David H

Enough wet sanding will fix just about anything.....

Actually, i always thought the universe would say, "B-A-A-A-A-A!!" If only sheep could really go that fast....

I look forward to seeing how this turns out. Not having built it, i guess Airfix never gave you an option for a lowered nose? -d-

Well Lads, it appears the X-Scale Trident has finally dropped. Available for purchase on their website.

same thing, isn't it?

Yeah, i had questions about that sparrow beak...

I always wondered what the purpose of the tabs was; at first i thought it might be high speed roll trim; then after seeing pics of the Buccanneer i figured it was blown. Does it just boil down to increasing the degree of camber, which increased the downwards "lifting" force at low speeds?

Adam, how would you rate Tony Buttler's book on the Vulcan by Aerofax? Is the Craig Bulman book readily attainable?

Purely by accident as i was reading through one of my magazines on the Buccaneer, i learned that it's (Blown) horizontal tailplane had an identical feature; it went to trailing edge-up when the flaperons went down. Now, i know TSR-2 had a highly "blown" wing trailing edge but not sure if the tailplanes had BLC as well. Seems to have been a uniquely British phenomenon; haven't seen any equivalent American aircraft equipped with such a setup.

If my experience on the Super VC10 is any indication, it's super easy to go too dark with a panel line wash on a white surface, and kind of hard to work backwards to get a good contrast back....

It's as if engineers at BAC took a look at a B-58 Cockpit and said, "Chaps, i think we need to use a somewhat darker shade of grey..."

Very nice , clean construction you have got going there. Nice work!

would it be feasible to cut/ sand a shape that represents what the intake contours are supposed to look like, throw some milliput into the intake, push the "buck" into place, thereby shaping the Miliput to its final form, then extracting the buck and letting it harden up? just an idea...

The Revell 727-100 predates the Revell kit by a few years. Its jokingly regarded as the least terrible 727-100 kit out there, with the exception of the Authentic Airliners resin kit, which is by all reports excellent.

Hello everyone. Thanks again for tuning in. Since i have a body of photos to draw from, i'd like to move to the wings... or at least as far as i've gotten on them, so far. First, the good news: The Revell 727 wings are a bit easier to work with than the Revell 707 wings, and probably the Minicraft 727 wings. The bad news: The Airfix 727 wings are more user friendly. The issues with the Revell 727 wings can be summarized in 3 major areas: 1) The general fit of the wing parts. 2) The rivet-encrusted, undulating lunar landscape surfaces. 3) The fit of the assembled wings to the fuselage. Starting with the fit of the wings, Revell chose to mold the lower, inboard section of the wings as a separate piece, the remainder being incorporated into the upper wing half. This resulted in a couple of construction challenges: First, there's a prominent gap as well as a step at the outboard, butt end of the lower wing, and i inserted plastic strip as well as a healthy amount of black CA to address this. second, there's a cross-sectional mismatch in thickness between the butt end of the wing and the fuselage-wing fillet. I rectified this by inserting lengths of .010 strip and thickening the wing at the leading edge to address this. (i did not take a close up photo of the shims inserted, but you can see where they're located from these photos of the leading edge near the fuselage) Finally, when you cut off the locating tongues, you discover that the upper and lower butt ends of the wings do not come together on the same plane, nor on parallel planes. The upper and lower butt ends come together slightly diagonally which means you have fit issues on both the upper and lower wings where they meet the fuselage. To rectify this, after i cut the mating tongue free, i block sanded the butt end of the wing, in an effort to make the two mating surfaces at least a little bit more square and parallel, occasionally checking the fuselage fit to ensure the proper wing dihedral was maintained, more or less. Next i carefully marked, located and drilled holes in the wing and fuselage, forward of the slot in the fuselage to take an alignment post/pseudo wing spar. Mounting this at the forward end reduces the number of degrees of freedom somewhat and allows me to better align the wing at the proper angle of incidence as well as line up the upper wing skin as closely as possible to the upper part of the fuselage fillet. There is some mismatch on the lower surfaces but i'll elaborate on that in a later installment. You just need to be super accurate with drilling out those holes; a little bit of looseness/ slop will allow you to tweak the accuracy of the post hole location if you need to *really* dial things in. Once i was satisfied that i could set the angle of incidence and dihedral properly, i did my time-honoured technique of laying bare metal foil on the wing fairing mating surface and i carefully glued the wing onto the foil. I could have used a mix of Zap A Gap and Dental resin, but this time around i really wanted to put Starbond CA to the test to evaluate its gap filling capabilities. In short, it flows well and it's gap filling characteristics are....okay. It required a couple iterations of filler before i felt comfortable with removing the wings. (For those of you wondering what i'm talking about, i expand on this in my Boeing 720B build thread as well as in my Postgraduate Masters thesis on building the Roden VC10.) With the wings now removed, it was just a matter of using sanding sticks to remove the excess CA fromthe wing uppers, lowers and leading edge, periodically checking to ensure the mating edge of the wings were not rounded off, of "chamfered" in the evolution. With the wing root gaps and fit issues more or less mitigated, it was time to carry out unrestricted warfare on the wing surfaces. The problem is two-fold: first there are the rather obvious boilerplate rivets. Secondly, Revell's choice to mold the upper wing pieces as a single, monolithic part leads to some rather dramatic sink marks and low spots on the outer wing surfaces. I took sanding sticks to the black hills of South Dakota, and i was able to level out *most* of the undulations on the surfaces. two benefits of this ordeal were of course, the rivets were eradicated and secondly the wing trailing edges were thinned down considerably. Before i continue to throw rocks from the cheap seats, its worth pointing out that the silver-grey Revell/Monogram plastic is truly wonderful stuff. It's not too hard and not too soft. It sands out beautifully; it can be polished to a glass like surface and all the eradicated panel lines and rivets remain visible, enabling the modeler to restore surface detail by scribing with a high degree of guidance and accuracy. To wrap up this installment, i decided to do something about the rather blunt wingtip trailing edges. The first time i did this was on my VC10, using Evergreen bar stock. It worked well enough but the plastic was relatively soft and got brittle when sanded to a thin cross section. This time i wanted something with more similar working characteristic as the kit plastic, so i sectioned a piece from the "Revelling" stand and inserted it as a solid "billet" in the wing trailing edge. I filled around the joint with black CA and filed and sanded it down to final shape. I'm afraid that's all i have for you today, but when i return i might have some better ideas about fixing the nose. If not, i will go into adding the wingtip navigation lights and address the subject of leading edge wing fences. So, until next time , thanks for stopping by to read and view this disaster movie.