets over at Flickr who are going backwards faster than Doctor Who with a demented Zarbi shoved up his time-tunnel. Having to upload images one-by-one excruciatingly slowly tonight. Never had this before paying their ransom fee. What are the feckwits doing? Stuffing the cash into the servers and making them overheat? If any of the photos below aren't loading for you, don't waste your time reloading. I think their tech department must be on the mescalin margaritas this evening and doing sod all. 'We're aware of the problem and are fixing it.' My arrssss™ Exhaust on: Needs a touch-up in a couple of places where I flaked some lacquer off but otherwise pleased to have got that into place without too much ado. Get (all 7) of those short runs of pipe that lead out of the cylinders into the exhaust ring was a tricky proposition and need several dry fits before I was confident about going for it with epoxy on. A small bit or a wiring loom to add around the magnetos at the back but I'll come back to that later as I'm a bit tired of engines at this stage and moved on to the front cockpit instead. IP and control collumn have now been added: Along with the pilot's seat and the collapsible one for the 2nd pilot to starboard: As per usual it's only in the photos that I noticed I managed to chip a bit of the leather off of the 2nd pilot's seat: What a giveaway it's not real cowhide... In need of some variety I finally decided to attack the problem of the propellers. Having alreaady lost one of the kit ones yonks back, it was lucky I'd taken a reference photo of the remaining one as that too had gone awol in the interim. The actual shape of the kit prop looks pretty good but the thickness of the leading/trailing edges made me want to try something in metal, traced here for producing some cutting masks in the Silhouette software: These were then fire out to some Washi sheet on the cutter and applied to some 0.8mm brass sheet blanks and cut out using the jeweller's saw and final shaping with diamond disk in the Dremel: I then started working the leading and trailing edges, using as a reference this beautiful side-on shots of Anson prop from Etienne du Plessis' treasury: Here I am with the leading/trailing edges done on the lower of the pair, and the upper one juest gettin first shaping of the edges: Once the main blank had been cut out, the bulk of the shaping and edge profiling was done initially with the sihrsc, followed by sanding boards, followed by W&D and a buff up at the end with a felt roll on the Dremel. Simply wouldn't be able to get such a knife edge at thsis scale in anything but metal: Needs more done on getting the overall aerofoil chord done still: But those edges will do for tonight: Once the chords are done in each, I need to look at building the central bosses and working out how to put the required opposing 'twist' into the metal so that each blade is correctly angled as per the reference shot posted above. This hasn't felt like work so much as a rather joyful sense of freedom learning to work the metal a bit better with each new job tried. The minces are predicatably aching a bit after that sesh now so I'll bid ye all have a good evening and speak more at the weekend. Adieu, adieu.... Tony

Every time on every build that you mention it strikes me that should have been a character in a Tom Waits song. Hope the wee dog heals swiftly Ced. The Master Ironist at work...

It's a lot of work on those side windows Bill but a pleasure to see such damn fine crafting. He's right you know!

Ditto Ced! But it's a good goad to self-improvement I find. You mentioned summat about backdrops? This guy has a nice idea and doesn't look complicated: https://www.diyphotography.net/build-cheap-collapsible-diy-light-box/ Crete looked great: I'm envious. Any time I've stood in classical ruins I get giddy from the vast sense of time and lives involved. As Bill says, do RFI this won't you? Them shiny shiny bits would look lovely outside in the sun!

Glass of porter at 9 quid? Shocking violation of human rights. No wonder tha needed to build an engine to settle the nerves - champion pipework Johnny.

Can't we just? Reckon if I just paint the undersides in alternating stripes of Silver Dope and Night Black then no matter what their views upon the matter, everyone will all be able to say: 'He got that bit right That bit wrong, That bit right That bit wrong, That bit right That bit wrong, That bit right That bit wrong, That bit right That bit wrong, That bit right That bit wrong....' Like wise Chris - there seems an inexhaustible amount to learn about colour (and light!) and I'm conscious of the depths of my own ignorance in so many regards. Have been trying to get my eye in on NB (bearing in mind the biases of the original photochemical film stock) by having a gander at Etienne du Plessis' superb colour archive over on Flickr: Praise from the Maestro. Remind me to wear bright clothing if we ever meet Anthony! A; Possibly! Don't think you'd find one of them red leather jobs in a Mk.1 in 1940 however H - the vendor of said seat handily posted a photo of the frame with the upholstery stripped-off and you can see that it's a non-folding seat from a later (Mk.IX?) passenger variant: What was that underslung tube for? Umbrella? Baguette for the continental routes? No qualms about admitting my paucity of knowledge on contemporary colours for the Anson upholstery: best you can tell even from the manuals is 'something dark'. A brief perusal here: and here: is at least reassuring in pointing out a lack of definitive technical documentation, but with some interesting insights re: brown leather of the period darkening to black quite quickly. Somewhere in a stray neuron I have a half-remembered nuggest that items such as upholstery could frequently be determined by what the sub-contractor had access to at any given period in the production run, though I can't recall whether the source of that was book or documentary. I like you notion of A Study in Brown being a bit more colourful around the interior so got busy with a Burnt Sienna oil wash last evening to turn black to brown: Actually I'll have to file that 'highlighted black under sienna wash' technique away as a good method for approximating abraded brown leather. for prompting the change! Similarly, try popping into Selfridges to buy a bronze eagle in 1939-45. Nary a one to be had for some reason... It's not beyond the possibility that they did Simon. Along with an Aspidistra beside the relief tube for the complete Edwardian experience... Schnitzel-medals all round. Get the right one Johnny. They'll tear you apart on here. Dunno if this of any use Johnny but occasionally find some of the photos appearring here of use working out details: http://www.spitfirespares.com/Hurricane parts for sale.html Some more painting and detailing work has taken place in fits and starts since the weekend. One of those rather intense 'do a bit - go away for a bit - come back and do some more' jobs was to get the side glazing of the cockpit done on both sides: Each side section consists of three separate sections of transparency that needed gluing into place one after the other - hence the need to take breaks so that the glue had time to cure between sections in order to avoid knocking them out of alignement. You can see I played it say by using thin strips of tape to hold them into place, having learned from the Iron Chicken days that using wider strips of tape tends to pull of either the masking, or the part itself away on delicate jobs such as this. I used Gator's Grip thin-blend on this job and remain deeply impressed by its adhesive qualities. Diluting it down even further so that it would (in hendie's inimitable phrase) 'wick' in and around the seams was a godesnd with such large transparent panes. Rear bulkhead leading to the AG position was also wiggled inside the framework and epoxied into place permanently: Then it was the turn of the engines to get their finishing touches. Spiders of fuse wire for the ignition wiring: Trimmed, bent and CA'd into place: After that I then added the supply and return runs for the oil pipes that pass directly into the pump underneath the central down of the engine at the front: On the unexposed port engine this is as much as you'll see in the end: Starboard one however is fully visible: I've left those pipe-runs overlength as one needs to pass down to the oil cooler and the other directly back through the firewall to the oil tank: Plonked-on to the engine-bearers for a quick shufti: Looks Ok so far but out of contentration energies tonight now. Next task will be to attach the exhaust ring to the back of the engine - a fiddly job in terms of keeping alignment and angles correct all the way around so that can wait for fresh eyes and mind. Thanks for looking-in: I hope your respective weeks are going tickety-boo, if n otm outright beezer and pukka. I'd like to leave you tonight with a final flourish from one of Scotland's greatest native savants, Bob Servant: '20 yrs ago a young man said to me “I have no qualifications, poor eyesight + I’m not a people person but if you give me a job then I’ll give you everything I have” I said you start tomorrow. I believe in people. Sacked him 2 days later for gross negligence but point still applies.' Tony.