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Army_Air_Force

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  1. Army_Air_Force
    It was early October 2016 when we got back to the diorama, having being distracted by the "My Little Pony" railway for pretty much all of the Summer. Most of the construction work on the tanker was done, just leaving the painting before final assembly. While my daughter was working on the tanker, I was painting one of the converted ponies for the railroad. First coat of green applied.
  2. Army_Air_Force
    In early July, the Bedford chassis was mated with the axles and wheels. The original tank detail was sanded off, the area filled and the main body of the tank sanded, while I turned a new dome for the top on my lathe. It was all placed together to see how it was looking. Progress was slow over the Summer as we were heavily involved with building the "My Little Pony" railway.
  3. Army_Air_Force
    Not Middleton St George. That another 40 miles South of RAF Usworth.
  4. Army_Air_Force
    I forgot I did this time lapse of the lowering of the Vulcan back to the ground. The video also shows the tail damage and some cockpit shots.
  5. Army_Air_Force
    Here's the museum Canberra, photographed the same day the Vulcan tipped.
  6. Army_Air_Force
    Yes, it was what was the North East Aircraft Museum, now the North East Land Sea and Air Museum, next to the Nissan Car Factory which was built on what was RAF Usworth. It was January 2010, a particularly bad winter, and the museum staff couldn't safely keep up with the snow fall. Here's a more recent picture of XL319, part way through a repaint.
  7. Army_Air_Force
    While the springs were drying on the chassis, we assembled the wheels, and glued them to the axles. The tanker starting to take shape.
  8. Army_Air_Force
    Looking at all these builds reminded me of so many models I built as a kid in the 1970's and 80's, but completely forgot about in the years following!
  9. Army_Air_Force
    So, back to the tanker, starting with the chassis. I placed and held the pieces in position while my daughter did the gluing. I'm sure many adults have found that grown up fingers aren't the correct size to work in 1/76 scale, so perhaps she should have done the positioning and I should have applied the glue! The tank went together next after some internal filling, to allow the top detail to be sanded off. This is because the kit is a copy of a post war tanker with booms for the refuelling hoses. The wartime tanker wasn't like this, so we were going to do a little modifying.
  10. Army_Air_Force
    We move on to the June half term holiday and we got a bit more work done to the diorama. We started by painting the concrete dispersal. The grey was a little thin, so it took a couple of coats. It still needed some weathering to dirty it up a bit.
  11. Army_Air_Force
    They look good so far!
  12. Army_Air_Force
    Anyone fancy a go at this? Vulcan XL319, in 2010 with snow overload. Or the recovery 10 days later.....
  13. Army_Air_Force
    The work done above was at the start of November 2015. There was another long pause in the project and a change of location, following the completion of the customer's model railway project. That cleared my workshop, which although is 23 x 12 feet, was somewhat taken over by two eight feet long sections of railway!!! So we finally got back to the diorama in mid May 2016. I gave the aircraft a sprayed matt coat over the decals and we got the canopy on. The frames were painted, masking a few at a time ( I did the masking ). There was still a few touch ups to do like the wheels where they were cut from the sprue and a little pink from the spinner that got on the prop. There was no further progress on the tanker. The Spit's gun ports should have been filled, but that escaped my attention. Modelling seems harder when you're not actually doing it, just telling someone else how to do it!!
  14. Army_Air_Force
    The engine installation page shows how tight it is in there!
  15. Army_Air_Force
    @BIG X I'd forgotten all about this until just now. The Sherman pics I sent you was the restored tank. It came from a firing range with one side blown out and lots of missing bits. From memory, Adrian spent 10 years searhing for parts and 5 years rebuilding it. I remembered on the Historic Military Vehicle Forum, that Adrian did a restoration thread covering lots of the work to bring the Sherman back to life. It may be useful. The thread can be found here - http://hmvf.co.uk/topic/7836-m4a4-restoration/
  16. Army_Air_Force
    With regards to servicing, a friend of mine has an M4A4 Sherman with the multi-bank engine ( five inline 6 cylinder blocks onto a common crank ). The multi-bank is much quieter than the radial powered version and also has more torque. It does drink the fuel though. It's five gallons of fuel to warm the engine through, then if he's careful, he can get 7/8 of a mile per gallon. If he has his foot down, then it's half a mile per gallon!! Anyway, servicing, the multi-bank engine as I said, has five inline 6's with their own carb, dizzy, etc. So that's five carbs to adjust, five sets of points to adjust, five condensors, five ignition harnesses to go wrong, and 30 plugs to clean and gap check. That's where the problem arises, as he said you can't get to the plugs in the bottom two banks of cylinders with the engine in the tank! Now one of the reasons stuff hangs on the outside is there's not much space inside! I seem to recall him saying the M4A4 had 96 main gun rounds, plus machine gun ammo and crew. Even the driver has a bunch of shells just over his left shoulder. It's cozy, and everywhere you turn, there's something to split your head open!!
  17. Army_Air_Force
    Painting the inside of the cab. We'd done about an hour and a bit, and I could see that was about enough concentration in one go, so left the painted parts to dry, and before we stopped, got the Spitfire landing gear attached. The legs were left to dry with the model inverted for a while, before being turned over and supported on some small blocks of balsa for a quick picture, before being turned back over for the glue to completely evaporate and the joints to harden.
  18. Army_Air_Force
    Here's a selection of old Airfix kits, all combined into one diorama. All from the 1/72 & 1/76 ranges - Douglas A-26B Invader, GMC CCKW 353, Willys Jeep & Trailer, Queen Mary Trailer ( x 2 ), Thorneycroft/Coles Crane. In addition to chopping and changing the A-26, both Queen Mary trailers were significantly reworked to correct the bodge up Airfix did on their research. They somehow created a hybrid trailer from the 3 and 5 ton designs. Mine were reworked into proper 3 ton and 5 ton versions, with lots of scratch building of the lattice structure from microstrip. The crane jib was also corrected as that was too long for the screw jack operated version. The whole diorama was based on a wartime picture I saw of either an A-26 or B-25 wing on a cradle in the back of a Queen Mary.
  19. Army_Air_Force
    The 1970's Series 2 Airfix Mosquito.
  20. Army_Air_Force
    Airfix's dH.88 Comet, from a very worn mould, so lots of flash and sink marks to deal with.
  21. Army_Air_Force
    Happy with the progress so far! The glue joint on the wheels was still hardening, so we moved on to the small Bedford fuel bowser kit. There were two bowsers in the kit, the Bedford and AEC Matador. We separated the small bowser parts and left the Matador in a plastic bag, to use in a future diorama. So we started off painting the tyres.
  22. Army_Air_Force
    The aerial base is 15 inches tall. Comparing the ring diameter to the aerial base height, this would make the ring about 2.5mm diameter at 1/72.
  23. Army_Air_Force
    There was another long pause in the project until the beginning of November 2015. Wifey was away again for the weekend, I think with her Girl Guide unit, so it was just me and little legs for two days. So after some episodes of Danger Mouse to start the day, we got all the stuff out on the dining room table and carried on from where we left off. We'd painted the wheels, legs and exhausts on the sprue, so these were ready to be cut sanded and attached. She's now generally safe to be let loose with a scalpel, 'though she knows she's only allowed to touch one when I'm there to supervise. So the wheels were cut, and the cuts sanded smooth, followed by the legs and exhausts. I did a little scraping of paint where the gluing contact area was to be. The wheels were glued to the legs and left to dry a little while. In the mean time, we attached the exhausts.
  24. Army_Air_Force
    With the serial on, and over an hour passed, it was time for a couple of quick photos before we had to clear away. The wind even gave us a gust for the prop! Other than perhaps the canopy, that was the Spit done for the time being. We left the landing gear and other fragile parts off until nearer the final assembly of the diorama. With the school summer holidays only a week and a half away, we hoped to make more progress.
  25. Army_Air_Force
    At first, the alignment of the red dot needed some assistance from me, but by the later ones, she was getting quite good at centering them. Just the serial to go.
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