Bandsaw Steve

Fantastic work Frank. Funnily enough It was only a couple of days ago that I was looking at plans of one of these and idly wondering if I should bash one together one day. A great collection you have made here, very inspiring.

Hi Hendie, been a a while since I dropped by here. Sorry to hear about your arm - good to hear it’s on the mend though. Little Alpha looks wonderful- you should RFI it in my humble opinion.

Great thread. I am learning heaps from watching this. Thanks for posting.

She’s looking great Chewie!

Well it bloody well better be the right forum or everything I’ve ever posted here will need to be deleted! Goodness me...

Very cool!

Hello Martian, I work as a Geologist in the Pilbara region of Western Australia and consequently was invited to a conference last night with a couple of folks from NASA and some University boffins. The purpose was to discuss strategies for searching for life on Mars. The NASA folks were surprised, and appeared to be a little confused, when I suggested going to Poole in the UK and trying to lure Martians out of hiding by scattering freshly moulded 1/72 scale kits of HM Customs boats about the countryside. We also discussed the possibility of sending a contingent to the next Scale Model World at Telford, where numerous sightings have been recorded. The response was at best lukewarm, so it looks like you are safe for now. I’ll keep you informed if I hear anything more. Bandsaw Steve Martian hunting advisory board

Thanks gents! Three very helpful suggestions there, none of which I had considered! Will be dwelling on my options now. Thanks again.

What a great tribute!

Ahhh! Missed this first time around. Very nice Redshift!

Yes I agree. Despite claiming above that this is all very boring, the truth Is I actually find it quite therapeutic and enjoyable. Nothing too challenging and it’s an activity that rewards patience with a satisfyingly smooth more ‘finished’ product. Yep - the rear cockpit is a bit narrower- front to rear - than the front cockpit. Strictly speaking I think they should both be identical dimensions. This might have remain a ‘talking point’ on the finished model. As for smoothing out the edges, the original had some leather padding running around both cockpit edges. I intend to represent this later on in the build, probably after painting. My hope is that this will smooth out the sharper corners. I’m not quite sure how to make and attach the padding though- I’m thinking doing something with rolled-up sausages of FIMO. Any suggestions welcome.

A cure for insomnia Sooner or later every one of my threads has an entry that goes like this... Inspect, Fill, Sand, Repeat. Sorry folks - this is it... It'll be a great read for anyone who has trouble sleeping. At the end of the my last post I said that this one might be about the undercarriage skid thing that sticks out the front of the aircraft. Then I inspected my work and noted the many rift-valley sized gaps there were in this thing; see the red annotations on the photo below. I decided instead that It was time to do some filling... I often use masking tape when filling to try to limit the spread of the mucky, sticky stuff (in this case pink two-part car filler). Here's where I got to after the first application. The masking has worked well. This was followed - unsurprisingly - by a bout of sanding. I was fairly pleased with this outcome. So inspected again, and filled again... and sanded and inspected and filled. By the third round I had moved to Vallejo fine grained filler which has the same consistency of toothpaste but dries rock hard. It's my favourite filler that's actually intended for model building. I let it dry then sanded again... Masked the open cockpit with some old upholstery foam. This stuff is great for this purpose; washing up sponges are also pretty good! I then sprayed with some automotive 'one-step' primer & putty. This is fairly thick gluggy stuff and can be a bit scary to spray because it fair slathers on and... can leave a bit of an orange-skin effect as shown here. Despite the thickness of this particular primer many underlying surface imperfections are still visible. See what I mean. So there's nothing for it but... Inspect, fill and sand... again... Then switch to a fine surface primer and 'spray and pray'... Ahhh! Looking better. Might be one or two more rounds of inspect, fill sand to go. But I won't bore you further. If you have got this far I'm surprised! Will try for something more exciting next time round. Best Regards, Bandsaw Steve

Finally updated all of the promised and well deserved ‘likes’. Can I have a front seat now?

Brilliant!

Yep! What an epic! Nearly there!