kiseca

So there are! I didn't realise there were two. I have the bison one, and wish I had the swordfish one

That looks really good. I'm very interested in this build because I've got Hasegawa's yellow Draken in the stash, and I assume it's the same basic kit so I'll be popping over to Scalemates to check that and then on to your WIP thread to find out more. The end result looks lovely! Nice work.

Yes it is! Frustrating but solvable. I've since seen other bits and pieces that need sorting out too, like some flashing that needs tidying up around the cockpit rim, and a few edges where the white paint hasn't settled, so overall it should work out better in the end. Funny how I only notice those things when I'm looking at the photos. Also, I can't understand how I was looking right at the damn thing and didn't notice some yellow masking tape stuck on top of the grey surface when I got on with painting it! I must have been in zombie mode.

I'm with both of you there! I tried Wuthering Heights - because I really liked the song! Kate Bush's hit gave me an interest in the characters at the heart of the book so I thought I'd give it a try. I made it through maybe three chapters before giving up. And then I fell into the same trap again. After watching, and really enjoying, the spectacular movie flop that was John Carter, and then learning that, because it had been such a flop, the sequels are never likely to show up. So if I wanted to know what happened I'd have to read the books. There are 11 of them. I got a bit further this time, I was halfway through book 3 before I abandoned it. That was many years ago so there'd be no point picking up where I left off now, I won't remember any of it. I actually did quite enjoy the first book (A Princess of Mars) and made it through the second, but by the time I got to the third, the style of writing and the constant battles against never ending adversaries had worn me down and I left John Carter to his fate. No other classic book has fared better than those ones in my reading history, and Shakespeare was the worst of them all. Way too much like hard work.

I read that one some years ago, and yeah, I remember it being tough to read in places. Not because it isn't well written, but as you say, it's quite a sobering read. I was prepared for that, because some years before that I'd read an account from an infantryman who was, as a POW, present in Dresden during the infamous bombing operation that destroyed much of the city. His point of view was the first I had read which questioned (in this case directly attacked) the ethics of area bombing cities. Looking back through my reading history, I'd assume the book I'm thinking of is Rifleman, by Victor Gregg. I don't remember anything else about the book other than his first hand description of the Dresden bombing which has stuck with me ever since. I remember, when I read Bomber Boys, thinking it was a well balanced representation of both sides of the moral vs military value argument.

The next assemblies in the instructions are the floor and the radiators, so I am working on them now. The floor is another challenge. The colour of the top surface is, according to Aoshima, silver under the tub and steel under the engine assembly... and the colour of the bottom surface simply isn't specified at all. However, the instructions indicate that the extra detail pack has decals that cover all of these surfaces - upper and lower. I don't have the extra detail pack, but I did find pictures of it - and from what I can make out, both surfaces are entirely either black, or a very, very dark grey. That sounds quite plausible for the underside at least, so I need to decide how to handle that. I might fall back on that Tamiya Dark Iron again. It seems a good compromise to me for when I need something that's not quite black. At least for the paints I have! This is a simple part to assemble with only 5 or 6 bits too add. There are the two surfaces on the leading edge of where the floor widens to hold the radiators (already attaches in picture below), then the pedals are a single unit that sits on this floor, not in the tub, there's a fire extinguisher bottle to go in front of that, and a weird box thing that goes on the right side and will be partially hidden under the intakes and airbox. The complexity with the floor assembly comes with the multiple colours involved. There's some body white, a bit of dark grey on the left hand side where there's a vent area, the silver section under the tub, the engine bay itself is a different colour, the edges in front of the radiators will have decals on them but I'll paint them white so they have the same undercoat as the rest of the decals... and then the underside is going to be matt black or dark grey or something. Lots of fun and masking coming up. Now I was just following the instructions in order, which means I'd do the upper bodywork and rear wing last.... but my experience with the body side panels showed that these take an awfully long time to prep, what with all the coats, varnishes, drying time, polishing, and so on, so I decided I'd best get a start on them too. The front wing assembled reasonably well. It needed a bit of finishing around the leading edge, where the top and bottom halves of the wing join, but it wasn't bad. That's all painted and I'm a lot happier with how smooth this came out compared to the side panels. This is just paint, no polishing or finishing involved. I'll put the decals straight on this finish and then varnish on top. And so on to the body. Here it is ready for primer. I painted the whole lot, inside and out, with Tamiya Fine Grey spray. In the manual, the inside looks a bit greyer than the outside. That doesn't make a lot of sense, since the actual car bodies weren't painted. The colour, both the white and the blue, were impregnated into the glassfibre resin at moment of manufacture, and only the pinstripes were added afterwards. So, logically, I thought, the body should be blue and white on the inside in the same pattern that it is on the outside. But maybe the inside isn't as well finished and that just makes it look greyer. Anyway, I put two coats of white on the inside, which leaves it looking a rather greyish white because the grey primer still shows through a bit. I think masked the underside and sprayed the top. Four coats on top is enough to cover the grey, and I must have been putting thick coats on because between this, the front wing and the two side panels I've gone through a whole can of Tamiya pure white. I was very happily surprised with the finish I got on the upper body when it was done. Very smooth and again, good enough IMO for the decals to go straight on. I'm starting to think the paint lays down more smoothly on curved surfaces than flat ones... the flat upper parts of the radiator pods for instance show a bit of orange peel. So I was really happy...... ....happy, at least, until I removed the masking tape. I'd been very careful when masking the other side - which I did quickly because I'd forgotten, and was ready to paint - not to wrap excess tape around and cover the surfaces on top that I wanted to paint. But, at some point, I must have subconsciously felt a loose end of tape, wrapped it around and secured it.... to the top surface.... and, well, I've done this: Stupid, stupid mistake. No way around it, I'll need to sand that down, mask the underside, properly this time, and repaint the whole thing. Hopefully I manage to get the finish as good as the first time around.

Well, I didn't exactly meet my Christmas target for an update, but happy new year, everyone! I usually work on two models at the same time, in this case I'm building a 1/72 Tornado alongside the Brabham. The Tornado build has seen a lot of drama, and I have to say the Brabham has been too, though while Revell's Tornado kit has been the source of some of the frustration, pretty much all of the Brabham's problems are of my own making. For starters, the side panels got their coat of gloss varnish, got a polish, got decals, more varnish, another polish, and some Tamiya wax on them. I generally struggle to get varnish, whether clear, satin or matt, to dry. I've tried a number of different options and I'm currently using Vallejo spray cans. With the cold, wet early December we were having, I didn't want to wait forever, so I stuck them in the airing cupboard for a few hours - something I've read a few times on Britmodeller - and they came out beautifully hard and dry. So that's what I'll do from now on. As mentioned above, the polishing didn't get to the smooth finish I wanted, there is too much orange peel, but it's something I'm learning to apply gently because my with my first attempts, on other models, my mistake was go too far and start removing paint. I'll keep practicing. The Parmalat decals are too low. My own fault. I misread the sheet and didn't realise the blue band at the bottom is also a decal, but these Aoshima decals are tough! They feel almost unbreakable (I did still manage to break one of the bands.... ) but they set fairly quickly and when they set, they are unmovable. I'm going to have to be really careful with the big decals on the top bodywork. With the body side panels done, I could assemble the tub. And here's where I created my second drama. The wheel hubs are press fit on to the suspension arms, but the tolerances are tight. The left side went on fine, and I was being careful with gentle pressure on the right side - or so I thought, but, struggling in particular with the last joint, and after lots of sanding and rubbing, my patience slipped, I pushed a little too hard and basically stuck my thumb through the whole suspension assembly, bending every single piece of assembly on the right hand side and snapping both arms of the the lower wishbone...... great. I had one job - avoid breaking fragile suspension bits, and I screwed it up. To rub salt in the wounds, I realised I'd left fingerprints on the now unremovable side body panels. I guess the Tamiya wax needs more time to harden too! I have no idea how I got fingerprints on it - I was wearing rubber gloves to avoid exactly that - but live and learn I guess. I got it all back together and it looks OK - the troublesome joint slipped into place so easily after that - but I was not in my happy place for quite a while that night The tub assembly is all done now at least, apart from a few decals that go on the nose, and one on the rollbar. Sorry, I do not know why this picture is sideways! The steering wheel rim got repainted, a mix of Tamiya matt black and Tamiya Dark Iron. I was hoping the slight metallic nature of the dark iron might approximate the suede texture of the original. I was happy with the outcome. Here is the tub dry fitted to the floor and drivetrain assembly. There's a lot of work to do on the floor before I can attach them all together for real. That aluminium coloured plate on top of the tub, just behind the suspension mounting points, was a surprising source of hardship. The Aoshima destructions say this part should be silver, which sounded a bit unlikely to me, but when I checked the Haynes manual for reference there is no plate there at all. It's just a big round hole. In fact there is a big round hole in the model too, which the plate covers too, so, possibly the part is optional, though it is not indicated as such, and the Haynes manual pictures of this area are all of a BT-52B, in the current day, so the plate could well have been deleted in the upgrade to the B version of the car, or indeed lost at some point between when it stopped racing, and when the Haynes pictures were taken - and the quality of the images suggests that gap could well be two decades. So, no help there. I thought the silver would be too high a contrast, and the Aoshima instructions seem to make all sorts of random parts just silver. So I decided to make it black metallic, same colour as I've done the coil spring top plates. I brush painted it, it's a small part after all, and the finish I got was terrible. So I sanded it down and airbrushed it semi matt aluminium, but the paint really didn't sit very well and it still looked rubbish. So I sanded it and airbrushed it again and finally got a finish I was happy with.

Wow, was it October the last time I updated this thread? I know I said I build slowly but it looks like I've been pushing it to extremes. Anyway I do actually have an update, and it hasn't all been plain sailing, so progress really has been slow. Here's what's happened: Firstly, I did indeed paint the wings, including the grey area near the pivots. I then installed them in the fuselage, which allowed me to join the whole fuselage together. This is where I hit my first two major problems. Firstly, I've managed to break off the two swivelling pylons from one of the wings. Those two were always a bit stiff and I've pretty quickly sheared the plastic lugs on both of them, rotating them out of the way. Either that side just wasn't a good fit, or my decision to glue the retaining C-clips to the lugs has worked against me and some of the glue sealed the join to the wing itself. Either way, it means I'm going to have to glue the pylons in place and will not be able to change the wing sweep on display. I always thought Tornados looked best with wings at full sweep anyway so I wasn't expecting to use that option much, but I guess now the choice of sweep angle, once I make it, is permanent. The second headache came once I tried to assemble the fuselage section with the wings in. They don't all fit together well. With the wings fully forward, there is clearance but as I sweep the wings back it fouls against the fuselage sections and forces them apart. The fuselage join is such that it splits the wing gloves into upper and lower halves, and with the wings fully back these are forced apart so there's a gap. This took a lot of sanding and grinding to get the right clearances, and now everything is snug with the wings fully swept, but very loose with them fully forward. Meanwhile, all the work I'd done to solve this had scraped and sanded grey paint off the wings so I had to redo those areas before I could assemble. It was really difficult to see where it was fouling because you have to close the fuselage to test, and the parts that are fouling are inside and hidden from view, so it was very frustrating working that down. In the end I had to sand down the wing surfaces themselves - on the areas hidden from view at least, so no detail lost, but I've sanded the gloves, the mounting plates, and even the curtains that seal the fuselage to get the whole thing to fit together without gaps on the wing gloves when fully swept. Anyway, fuselage, cockpit section,wings, elevons and vertical stabilizer are all assembled now. In this picture the nosecone is not secured in place yet. That will be a different colour to the rest of the fuselage so I will paint that separately before attaching it. The plastic is black, so it's hard to tell in this photo, but the wings are painted while the fuselage is not. On this second photo it's also clear that the grey parts on the wings aren't aligned with eachother, so I'm going to have to touch those up too. On the previous photo, if you look closely at the windscreen area you'll see there's a missing bit of clear plastic on the port side. I noticed it on the piece early on, but then forgot about it and only noticed it again when I assembled the darn thing. That was the next problem to be solved. I filled it with Perfect Putty, trying my best not to get too much actually inside the cockpit, where it would be impossible to reach and would look like a white mushroom. It's all masked off already but hopefully I don't see any interior problems once I take the masking off, otherwise the windscreen will have to come off so I can sort it out. Here's the fix.... The next challenge was the fin. It doesn't fit square on the fuselage. The bottom edge of one side sits a bit lower than the other, so it doesn't stand vertically. Stupidly, instead of thinking to file it down to level, I glued it on and held it vertical with the intention of filling the gap on one side. I thought I'd done this well but later I noticed the fin is one or two degrees off vertical. Unfortunately, because I knew one side wasn't making good contact with the fuselage, I'd used a lot of cement to make sure it stayed in place, and it's not coming off now without damaging something, so it will have to stay as it is. It's only noticeable when seen head on but I'll always know it's there It looks a bit out on one of the above shots but that's exaggerated because the camera isn't directly above the aircraft, so it looks worse there. By this time I must say I was getting ready to abandon this one. Too many annoying problems and the kit, while having excellent detail, has a lot of fitting problems and the general quality is just annoying me. The parts also need a lot of cleaning up and there is a lot of flash. I chose to continue the build, I think it will look OK in the end and I haven't evern abandoned a model before, and hopefully from here on out, with just the decals, weapons and engine cans to trip me up, it doesn't have many more opportunities to throw curveballs at me. Here's one example of the flash, on which if I recall is one of the nose gear doors. Speaking of gear doors, there's another challenge on this model. I am building it gear up to display in flight, and the doors just don't fit well in the bays. The main gear doors have needed a lot of filler, and the nose gear doors, particularly the one at the back of the bay, has no locating ridge or pins to line it up on, so it just sinks into the hole. I cut off a piece of sprue, glued it to the inside of the door and then cut and sanded it down until it was just the right height to sit on the base of the wheel well and hold the door up at just the right height. I realise now I should have taken photos of that too but I didn't really think of it at the time! Sorry Anyway, it's now sitting in primer, ready for the coat of gloss black... but before I get to that, the join at the base of the fin, which I had filled, still looks a bit too big so I'll be putting more putty there first. The wings are all masked up on this shot, right down to the root. So that's where the Tornado is so far. Hopefully this weekend I have an opportunity to put the black coat on and have more pictures for you then! Thanks for watching

Does that open up the possibility of posing it on the stand with the gear halfway through a closing cycle, as though the aircraft has just taken off and is busy cleaning up? The pilotless cockpits break that illusion a bit, but I suppose to indicate how incredibly fast the Blackbird is, a couple of random 1/48 pilots could be posed behind the aircraft sitting on their butts on the ground wondering where their ride went, Wile E. Coyote style

Looks marvellous! Hope you don't mind if I jump onboard for the ride?

I missed this when you posted it! Great modelling there. As others have said, it's a very dynamic looking build. The ship looks great and the sea is some of the best I've seen.

That looks fantastic. Excellent work on the paintjob, I've never got close to that smooth a finish with a paintbrush.

That is a lovely model and despite your description, I was struck by how refreshing it is to see a Tomcat that looks so light and clean. I'm now so used to seeing them in shades of grey that the colour took me by surprise a bit, and it was only when I got to the picture of the real thing that it really hit home how close to the actual aircraft it really is.

Is it possible to build cardboard or styrene rectangular boxes that are about the shape of the wheel well and fit around the gear but with a snug fit into the wheel well? such that they transmit the load on to the wheel well instead of it being on the gear, and are sturdy enough to protect the gear from knocks from any direction? I suppose the difficulty is making them secure so they don't just transmit any lateral knocks straight to the gear. Or, make the box and then pack them full of paper or tissue or something to cushion the gear.

Ah! Nice to see a build underway already! I'll join the ride if you don't mind

That is more likely

Perhaps someone leaked plans of a future invasion?

Gorgeous paintjob on that with a lovely gentle touch on the panel lines. There was one of those at White Waltham for a while I think. Not sure if it's still around there.

That is a fantastic result and I expect you're really happy it's all finished now!

A guy in my school days certainly had supersonic farts

It really does look nice in that unpacking. The whole presentation with the two engines and a stand purpose built for them and the model is really nice too.

If I recall, Ward's book backs this up to an extent. It's common that some aircraft have better flying characteristics than others of the same type, and if I recall for one mission they chose the aircraft based on it having the best performing radar set in the squadron. Ward's book is definitely a source that mentions 801 using radar and 800 not, and Hermes command issuing instructions to the SHARs not to use their radars but rely on the ships. And that second point is also, I think, relevant to the OP. Throughout the book they are reliant on ship radar for their long range picture. AEW is never mentioned to my memory, i.e. it was never a source of information for them, ergo it sounds like they didn't have it. They were nearly always relying on the carriers radar, and the carriers were stationed generally far enough away to be out of range of an attack from the mainland.

The model looks really good, but the finish in particular looks immaculate. Lovely job on that model.

I'll wait until early next year and see a few built ones (but more importantly to let my wallet recover from something of a beating this last quarter) but I'm really looking forward to adding it to my stash.

Sonic cracks then maybe? I also have never heard anyone describing sonic booms from prop tips, so fair point. I've heard, to my misfortune, a few Harvards in my time so can concur - bloody noisy thing, compounded by the fact that it's not particularly fast so the noise doesn't go away quickly either.... but definitely, as you say, not a boom.