12jaguar

Missed this one Tom (although hard to miss if seen in the flesh). Can't get enough of that Shorts engineering goodness....talking of which😉 cheers John

Ah cool, St Neots for me. Used to work at Wyton, first in the RAF then latterly in the MOD in The Jaguar Engineering Authority Our Stirling workshop is at Alconbury John

Aah takes me back to carrying out Minor* and Mods on them at Abingdon.... Whereabouts in Cambs are you? John

Generally speaking what you're after is a General Arrangement of the aircraft, but this won't show rivet detail as it will be in too small a scale to represent. For rivets you would need each individual skin panel drawing which would detail the rivet size, pattern and pitch dimensions. best option is to seek out photos of the real aircraft and identify which fasteners are actually visible from a scale distance and replicate those. To be honest you're unlikely to see rivet heads in most scales as for example a 1/8" countersunk rivet would have a head diameter of approximately 5/32" which in 1/32 scale would equate to approx 0.6mm and most of these would be covered by paint regards John

nice looking Stirling John

AP119A-0601 is the paint scheme reference. I have a copy of it somewhere, if I can find it I'll see if I can scan the relevant parts and send it to you regards John

As John says, they've been doing it for a long time, here's a documentary from the early 80s

According to Aircrew Remembered, the aircraft loss was not claimed by any Nightfighters so it's assumed to be either Flak or poor weather; 21 aircraft were lost on that raid alone John

2 shops relatively local to me: Model Junction in Bury St Edmunds https://www.model-junction.co.uk/ City Cycle Centre in Ely http://www.citycyclecentre.com/ Both worth a visit

Unfortunately it's pretty well broken up; we had the complete (damaged) throttle box on loan which had been ripped from its mounting and we had the lower LH part of the 1st pilots seat chassis and remains of the seat rail so the impact was pretty violent John

Hi Tony the aircraft is broken up but the parts that have been recovered thus far have been in good condition due to the freshwater and anerobic conditions of the mud they're buried in. In reality the water is omly about 6 feet deep. We have the de-icer pump mount and landing light pneumatic control valve from BK716 incorporated into our flightdeck build. The Fort Veldhuis Museum team have loaned us items in the past that we have been able to measure John

I'm in regular contact with the RNLAF Major who is leading the recovery and indeed have been this week. I remain hopeful that this was just on a list of proposals put forward for recovery methods; BK716 was due to be recovered in the week we all went into lock down and the method of recovery was going to be by Coffer Dam, so assuming that the plan is still extant there should be no reason why this still shouldn't take place as planned. No date yet though for when this will happen take care John

welcome aboard John

That's what the curvature of the earth is for. Thought I'd get that one in before some surly non-Jag mate chipped in LOL John

depends when you're talking about. Initially they had FN4 tail turrets which had a rounder profile to the cupola than the later FN20s. Essentially, the FN4 shape is pretty much the same as that fitted to the Manchester IIRC Oh and possibly Sunderland.

Hi Martin I've made the MkIV and Italeri did a pretty good job even if they did include a Galley! I'm making a MkIII at the moment and am using the White ensign detail set although tbh I'm not using that much of it as it's pretty spurious in places LOL cheers John

Hi Martin a couple of points: for a Mk III, the bombsight will be a Mk XIV or in other words exactly the same as a Lanc Just seen that you've got an R1155 radio fitted to the Navs bulkhead, this installation was only found on Mk Vs as the W/Op position had to move due to the passenger/freight cabin regards John

If you need any cockpit photos, send me your email and I'll ping some to you. If you go to the weblink below my signature, you'll find some pics of our flightdeck rebuild I'm currently building a MkIII as BK716, an aircraft which was due to be recoverd by the RNLAF in March but unfortunately postponed by CV-19. We have a significant number of parts from that aircraft in our reconstruction and parts that have been reverse engineered from parts that have been loaned by a Dutch museum. cheers John

If you're doing a Mk III, you'll need to block in some windows in the nose, fill the oil cooler intakes in the wing leading edges and blank the landing light in the port wing cheers John

I should of course said tailcone not nose...doh! John

Well I happen to have a Mk V conversion (sorry but promised to a mate once lockdown is over), I think it's a heritage models conversion. The nose plug still has the resin gate attached so unfortunately I can't confirm the width at the transparency. I can confirm however that the dimension between the strakes on the nose cone is 9/32" for 1/72 scale. It's worth noting that not all MkVs had the transparency and many had an all metal nose. eg https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205126847 regards John

nice one Neil

Indeed

And I seem to recall that there's a Stirling lurking somewhere in Tom's to finish list😉 John

perhaps 'inherently unstable' is too strong a description by me certainly for normal operation the aircraft required autostabs, which could be switched out in an emergency, and I'm sure if Fritag is around would describe the ride as a lot more uncomfortable with them off. John