Graham In Oz

Aww, you'll have me blushing! Thanks for the kind remarks. I guess one thing I'm not short of is perseverance - a legacy of many years of software development For a supposedly 'simple' build it threw up some surprises. Oh well, all part of the relearning. I've never used Alclad myself, though many people swear by them. The AK metals are supposed to give almost identical results, but are a lot more user-friendly - at least that's what the various YouTube videos I watched on the topic claim. I think my problems with them were probably down to overthinking it, and applying too many layers. I tried a quick spray on a half-built Harrier to try out different paints before committing to the TriStar, and those came out really perfectly - but I didn't endlessly fiddle with it. Lesson there I think. On the other hand, I'm quite pleased with the engines in the end - of all the natural metal on the model, they look the most realistic. The intake lips are a bit thick, but thinning them down and shaping them was difficult due to the internals of the engine being in place. If there was a way to fit the core and fan of the engine after closing the nacelle halves, It would have been much easier to have at it with a file, etc. If I were the kit manufacturer, I'd have gone for a moulding where the intake ring was a single piece that fitted to the rest of the engine. Overall I think the Eastern kit isn't bad, if you can manage the lack of locating pins and so forth. Detailing is very good overall, though perhaps the panel lines could be subtler. I'm not quite at the level for filling the lot and redoing them from scratch. The front undercarriage leg is rather chunky and not very true to the real thing, and the main wheel bogies are also on the crude side - but there was enough material to rework them somewhat to suggest brakes and other details, plus the PE hydraulic lines and compression linkage add a lot of realism. To be honest at this scale it's a moot point - you need a magnifying glass to see anything. I think I'll do the Britannia next. Strictly OOB this time. It may have to wait for warmer weather though. In the meantime, I'm going to be working on the wife to buy a display case for the loungeroom, otherwise I literally have nowhere to put any of the finished models anyway! The other thing about this build was that it has greatly expanded my toolkit and materials - I should be set up to build anything a lot more quickly next time. Thanks to everyone for your very kind feedback and encouragement, it has really helped me push on when things looked like they were not worth the trouble.

Thanks, I'll give it a go.

OK, I'm calling it finished. To be honest it's not as good as I really hoped - I guess my talent is not really in line with my ambition just yet. There are lots of little things that make it less than 100%, and overall it's not quite up there with the models that inspired me from @Skodadriver and @phil1, but for my first one in 41 years, I'm trying to look on the bright side! I plan to do some proper photography in due course for RFI, but here's a quick few shots of the finished thing on the kitchen table taken on my phone, for those kind enough to have followed along with the build and encouraged me through one or two little problems. I still need to make a display stand, and the 'TriStar' decal on the port side got damaged, so I need to redo that (I have the spare from the old brittle sheet). There may need to be a few final tweaks to the weathering also - what I have so far may need toning down a tad, especially on the upper wing surfaces - need to live with it for a bit see what I think. Another admission is that the final detailing of all the little antennas, pitot tubes and so on defeated me. The PE parts were just too fiddly for my eyesight and patience, given that they were about 2mm long and ½ mm wide, and needed CA glue which quite frankly I absolutely loathe. Does anybody like working with that stuff? Is there an alternative? I may yet give it another go if I can find the patience! Thanks for looking!

Thanks for the compliment, but quite honestly I reckon a real expert would have recovered it without having to redo the paintjob almost from scratch!

Finally some progress! The new decals went on without any real problems, so I think I'm on the final straight now. From the disaster of this: To this: My plan was to stop there, and complete the decaling on the finished model - only the colour stripe really needed the wings and tailplane absent for careful application, but since I was set up for it and it was all going so well, I decided to continue with all of the fuselage decals. So I'm pretty happy with the results. Thanks again to Ray at 26 Decals for the replacement sheet - I can report that they were like night and day compared to the first sheet, and were flexible and obedient! If anyone else is contemplating building this livery, definitely make sure you get the modern sheet straight from the source, (STS44279 and NOT STS4499). This also uses the windows and cockpit from Authentic Airliners. There are still numerous small detail decals to add to this, but I'll save those for the final reveal, which shouldn't be too far off now! Thanks for looking.

Very quick update - new decals have arrived. They seem to be superior in every way to the first edition sheets, not only in terms of print quality and flexibility, but also in detail rendering. I'm going to attempt to use the colour stripe once again, though in the repainting of the fuselage I left a white stripe there that could be used to paint the colour stripe. One of the other things that's holding me up at the moment is the weather - it's winter here in Australia and I do my modelling in the garage, an unheated space. It's f-f-f-freezing! Anyone who thinks Australia doesn't get cold is quite wrong! (plus I'm at 1000m ASL on top of the range, so we're getting -5° nights ATM). But I should have an update in a day or so all being well.

Hi Rob, Well... I haven't posted since then because I don't want to be that guy who's always moaning about something or other! I'd rather wait until I have something positive... But since you ask, yes I'm waiting on the new decals sheet, but I had to rub back the paint all the way to the primer to remove the aborted attempt. Masking and respraying the whole thing takes quite a bit of time, especially with extended drying times and having to fit it all in around work and so on. On removing the masking tape I pulled away a small bit of paint where I hadn't rubbed it back quite enough, so that'll need sorting. So at the moment it's 2 steps forward, 1 back. Hopefully will have some progress soon. Really, there's very little left to do - just the undercarriage, final paint, decals and glue all the big bits together. Thinking about next projects - I have a Britannia and a Boeing 720 to do (both Roden) with 26 Decals' Monarch livery for both. Beyond that, not sure. If I'm going to be building models, I want to have some sort of coherent plan for era, scale, etc rather than just build randomly. The 'Luton '73' thing is one strand (hence the Monarch planes) but I also quite fancy doing some British military aircraft of the 50s and 60s. Also British airliners of the same era, so a VC10 would definitely be on the list at some point.

I had a lovely reply from Ray at 26, offering a FOC replacement sheet. Turns out that it has been reprinted by a different manufacturer more recently, and the set I have is the older one. It could have sat around in a store for 10 years, which maybe why it's so brittle. I still may repaint the colours, but I'll await the updated sheet and see whether it's more forgiving first. Ray also said that the white background is overprinted twice on the newer sheet and is definitely opaque! So things maybe don't look so bad - it's a new day Also, great customer service Ray!

I've also been very impressed with the community spirit here, and I'll definitely press on. Thanks for all your support! It may be a few days before I can face up to the reality of so many steps backward though. (And it's worse than it seems - after failing to remove the decals, I was forced to take the 3000 grit sponge to them which has removed large areas of the paint that was there. One thing I could not fault is the adhesion of the darn things! Effectively it means starting over with the fuselage painting.) I've sent a polite note to Ray at 26 - not so much casting aspersions as trying to find if there's a better way to handle them they'd recommend. Since I want to do a few more models with 26 decals, I'm hoping the problem is confined to this one set and not endemic to the printing process or my own technique (or lack of).

Decaling - a total disaster. OK, I'm going to call it as I find it. I know 26 Decals have an excellent reputation, and I'm effectively a beginner, but despite taking every care that a person reasonably could, these decals are not fit for purpose. They are, of necessity, large. And they must conform to a whole heap of compound curves. But they are so incredibly brittle that the slightest need to conform breaks them up. Long cracks appear at even the gentlest touch. I'm using Microset and Microsol to help apply and conform the decals, but these are not helping. There is literally zero flexibility in the substrate of the decals - they have no chance to stretch by even the slightest amount to conform. It's not as if I'm forcing them - I was extremely patient and took my time, waiting for the softener to take effect, and applying the gentlest of pressure using a cotton bud and a soft paint brush. Nope, cracks all the way. The brittleness is unlikely to be an issue with small decals, but these large ones are unusable. It makes me wonder if 26 ever actually checked these on a built up kit to see how usable they were - I can't believe they'd be happy to sell a product this troublesome to a modeller. The opacity is not sufficient to fully cover the paint line after all. That isn't a fault I'm laying at 26's door - I should have considered that. If this was the only issue, I could live with it. But they have other faults - the shape of the stripe at the nose end is wrong when compared to reference images, and the join between the tail decal and the rear fuselage decal has inconsistencies in the width of the white line either side of the colour, so they don't quite line up without a visible join. And the colour of the tail piece doesn't exactly match the fuselage pieces (they are printed on different sheets). So I'm going to have to paint the full colour scheme after all. It's a shame, because it was the discovery of the existence of these decals that led me to build the thing in the first place. That's if I can remove them without damaging the paint. Thoroughly demoralised at this point.

Wings: No real dramas here, just painting, masking, masking again and painting. The orange gloss ended up a bit orange-peeley but it rubbed back with no problems and I managed not to go all the way through to the underlying white layer (which I ended up spraying over the grey as it was too dark). Then it was time to finally assemble the flaps and build the secondary flaps. These proved to be quite tricky as I hadn't really thought about how I was going to fix them in until it was all assembled and painted. The final result looks good from the top but isn't quite true to life from below, since there's no opening where air flows around the secondary flap. In fact there's no real detail here and almost impossible to find reference images for it - almost all walkarounds of aircraft on the ground have the flaps fully raised. So there's scope for doing something in there but I'm not really sure what. For now that's the wings more or less finished other than a gloss coat, decals, and weathering. I haven't decided how far to go with weathering yet - these aircraft were brand new in Court service and the airline didn't last long enough to see them deteriorate much. Even the preshading might be a bit excessive. Next main job is decaling. Thanks for looking!

I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one! With so much praise for these paints I was expecting them to be foolproof, but so far not the case (at least for this fool). No, the tape was only on for a few minutes, over paint that had dried for 24 hours. Gum residue was present, but the effect on the paint was not just that, it seemed to cause it to 'bunch up' and become lumpy. It's hard to describe! Still, the polishing approach might be the way forward, when I come to paint those areas of the wings and tailplane that are natural polished aluminium. They should be easier since there's not the same necessity for masking.

Engines. Well, a frustrating day but came good in the end I think. I'm using AK Interactive's 'Xtreme Metal' paints for natural metal finishes. Everyone online praises these to the skies, noting in particular that masking tape can be applied over the finish and it won't pull it away. Well, that's not my experience. Not only does Tamiya tape (detacked on the back of my hand to reduce adhesion) pull the aluminium finish away, it reacts with it in a strange manner, causing the paint to appear to detach from the base coat. In fact the paint doesn't seem to want to properly adhere to the base coat, even though I'm using AK's own 'black base', supposedly intended for these finishes. I must be doing something wrong, but I don't know what. I left the base to dry for 24 hours and the aluminium to dry also for 24 hours, so they should be 100% dry. Maybe that's wrong, and it's better to overspray it when the base is only touch dry, so that there's more adhesion between layers. The other factor could be that where I'm spraying is quite cold - probably less than 15°C. Grasping at straws - I really don't know what's happening. Anyway, after a few goes at it, removing the masking tape produced this sort of result, which I was unhappy with: This shows the weird effect I'm getting. The front part of the cowl was perfectly smooth, but then masked to paint the middle part with a slightly different tone. After removing the tape, the front part ends up with this horrible finish that's sort of 'lumpy'. The middle part, being just sprayed, is perfect. But to respray the front and rear parts, the middle part has to be masked, so then the crappy finish ends up there. If anyone can put their finger on what the issue is here, I'd be grateful for your advice. I did remask and respray the front and rear parts of the cowl, and sure enough the middle part ended up 'lumpy'. Not only that but the resprayed areas ended up all bloomed and not smooth and shiny at all, despite reprepping it by rubbing back to the base coat with 3000 grit. This is when I was ready to scream, and in frustration, and figuring I had nothing to lose, I decided to attempt to polish the paint lightly using a cotton pad on my Dremel. To my surprise this converted the nasty paint job into a truly realistic looking natural metal finish, even though it was starting to allow the black base to just begin to show through. (The photos once again probably don't do the effect justice). I decided at that point to repeat the process on the other engine and call them done (other than the RR decals). The final result is, by a fluke, as good as I could have hoped. While I'm happy enough as it turns out, I would have preferred to have got there on purpose rather than by accident! So if anyone has any tips regarding painting metal finishes, I'm love to hear 'em. Thanks for looking!

Update: Wings and Engines. While I'm waiting for gloss clearcoat to arrive, I've put together the engines and solved the issue of the leading edge slats. I kept the amount of modification to the kit wings down to a minimum and the results are not too bad, though not perfect. I think once fully assembled and painted they'll look pretty good though. I removed just enough material from the upper leading edge surface to suggest a recessed area without going right through the plastic. I then sawed a series of slots to take the vertical elements of the slats. It's hard to be sure if these are really in the right places - that's where the kit had scribed lines, but some reference images suggest there may be more. Still, that's what I went with. After that, I scratched up the slats themselves in the manner outlined in the earlier post using a piece of thin flat and a half-round strip. In the end I didn't need the EPO and the resulting recess formed a very natural place to attach them to the wings. With some crafty painting, these should look pretty realistic. The slat is a bit wide towards the wingtip, but by the time I realised this it was a bit too late to fix. I've made a start on the painting with priming and a bit of preshading, though I think to get the colour density sufficient, the preshading will end up disappearing - I should have gone with a white base coat instead of grey. So much for that. I also built up the engines. The only tricky aspect to these were the fact that the main fan is replaced by a PE part which was a bit fiddly, but not too bad. The spinner from the kit part is sawn off and attached to the PE to make the complete fan. The worst thing about it was that it was slightly too large a diameter, so the nacelle halves didn't want to close. I ended up scraping a recess around the inside edge of each half to take the fan, but the plastic being so thin I could only do it up to a point. Forcing the halves to close slightly concaved the fan, as well as forcing it to sit at a slightly unrealistic angle within the engine. Hopefully neither of these things will be noticeable, but it was a small point of irritation - why couldn't they have made the PE fan to actually fit? Having got the nacelles to close, some EPO was needed to fix up a small dent in the front casing where the halves met (normal putty wouldn't stick in such a small area). After filing and sanding these back to shape, it was on to painting. Should have these finished tomorrow... Thanks for looking!

Hah, well I guess under the circumstances your feelings about the plane are understandable. Personally, I've never flown on one, though probably have been on nearly every other type since its time and some from before, like the DC-8, 1-11 and Trident. As a pimply schoolboy it was the fab colours that inspired me! Court went bust in '74 at much the same time as Nixon bit the dust - my memories of the two events are linked, along with the ominous 'News At Ten' signature tune and Gordon Honeycombe's grave tidings. Those colours graced the skies over Hertfordshire for a scant 18 months. The TriStar always looked 'right' though, in a way that the DC-10 just didn't, somehow. Apologies to DC-10 fans out there. Learning more about the aircraft as part of this build hasn't made me change my opinion on that score - it's a pity it wasn't the commercial success it deserved to be. Eastern also do a TriStar 500 if you wanted to model the RAF version. While the engineering of the kits are a bit on the crude side, the overall moulding quality and detailing is pretty good. You can find them on eBay and they are much cheaper than an old stock Airfix version. D'oh! Now you point it out, putting the demarcation right on the line makes total sense - why didn't I think of that? Now I'm at the mercy of the decal's opacity (unless I repaint, which I'm somewhat disinclined to do). I will also use the photocopy idea, it may turn out that the line isn't right at the nose end, where the decal tapers to a point (or should do - actually the 26 Decals sheet has a small error in this area and doesn't come to a point. Decided to live with that.) I've had to put the decal application on short hold however, because I was trying to get hold of some Future to apply a clear coat. My efforts in that area have failed (some friends were tasked to bring some back from the US but forgot), and Amazon Australia have it listed at $212 a bottle!!!!! What is it made from, gold leaf wrapped in rocking horse poo? So plan B is to use Humbrol gloss clear, but it'll take a week to come. So in the meantime it's back to the wings... By the way, thanks everyone for all your kind comments and encouragement - it's nice to get off to such a welcome (re)start. As for next projects, I may do a few more 'Luton 73' era airliners - I have a Monarch Britannia and 720 waiting in the wings, but these will be OOB compared to this one.

Ah, that's something I hadn't considered. They are the 26 Decals set, I believe they are screen printed. (http://www.26decals.com/epages/62035508.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/Shops/62035508/Products/STS44279) Perhaps @phil1 could comment on their opacity? I'd hate to discover a problem after it's too late, and it's a tricky thing to try out without a spare!

Thanks Phil! As you know yours was a big inspiration, and your early advice was very significant in getting this off the ground. Still a fair way to go, and I'm not posting all the silly little mistakes I'm making (like rubbing through the paint just now, requiring another full mask-up to repair it - sigh.) Your comments regarding the brittleness of the decals is also giving me sleepless nights! All that joy to come...

Update: Not been able to make as much progress as I'd like ideally over the last few weeks, but managed to get back to it today. The main work has been to get the fuselage to the point where it can get its main paint ready for decals, because these are pretty tricky and need to go on before the wings and tailplane are attached.Probably more experienced modellers could handle it with wings in situ, but I've decided I can't, so the build is a bit out of order. There are quite a few PE details on the fuselage, including the very fiddly NACA ducts which require the moulded representations to be removed entirely, and the fuselage to be cut into to accept the PE part. These then need filling and sanding on a very minute scale, so that part was very time consuming.There are also numerous pads and bases for antennae and the pitot tubes, though these will be fitted as a final step so I don't knock them off when working on the paint job. This shows the NACA ducts and numerous other PE details like the louvres, forward nosewheel doors, cargo door and various antennae bases. A base coat of gloss white over grey primer was applied and rubbed back with 3000 grit ready for the main paint. Getting really good colour references for the Court livery is pretty hard. No doubt somewhere, someone has drawings with the paint codes, but I don't, so I've had to go by what photographic references I can find and my own memory. Obviously this is notoriously unreliable (both), but one thing I do feel fairly certain about is that the main upper yellow colour is not that strong - more custardy than lemony. The Gemini Jets diecast has this utterly wrong. To try and get a grip on it, I grabbed a bunch of colour cards from my local hardware store and tried to find one that seemed right when put alongside the decals. This is what I settled on: The lower orange colour was easier, and I used a Dulux 'duramax' off-the-shelf colour for that. The upper yellow was mixed from Tamiya gloss yellow and white standard colours (X-2 and X-8), adding white to the yellow until it matched the colour card. The paint ended up looking incredibly pale with remarkably little yellow in it, and I was almost tempted to go yellower, but in the end I stuck with it and the final colour looks really authentic. It looks yellower in the photos that it does in daylight. Then it was on with the orange. Bear in mind that the decals cover the line between the yellow and orange with a third colour, so the line is positioned so it should end up covered entirely. Only the white stripe along the belly is a masked and painted feature. I was also keen to try out the use of the AK Interactive 'XTreme Metal' paints that I bought to do the various natural metal areas, so I also masked up the rear engine, moving tailplane area and air intake and sprayed these. They look pretty good The intake is Polished Aluminium, the engine is Aluminium for the main part and Pale Burnt Metal for the inner part (not clearly visible here). The tailplane area is Steel, but is mostly hidden by a cover plate that will have bright Aluminium edges when it's placed. Using the darker Steel is to try and give this area the illusion of depth. Hummm... Anyway, overall I was pretty impressed with these paints. I think the lighting here is really exaggerating the panel lines - in the flesh they don't look anything like as prominent. At least I hope so... So that's about it so far. I also made a start on the engines, but I'll put those in another update later in the week. I also decided I'm definitely going to make up some leading edge droops, so I made a start by modifying the wings to take them. More on that later also.

Interesting thought Matt... I think making the slat isn't too hard - I tried out a combination of a half-round styrene strip with a thin piece of flat attached to the round side, the underside filled with EPO putty. It was easy to sand to the right shape (diagram below shows the general idea), but I made them the wrong size (a bit big), but the method seemed sound. The harder part may be attaching to the wing convincingly. As you suggest, recessing the existing slat is what's needed, but the plastic is so thin right there. In hindsight I should have filled the leading edges with EPO so there's no worry about going through, but it's too late now. Deepening certain panel lines and using a darker shade of paint for the exposed area under the slat might be good enough to produce an adequate illusion at this scale - need to experiment.

Update. I turned my attention to the vexatious issue of the missing S-duct. The Eastern kit doesn't have the No. 2 engine S-duct (the Tristar 500 model does apparently, but not this one). So the question is how to make one. It doesn't have to be all that accurate, as honestly it's an internal detail that very few will notice. But I prefer it to be there rather than just a gaping hole or a blanking piece. In thinking of various solutions, I came across the fact that a ½" copper pipe joining piece has almost exactly the right diameter. The internal diameter is slightly small, but the outside diameter is larger than the opening. So some filing to flare one side to a slightly bell-shaped curve matches the air intake perfectly. Then I made a round sausage from modelling clay to fit the aperture, and bent it into the S-duct shape: I decided to form the tube by using a thin layer of polyester resin of the type used for fibreglassing. Ideally this would use fibreglass 'tissue' as a matrix but I was unable to source any locally, so I found some nylon ribbon in my daughter's dress-up box that would do the job: The ribbon was sliced lengthways and CA'd to the copper tubing. I put the whole jig in the fridge for ½ hr to get very cold to harden the plasticine so it was a lot stiffer for wrapping. Vaseline was used for a release agent, though this turned out to somewhat dissolve the surface of the plasticine and ended up being more or less useless. I then wrapped and resined the form. After an hour or two it had set totally hard and the clay could be pushed and pulled out. Then the inside surface was cleaned down using thinners to remove any plasticine residue and sprayed with primer. The outside surface is rough but the inside is quite smooth. The whole thing was then CA'd into place within the fuselage half. The final duct ended up not quite in alignment with the engine fan, so I just cut the end a bit shorter and went with it. You can just see the fan through the air intake, but it's really dark inside there and not worth any further trouble. I painted the inside of the duct matt black so it really is just a 'black hole' that seemingly leads nowhere. From the outside, it looks absolutely fine. Another issue with the tail section is that the flange area around the pivot point for the all-moving tailplanes is incorrectly moulded on the kit. In any case, I have a PE part for the 'cover plate' that moves with the tailplane. I also want to position these in the up elevator position, because I'm depicting the jet in landing configuration. So all-in-all, this region needs some modding. The kit moulding was removed, and the tailplane slot tabs slimmed down to slot into the PE part. The openings in the fuselage were modified to allow the tabs to slot in in the up elevator position, and the position of the cover plate was used in the up position and normal straight position to determine where the true edges of the moving tailplane flange should be, while referring to suitable photographs of this area of the plane. This image shows the modified flange area on the left and the original one on the right: One of my reference images: When combined with the PE part and painted appropriately, this should be a lot closer to the real thing. Here's the tailplane dry-fitted in the 'up' position showing the PE flange cover and masking tape used to mark the edges of the flange prior to scribing new panel lines around it. Finally, the two rear fuselage halves were joined and the seams levelled and filled, ready to mount to the main fuselage.

I would absolutely love to see the stages in this thread, but (for me) all of the images appear as broken links. How sad! Any chance of fixing it? (If you need somewhere to host them that won't vanish overnight, I have an Amazon S3 account and would be happy to host them).

Progress update. Started work on the fuselage. Because of the fairly poor engineering of the kit, I decided to add some plasticard strips to help align and reinforce the joint. I also added a vertical tube with a neodymium magnet CA'd into the bottom. The idea is so that when the model is finished, I can make up a matching magnetic stand that will display the model in a flight attitude but without any slot or hole for the stand being needed. Neat idea, huh? We'll see if it works. So the fuselage halves were glued together and the plasticard worked quite well - I was able to get the seams more or less aligned without a great deal of trouble. I added some lead weights to the cockpit area so it'll sit on its wheels, and filled all the seams. I forgot to take photos during all that work, so here's the fuselage after fitting the windscreen and main wheel doors, levelling all the seams and adding filler where needed and sanding it all back smooth, and rescribing panel lines. I also started to add some of the PE details to the fuselage, like the ventilation louvre above. This involved cutting out a rectangular hole in the fuselage as the PE part is actually a small box section. The first one was a little rough, hence the copious filler. The other two went better. This shows the second louvre fitted, but before filler was added around it. There are also 3 NACA ducts in PE to fit, hence the rough scraped area. I added one of these - fiddly beyond belief. I'll add the other two another day. I also made further progress on the wings. Though the kit engineering is crude in places, some parts are very finely moulded - the wings being a case in point. The plastic is super thin, and with all my cutting to modify the flaps, I was concerned that they wouldn't have much stiffness and would tend to warp. So, just in case, I glued in some small brass tube "spars" on the inside of the upper half of the wings with CA glue to make sure they stayed completely straight. This may have been an unfounded concern, but it was only a small extra step. Then the wing halves were joined and the exposed rear of the flap wells were patched up with a thin piece of plasticard. Since the PE parts include a lot of details for the main wheel wells that I won't be using, I decided to repurpose them to add some bogus details to the back edge of the flap wells. While these will be almost impossible to see when it's finished, if anyone does take a peek in there at least there's something other than a flat surface. The brass "spar" can just be seen inside the engine pylon slot. With the flaps dry fitted and some plasticard secondary flaps inserted, the eventual look of the wing can start to be seen: The sharp-eyed obsessives among you will notice there's no central flap track "spur" yet fitted. So voilà, here they are: These will need a bit of filler and shaping once the very fragile joins have fully cured. So that's about it for this week. Thanks for looking!

You are absolutely right - the leading edges should be extended in this configuration. The question is how to actually model it. If I can find some plastruct bits that can go together (with some filler) to get the shape and simply add them 'on top', I'll do that, but if it means cutting out the slats from the kit, I'm reluctant due to the structural integrity problem, and I may decide it's just too hard. Here's one of my reference images, which shows the overall appearance I'm going for:

Hi, new member here. The Story (feel free to skip) I am getting back into modelling after a brief suspension of, oh, about 41 years. I'm pretty sure the last model I built was in 1977 - I can't remember doing any in 1978 - that would have been an 1/72nd A6E Intruder... Back then I was in my teens, and a prolific if not exactly pro standard modeller. I'd model anything and everything, mixing all eras, scales, nearly always OOB, and they'd all end up festooning my bedroom ceiling gathering dust. After leaving home my parents reclaimed my room and unceremoniously dumped the lot; I don't think any survive. I started the hobby back in 1973, inspired by the jets I saw streaming out over our newly moved-to house in Hemel Hempstead. These were the Comets, Boeing 720s, 737s, Britannias, BAC 1-11s, and the best of the lot - the Court Line L-1011 TriStar that was brand new to Court and the UK that year. These colourful jets really made an impression on me, with that characteristic RB211 growl still at under 2000ft as they took off out of Luton over our house and school. Me and a friend would cycle up to Luton and gawp at the jets taxiing past the chainlink fence that marked the 'spectator area' in those days. I loved the Court liveries, they seemed so exciting and modern back then, and the TriStars were especially awesome. My planespotting friend and I vowed to become pilots. He did, I didn't - he now flies for EasyJet from Luton. I just write software. Anyway those planes inspired me in other ways, and one of the very first models I built was the Airfix TriStar. Of course it had to be in Court markings, not whatever the kit came with back in those days (maybe Air Canada?). I had no idea. There were no aftermarket decals available, and even if there were I wouldn't have known about them. I hand-painted the lot (with brushes) using approximations to the colours from the Humbrol range. The result was over garish, with horrible hand-painted cheat lines (not even masked). Gloss paint onto bare plastic, dust and fingerprints everywhere, seams unfilled. Yup, the typical rushed effort of a 11-year-old with no skills or patience. Still, I was happy enough with it. I did improve over the years, and the Intruder I built as my last effort to date was done pretty well I think (I owned the extremely crappy Humbrol hobby airbrush by then, powered by canned air). In thinking of restarting the hobby, I decided to see what was around on this internet resource thingy we have today, and discovered there are now aftermarket decals for the Court Line liveries. I also discovered this site, thanks to the inspirational efforts of others who have also 'done' the Court Tristars. In the intervening years I've forgotten a lot of the skills I'd gradually acquired, for what they were ever worth. But also, there are lots of new products and support for the hobby that I wasn't aware of back then. And of course there are a million YouTube videos to help learn how others do it - back in the day I rarely met other modellers, and I was usually ahead of where they were at (which nevertheless isn't saying much). The Model OK, so I have my subject. Initially, my first thought was simply to retread my steps and do the Airfix L-1011. I ordered one, but in the meantime thanks to this site and others I discovered that the Airfix version is not considered very accurate, and so I was advised (thanks Phil and Skodadriver) that the Eastern Express kit might be a better starting point. Once it arrived I compared the two and I can see that the Airfix one does have numerous shortcomings, so it was sound advice. The Eastern moulding also has excellent fine surface detail, though the overall quality of the parts fit and engineering is crude compared to Airfix. Still, I'll manage. I want to bring myself up to speed with the more realistic modelling that is in vogue these days (may have been back then, but I tended to build to a relatively pristine, unweathered finish), use a proper airbrush, photo-etch add-ons, extra detailing and scratching where needed to build something a bit more interesting. But also, since I'm so rusty, an airliner is a relatively simple build that shouldn't end up going unfinished due to overextending myself. But having said that, I decided to build it as if on short finals, with all the flaps hanging out, as that was often how I saw the plane in real life (or else shortly after take off). There's enough work in cutting out the flaps and building up additional details in the flaps mechanisms and undercarriage to make this a pretty good challenge. I'll also be using the Authentic Airliners decals for the windows, 26 Decals for the livery, and the Metallic Details PE kit. So I've made a start by tackling the most difficult bit (I think) first - the flaps. I carefully cut the flaps from the kit wings and used them with added styrene to build up the deployed flap shape. I then added the track fairings to the ends and shaped them. Using piano wire I made up the tracks/mountings. These will be hidden with some further styrene work and an added second upper flap (still to make), and some detailing on the exposed wing internals. At this stage I'm in two minds about the leading edges. I would like to set them deployed, but I'm not sure how to do it. Cutting out the leading edges of the wings would leave them with no material to join the upper and lower halves very well, so I'd prefer to simply add something over the top of the existing parts. Or I may end up deciding it's not worth the trouble. If anyone's actually interested in this build, I'm very keen to hear all possible advice and criticism - I want to do the best I can, but after so long there are probably good ways to do things that an experienced modeller can point out that I wouldn't be aware of. So please don't hold back if you see me doing something stupid, or think there's a better way to accomplish something. I'm hoping the build will take 6-8 weeks, work and other things permitting, but knowing me it'll probably overrun the estimate.

Wow, this is superb - nice job! Isn't this the Lightning Clarkson had delivered to his front lawn in one episode of Top Gear? I also recall it was the same one that was parked just inside the main gate at Booker for a few years in the late 90s - I did my PPL there at that time and we had a good crawl over it one day. It wasn't in great shape at that time, and seemed to be headed for being turned into spares to help other restoration projects. Not sure what happened to it after that. Edit: seems it's in good hands after all: http://www.thunder-and-lightnings.co.uk/lightning/survivor.php?id=31 (and it was Speed, not Top Gear).