TobyK

Thanks Perdu - hopefully I've cracked the file sharing with the company Microsoft Onedrive account. Going back a step I should say that the magna resin is think and not too crisply moulded, but on the upside it is quite soft and workable, which is just as well, as it needs a lot of work. The Magna kit in the original slowback configuration, which the 10 machines were in until they were all modified to the "fastback" tail configuration inbetween about 1968-70. This means that you have to model an early machine unless you want to do some major plastic surgery to the back end. I spent a lot of time contemplating the nose and canopy which didn't seem to look right. The nose was a little too high, and the canopy glazing was a lot too high resulting in a strange flattening of the top of the canopy and fuselage. Using some blown up plans from the Shorts Putnam book, I set about the front end with a razor saw, and then got out the milliput - lots of it. Having lowered the nose and cockpit sides, the fuselage top needed building up by about 3mm to make it circular. Lots more milliput and plasticard, but so satisfying when the correct shape starts to emerge. I didn't fit the cockpit until after all this was done, chopping out a part of the fuselage to do so. Here it is with the fuselage top built up, nose dropped and cockpit sides dropped.

Here is the beast with the two halves together. It was a major task getting to this stage. One of the halves was quite warped, and I tried all sorts of tricks to get it into shape. including immersing in hot water and using some specially purchased jubilee clips. The work bench turned out to be invaluable, in squeezing it into shape after the two halves were together and I could treat it as a whole. It turned out that the whole thing was rather squashed and too wide in the body and not high enough. Having squeezed it into shape on the work bench the next challenge was to get it to stay that shape. I ended up drilling a series of holes along the under side and supergluing wooden skewers into the fuselage to act as bracing struts. They worked! You can just about see the filled in holes along hte centre line at about 2.5" centres.

Hello, I haven't posted on BM before - please bear with me whilst I figure out how it works. I've been working on the Magna Belfast on and off for a few years now, and its finally coming together. I'll post some pics of the build to bring you up to date if I can figure out how.