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John R

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  1. This started life back in August and appeared under work in progress as

    http://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.p...c=53543&hl=

    Progress hardly seemed an appropriate term and the at the beginning of December I had some rather painful back trouble which was followed by 'flu in January but finally I managed to get a grip on things and now it's done.
    It's a mixture of Heller F84G fuselage, Airfix F84F wings and tail. Nosewheel undercarriage is from the F84G. The main u/c used F84G legs and wheels with F84F wheel covers.
    A new canopy was moulded using a shape derived from what pictures I could find.
    The body of the nose probe was turned from 1mm tube using a battery powered drill to get a bit of taper and the tip was 0.5mm
    Finish was Alclad polished Aluminium over Alclad basic black undercoat. I am a bit disappointed with it as a couple of years ago I produced a stunning finish on a P1 but haven't been able to repeat it since - very frustrating!
    Fin decals were homemade.

    It took a lot more effort than expected. Was it worth it? Well, there can't be too many of these about...

    John

    YF84F_1.jpg

    YF84F_2.jpg

  2. Will this help? It's the back end of a Yak23 in the Zadorozhny museum in Moscow

    Yak23.jpg

    There are pictures of Yak 15s in Yefim Gordon's book 'Early Soviet Jet fighters' but they don't show much, only a very dark area.

    There is a nice colour picture of a Yak 15 on the cover but the 'onion' appears to stick out a lot further than in pictures of this and other 15's in the text.

    As they say 'museum a/c are funny things'

    John

  3. Ah, the loss of innocence! I remember when I used to be able to build kits straight from the box and then one day the thought occurs 'surely that can't be right?' and life is never the same again.

    "Perhaps I'll build it and give it to a young nephew.............. "

    Better still - get together with the young nephew and build it and another young soul will set forth on the road to hell.

  4. Thanks.

    I was more cautious with the second wing and gradually raised the temperature until I was able to straighten it but it was a bit 'comfortable' before I could de-warp it. I let it soak to get the whole thing at a uniform temperature and cooled it running water. It was stable for a few days but then I found it had remembered how it used to be and the warp crept back in!!!!!

    Why can't it remember that it came out of a straight mould?

    John

  5. I heard that you can immerse them in hot water but how hot does it have to be?

    I didn't work very well for me even when the water was too hot to put my fingers in so I tried dropping the part into boiling water for a few seconds before fishing it out with tweezers but it nearly melted. It would appear that somewhere in between there is an optimum temperature. Does anybody know what it is or does it vary depending on the model manufacturer?

    John

  6. No I didn't contact Bill. His article covered most of the things I wanted to know.

    I have just re-read it because I could not remember him saying anything about the wing position apart from the fore and aft alignment.

    I have just looked at a 3-view and some photos of the straight wing F84s and it appears to me that the Heller kit does not have the vertical position of the wings correct. I wonder if anybody has any views on this.

    I thought Bill's model looks OK as it is. Why do we let things like this bother us?

    John

  7. I thought that this would be a comparatively simple task but...

    YF84Fwingsandfuselage.jpg

    Things went wrong almost immediately. The donor wings were warped and were not responding to hot water treatment so I thought that I would try dipping one briefly in boiling water. DISASTER! It buckled and whilst I was able to get it back into roughly the right shape lots of milliput was required to rescue it.

    I then discovered that the F84E canopy was not suitable as the prototype F84F had a Vee windscreen. As if this was not enough the wings are lower on the fuselage than the E.

    At this point I put it away until I was in a better frame of mind.

    On picking it up again recently I came to the conclusion that the wing planform was not correct and that the chord at the tips had to be increased and then discovered that one wing was shorter than the other - it must have shrunk in the hot wash so a little was added to the root. These additions can be seen in the photo.

    To lower the wing position on the fuselage I made a box into which I could fit the existing wing tongues as this looked to be the best way of getting the wings lined up and providing a secure fixing.

    Now for the canopy. I made a mould by lining the F84E canopy with Micromask and then filling it with Milliput. Much to my surprise I was able to extract the filler. The plan is now to add Milliput to the forward section and sand it to the correct shape.

    John

  8. I built the CF100 mark V many years ago. As I remember it went together quite well except for one item - the rear fuselage was way out of alignment and required careful sanding to get it right. I was later told that this was a deliberate mistake as the kit was a 'rip-off' of the Astra vacform and they wanted to avoid charges of plagiarism. The same reason was given for the incorrect placement of the aileron actuators on the CF105.

    JOhn

  9. After a couple of years struggling with resins, vacforms and modifying ordinary kits I decided to do an easy one. I had a Hasegawa F18 in the stash and as it was the prototype F18 I thought that it would suit my needs perfectly.

    The build was quite easy, almost everthing fitted beautifully and I did not use ANY filler.

    The trouble started when I came to apply the decals. The colour scheme was Gold and Blue and the gold in the decals was a dreadful washed out apology for gold which leaked colour when applied so it had to be a paint job.

    Enquiries revealed that the 'Gold' really was a metallic gold and not a shade of yellow and the 'Blue' was actually a Ford Motor company paint. I ended up using Revell blue 'tweaked' to match the colour of the lettering on the decal sheet.

    The stripes on the side of the nacelles looked too difficult to mask so I sprayed strips of decal sheet with gold and blue and cut strips of the appropriate width.

     

    52567254405_6e6a945f1a_b.jpg

     

    52566811991_a5340c2091_b.jpg

     

    52567085149_f7d6294112_b.jpg

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