Bandsaw Steve

Great looking model! Scratchbuilding one of those in 1/48 is on my bucket list!

I presume this will be carved from wood? Remember Jesus was a carpenter!

OK - I'm watching. Good looking subject BTW.

I agree with all of Phoenix's comments above and will be stealing some of your techniques in future projects. Keep up the good work!

Sounds like a very good backup plan in case method 'A' struggles.

Ok. One mosquito- with 'the works' please. You have my attention.

What could be better than this?Well your Pullman build for one thing! I've just rediscovered it this morning and will be reading in detail tonight. Miles and miles and miles ahead of what I'm doing here, but that's OK, I'm just doing this for fun and am having plenty of it!

All done with photoshop!

Hi Churchill, That sounds like a great idea! I will definitely look into that along with Greggle's earlier suggestion of printable, removable labels. The PVA works very well but it leaves a permanent messy residue that must be dealt with. Your suggestion sounds much better and was not something I had thought of at all. Thanks again.

Well done. A deserved win no doubt. The model looks great.

Thanks for the encouraging comments everyone - they must be keeping me going because for the first time in a long time I have a mid-week update. And what an update it will be! This post will contain: The completely unnecessary use of a flamethrower! 800 degree centigrade temperatures! I will nearly loose an eye! I will use (possibly) carcinogenic chemicals without any protection! All in the pursuit of...a 1/48 cine camera that you can barely see at all in the end. (Please note that the content of this thread may vary from that which is advertised above) OK - it's all Hendie's fault - I was going to use a piece of wooden dowel to make the cine-camera but he said that this was now 'officially' a multi-media project. So I decided to use yet another media - clear styrene sprue, in this case from an old 1/48 Hobbycraft Hurricane. The use of clear styrene will allow me to claim one more material type used and will hopefully allow me to have a nice clear lens on the front of the camera. Having cut a piece out I quickly realised how easy it would be to cut the remaining length to the right profile - I's actually really easy to see where to cut when you can see through the stuff! - the brown strip above is the dowel that I was thinking of using; far too boring though... Having cut a length off I wet and dry sanded it to give the front lens an 'optical shine'. Now I had to cut the piece of plastic down to size. Fundamentally, there's two ways that can you can cut plastic - use a knife or a saw or something or...use one of these babies! This is a butane gas burner used for caramelising the top of crème-brulees. It's similar to what the US marines used in Iwo Jima! Clear styrene is brittle and can snap and get damaged if you try to cut it with a cold blade, so you really need to melt your through the stuff - (that's my excuse anyway). OK - disclaimer time... KIDS - DO NOT TRY THIS WITHOUT ADULT SUPERVISION! ADULTS - DO NOT LET YOUR KIDS DO THIS AND IF YOU CHOSE TO DO THIS BE VERY BLOODY CAREFUL! I fired up the flame-thrower and got my daughter to hang onto it while I heated up the knife - don't let her drop the stupid thing or it'll be the end of the house. Ensure that you get the knife stupidly, unnecessarily hot - according to google steel goes this colour above 800 degrees Celsius. Make the cut - it doesn't take long! Make sure that you don't stupidly bend down to get a closer look and nearly stick your right eye in the flame. I didn't actually get that close but I did have to stop and think once or twice! Reheat the blade - 500 degrees Celsius just will not do! Make a diagonal cut at the correct angle to ensure that the cine camera will sit on top of the nose just above the air intake. About 1/20th of a second later! And so now we have made a cine-camera. Clean it up with sandpaper and make final minor adjustments to make sure it sits down properly on the nose - it goes just slightly to starboard. Glue it down with two-part epoxy araldite. Two part epoxy araldite is very smelly - so I'm going to claim that it's a carcinogen just to make this post even more exciting and death-defying. If you look carefully at the photo below you can just see a clear blob on the top of the nose intake - that's the cine camera! That's what all this was about. Hard to see in this photo because the stupid thing is see-through. Man, some of those panel lines look rough. I think that they will need a tidy up prior to the NMF finish. OK, so that's that done. Given that all I actually did was use a domestic cooking appliance it's probably not that exciting - but hey - this is model building not bungy jumping so I have to try to get what kicks I can! There are still some details to go before that primer goes on but the list is getting shorter. I am hoping to be spraying primer this weekend Best Regards and (try your best to) stay safe, Reconcilor

Thanks for the tips guys. I'm keen to have a crack st this as well sometime. Thanks for taking the time to type this up.

Nice tidy colour scheme. I like this a lot

Ok. Thanks mate. It's good to know 'I'm not alone'. I suspect it's some sort of clash between this site, windows and my anti-virus software.

Sorry to post tech support stuff in the middle of this thread but does anyone know why I cannot use the 'reply' function on certain random pages. It's pages three and four on this thread but I've noted the same problem in other threads too and it's becoming frustrating. I'm having to write this on page 2. I've written a more comprehensive outline on the Help and Support page but have had no responses at all. The issue only affects this PC - not my IPhone. Any thoughts welcome.

Perceptive point Hendie - this is one of the more significant differences between shaping wood and styrene. Using the back edge of the blade on styrene does exactly what you say - removes an even skin, a bit more aggressively than sandpaper. Doing this on wood just tends to smooth the surface and does not remove much material.

My family and I recently took our summer holidays in Denmark. Denmark, Western Australia! It's a real place! Google it if you don't believe me! Love be that photo of the cathedral. I sometimes do a bit of landscape painting...hmmmmm...

And another weekend has been spent - more or less - on this project. This time I'm trying to give this little jet some armament - or at least some blisters into which the armament can fit. There will not be any gun-barrels fitted until after painting. Here's the underside view of the nose that I am using to ascertain the shape and position of the armament-related blisters. All of a Mig15's internal armament is mounted under the nose. It consists of two 23mm and one 30mm cannon. In the photo below the (broken) tip of the knife blade is pointing at the large housing for the 30mm cannon. I managed to find some brass tube at my local hobby store that was exactly the right calibre. It's hollow and everything! Following Hendie's observation that this was now a 'multimedia' project I chose to use 'Evergreen' 2mm plastic card for the 30mm cannon housing. As per usual start by cutting out the required shape from the plans and stick it on. Then cut around the shape - one thing I have noted during this project is how often a decent pair of scissors comes in handy. They cut this card like butter (not that I generally use scissors to cut butter). As an unexpected benefit of using scissors the card was bent slightly along the long axis of the cannon housing. This was exactly what I needed as, as shown in the photo below, the profile of the card now perfectly matched the profile of the fuselage. Sweet! Now just clean up the cut-out with a scalpel and some sandpaper and its starting to look OK. Cut a slot in the front of the housing to hold the cannon's barrel latter on. The front of the cut-out looks a bit rough here but when the cannon's fitted I reckon a dab of filler will tidy this up sufficiently for my purposes. In this view the housing looks a bit asymmetric - a bit fatter on one side than the other, that's actually the correct shape, but it does look like a mistake. Repeat the steps above to make another 2mm thick layer and cement the two bits together - one on top of the other. Hold them for a while, while the cement sets to maintain that curved profile that matches the fuselage so well. I now wanted to start completing the full 3D contour of the housing so I drew these plan view contour sections onto another piece of 'Evergreen' card. The new bit of card was only 0.25mm thick though, so my three layers of 'contouring' only boosted the thickness of the piece by 0.75mm at the thickest point. Here's what the five pieces all stuck on top of one another, glued together and matched up with the underside of the nose. Not too bad. The contouring method seems promising but was a bit of waste of time using 0.25mm card. Now I needed to shape the plastic piece into a rounded shape. I just treated it like a piece of wood, shaping it by carving, whittling and sanding. This process was dead easy - the plastic is soft and of course has no grain so can basically be carved or sanded in any direction - beautiful! While I was at it I also carved a plastic 'tail bumper' - one of those things that stops the rear fuselage getting damaged if the pilot rotates too hard on take-off. There's no photo of it here as there's not much to see and it only took about 5 minutes to make. Here's the result. It looks a bit like a fossil tooth! But anyway the shape and size seems about right so I'm happy. A few dabs of 'Perfect Plastic Putty' soon smoothed out the last remnants of the layering that can still be seen in this photo. I also cut out a plate for the cannon housing to be mounted on - these plates quite visible on the original jet so I felt I had to include it. It's pretty simple, just cut out the correct shape from some of that 0.25mm 'Evergreen' plastic, cement it on the base of the housing and use some putty to blend the housing onto the plate. I also had to make the 23mm cannon housing. This was comparatively simple - just needed to find another suitable gun barrel (in this case some more brass tube) and find something to make the gun fairings out of. As it happened I had some strips of 'bass-wood' in the shed that were just the right width. Bass wood is one of the finest softwoods for this kind of work (very popular with American wood-workers) so I was not expecting any problems. First job was to drill a very small hole in the end of the wood, this is where the gun-barrel will ultimately sit. No problems encountered drilling the two holes each of which went in about 15 mm. From here there's no need to bore you with repetition, just cut out the right length of wood, trim it to size, whittle and sand until it's the right shape for each blister. The Bass-wood is magnificent to work; the grain is so straight and of such even density that there's practically no grain at all, the wood is soft and sands very smooth very easily. Nice! And here's the state of the nose underside right now. It can probably stand a bit more of a clean-up and some more detailing, but the idea's there. And here's the same thing from a more 'racy angle'. If you look very carefully at the rear fuselage you can just make out the white dot that is the tail-bumper. If you take a look at the front of the gun fairings you can see the holes where the barrels will be fitted. So - we are getting closer and closer to getting the first layer of grey primer on this thing. I'm looking forward to that because I think it will be the first time this will look like a 'coherent whole' rather than a blotchy bunch of stuck together bits. All going well the primer will go on next weekend, but there are still several details to go including a very prominent cine camera housing above the air intake. Thanks for looking in. Reconcilor

At first I thought these were a set of 'walk around' photos!

Ahhhh! I'd been wondering what had happened with this build. I see you have been busy! Intriguing approach to building the fuselage - I can see me copying this method one day! keep going!

Looking good mate

Looks great! Such an attractive aircraft!

I can hear the DJ now- "That last track was 'Negative Love's' latest hit single 'Ignore Me'. It's from their chart-topping album 'Bandsaw'. Of course the only problem with all of this is that no DJ has actually said anything along those lines for at least the last 25 years! '

'Negative Love' - wish I was a musician. I'd start a rock band just to give it that name!

This looks great and is coming along very quickly. Was thinking about the glazing; another possible approach would be to telescope a clear tube into the inside of the existing fuselage shell. Anyway, looks like you have it under control- am watching with great interest.