Nik W

Lovely looking Starfire and super work on that NMF! Nik

Not sure if I've seen any build threads on here, but I built this as my first all resin kit, and I can only echo what everyone has already said - the kit is a genuine joy to build. It really is an ideal starting point for venturing into building resin kits. Nik

Many thanks for the responses gents, I kind of thought it might be the case that the extra outlay for the resin bits wasn't really worth it for the small improvements. Monogram definitely did a great job on the Century Series, but I think the brass pitot from Master is definitely a good call. Thanks again guys! Nik

Morning folks! As my next model after I finish the Wyvern, I'm planning to have a crack at Monogram F-102 I picked up a few weeks ago. My main plan is to use this as something to cut my teeth on rescribing panel lines before I attempt the B-58 I've got stashed away since it has to be nice and clean for all that Alclad. Because I suffer from an addiction to after-market though I was wondering about the F-102 and what I could cram in, I know there are cockpit sets from both Aires and Black Box but are these worth it? The cockpit straight out of the box isn't too bad if I'm honest, but I haven't seen either of these replacement cockpits before and wondered if they add all that much in terms of detail? The only part of the kit cockpit I'm not convinced about is the ejector seat, but aside from the two cockpit sets above, I haven't seen any replacement seats for it. I've also seen the landing gear bay replacement parts from Aires as well, are these worth it? My experience of Aires wheel wells in the past has been far from pleasant, so I'm not sure if these are worth the hassle. Anybody got any experience using any of this stuff? Or am I better off with perhaps just the Eduard etch set and a big pile of plastic card and some fuse wire? All help is appreciated folks! Kind regards, Nik

Now that is very nice indeed! Super finish! Something about the 'fat-back' MiG 21 just looks really purposeful! Nik

Evening folks, time for an update on the Wyvern. After drilling out the bottoms of the exhausts I decided I really wasn't happy with how shallow they looked. So despite having already said I thought opening up the fuselage underneath was probably beyond my skill levels at the moment, I took a bravery pill and started drilling and hacking away to open it up. Rummaging around in a few drawers I managed to find an old mechanical pencil which had a 'barrel' of roughly the right diameter to match up with the exhausts and set about creating a bit of piping to go into the hole I'd just created in the fuselage. Whilst I was waiting for some paint to dry on the inner section on the exhaust piping, I decided to crack on with adding the metal flap link fairings and air flow fences to the wing. These required a bit of surgery to the wing to cut some holes to slot them into. Cutting these out wasn't particularly hard, but had I planned this build a little better, rather than jumping head first into it, I would probably have cut these out and done the extra work I've done on the exhausts before I'd got everything fastened up. By doing it at this stage in the build I had to be conscious of not pressing too hard anywhere and popping open seams or knocking bits off, whereas had I done it right at the start I wouldn't have had to worry about these things. Below you can see the flap link fairings and the airflow fences fitted and also (although it is a bit dark) the improved exhaust piping, which looks a lot more convincing than it did before. Last bit of work for today was to get the tailplanes fitted on. These required a fair bit of jiggery-pokery to get them on right as with this being a vac kit you need to match the mating surfaces to the contours of the rear fuselage. A bit of filing and cursing later and I think the end result isn't too bad (certainly nothing a dab of filler won't hide anyway). And as proof that I do learn from my mistakes you can see the holes I cut in the tailplanes before I attached them to the fuselage ready to take the fillets later on when they're less likely to get knocked off! That just about wraps it up for this update. Next on the hit-list I'm going to have a go at adding a bit of detail to the gunsight area under the windshield and sadly this will have to be just an attempt to make it look a bit less 2 dimensional based on what looks right rather than any real relation to what this area is actually like, as despite a lot of hunting, I can't find any pictures showing any real detail here. Then it'll be time to get round to getting the windshield itself masked up and attached to the fuselage (as this is a vac canopy I'm definitely NOT looking forward to this bit) and then with a bit of luck I'll be able to start getting some paint on this soon! Thanks for looking folks, Nik

Absolute cracker! Nice to see it in such an out of the ordinary colour scheme as well! Nik

Really nice looking Meteor! Looking at the finished product you wouldn't know that you'd struggled with it! Nik

Great looking Phantom! Really like the opened up nosecone, this is the first time I've seen one of these used and it looks like a really nice addition! Nik

Bloody hell! This is incredible work, I've seen a few really well done jobs of Dynavector Scimitars in the past, but this knocks them all for six! I just hope when I get round to building mine I can come somewhere close to this kind of standard! As others have already said, the dropped flaps and the open airbrakes look superb! Would love to see some close up pics of the airbrake assembly if you have any! Nik

Glad to see this one going again, this was another I picked up a few tips from before starting my own vac Wyvern. Keep up the good work! Nik

Superb effort and fantastic finish! The big problem with seeing pieces of work this good is it gives me the urge to get one for myself! Nik

Evening folks! Time for a small update, back to work today so sadly modelling time is now limited again Managed to get a bit more done on the Wyvern tonight, a couple of bits which I wasn't looking forward to that I needn't have worried about. First up it was time to get a bit of filler on the areas under the fuselage where the wings section meets the fuselage. A bit of sanding has got these joints down to what seems to be an acceptable level, but I'll give it another coat of primer to check when I have more time. I was a bit heavy handed with the front joint though and managed to pop it open. Bit of a pain, but a good dose of Plastic Weld to the joint and some pressure seems to have fixed it without too much hassle. A little bit of sanding and some rescribing the panel lines I've removed should tidy this up not too badly. Next up was the first of the jobs that I hadn't been looking forward to - the drop tanks. My biggest concern with these was their small size and complex shape would be difficult to remove from the backing sheet without damaging them. Thankfully they weren't as bad as I'd thought they would be. Thanks to Miggers for pointing me in the direction of John Adams' vacform article on here, one tip I picked up on was to extend a couple of the score lines beyond the shape of the tank itself so that when I snapped it from the backing sheet the plastic broke along the path of least resistance rather than breaking off part of the tank at the joint to the pylon. As usual it was then back to sanding and filing to prepare the two surfaces for gluing which didn't take long for me to get to this stage. Closely followed by it's twin brother... The white of the plastic doesn't photograph very well, so what you can't see in these pictures are the slightly rough parts around the joins of the two halves where the melted plastic oozed out. A quick blast with a sanding pad soon saw to this. The other job which I really wasn't looking forward to was removing the exhaust fairings. These parts are VERY thin so needed care not to snap in half during sanding or scar them with a bit of over excited filing. Removing the centre section was the hardest part so far as these parts are thin and quite flimsy as it is, so removing this was just asking for trouble with somebody as clumsy as me. These took quite a lot of jiggery pokery with needle files and bits of rolled up sand paper to thin down enough to accept the white metal exhaust parts, and have been two of the most time consuming parts of this build so far. But being patient and careful with what I was doing with them and they've turned out not too badly. It was at this point tha I decided I didn't like how shallow the white metal exhausts looked, so chose to drill them out to give them a little bit more depth. It's not a huge improvement to be totally honest, but I'm satisfied with it and I think with some careful painting they should look a bit better than they would have done straight out of the box. I did toy with the idea of opening up the fuselage underneath the exhausts to add further depth but with the fuselage already fastened up I thought this might be a bit more than I'm capable of at the minute and I've not got any pipe of the correct diameter to simply extend the exhausts inside the fuselage. Anyway, that's all for tonight, not much but I think I'm making decent progress with this one. Hopefully for the next update I'll get a bit more work done on attaching the tailplanes and detailing the areas which will be visible under the canopy, which I'm going to be posing open I think (good job Dynavector supply two canopies in case I cock one up!). So, till next time folks, and thanks for looking! Nik

I think I paid about the same for this! Got to thank Trumpeter and Classic Airframes for driving down the prices of these, even with all the resin bits and pieces inside. Nik

As promised above, here is tonight's update. Only a relatively small amount of work done today, I planned to get a huge pile done, but I had to pick up a car from the garage and then as I went to get a coat of primer on it I discovered I'd run out of Halfords Grey, so cue a trip to Halfords for 3 cans of the stuff (I'll not be running out for a while now ) and I'm back in business. So, cockpit and wheel wells were masked up and a coat of grey was sprayed straight from the rattle can so I could see where I'd need to do work on any seams and blemishes. First impressions would suggest that I'd done a better job than expected here as apart from some panel lines which have vanished around the upper nose section due to sanding this is going to require a lot less filler than I had anticipated. Although I think this is definitely more to do with the superior quality of the kit itself rather than my skills, although I could always pass it off as all that surface prep I did before putting anything together Only area which needs any real attention is around the resin nose ring/engine bulkhead thing, which will need a bit of rescribing and under the fuselage where the front and rear of the wing section (which is an entire sub-assembly that drops into a gap in the bottom of the fuselage) meet the fuselage. The photo doesn't show it particularly well (using the iPad again as faffing with the camera and laptop is a pain) but you can make out the area where I had to add in a shim of off cut backing plastic to fill the gap I made. The rear of the wing section is very much the same, but a little bit of filler should hide all this I'm thinking. At the front of the wing root there are two intakes, which if left untouched would leave the model with a rather nasty see-through appearance at the front so I decided to create a bit of false ducting to prevent that see through look using a couple of small sections of copper pipe cut to a decent length. The pipe itself is slightly smaller in diameter than the opening itself, but with a little bit of filler I should be able to get rid of the holes around them and it'll give a passable impression of something being there rather than just an empty cavity in the model. Quick question for you all though before I wrap this update up for now, the kit comes with two beautifully clear vacform canopies, and I don't want to leave underneath these just flat black, so does anybody have any information (pics or otherwise) what the area under the windshield and rear sliding portion of the canopy looks like? As you can see from the pictures above, these areas are pretty flat straight from the kit, and will be pretty visible under the canopy, so I'd like to create a kind of semi-realistic representation of what is under there in real life. A hunt on the web turned up very little at all, so hopefully somebody on here might have some information on the matter. That's all for now folks, back to the bench for a bit I think! Thanks for looking guys. Nik

Hi Pat, definitely worth taking the plunge, having built only injection moulded stuff with the odd resin kit here and there I wouldn't consider myself an expert modeller by any means, but this has been great fun and a good challenge! Tom, thanks for the kind words of encouragement, coming from a 'Vac-master' like yourself (that sounds like a Hoover manufacturer...) it is high praise indeed! Thanks for the tips about the trailing edges, I went down the route of your first tip and thinned the trailing edge a good deal in from the edge itself as I discovered early on it was just creating a chamfer as you described. The suggesting of reducing the chord along the trailing edges and blending in a piece of plasticard is a brilliant idea which I think I may end up stealing on my next vacform build! I just need to decide what that will be, although I have got a Dynavector Scimitar in the stash, which would fit in nicely with the Fleet Air Arm theme I seem to be leaning towards at the moment. You've definitely converted me to The Dark Side! Michael - Yeah it's some racing stripe eh? Nose ring thingy is indeed resin, it's a bulkhead for mounting the contra-rotating props on, the spinners for which are also resin with whit metal props. Next update coming soon! Watch this space as they say! Nik

Evening folks, I've not forgotten about this one, just needed a bit of a break from modelling for a while (or so the girlfriend decided anyway...) but I've managed to find a bit of time to crack on with a bit of work on this one. When I left it, the Sentinel was at the primer stage and I was trying to decide what kind of camo scheme to go for, the vast majority of you suggested something along an urban scheme, so with that in mind I created this... Colours are Humbrol 27 (Grey) and 187 (Tan) masked off in a roughly splinter type scheme. They were pretty indistinguishable between the two at first, but a wash of Tamiya Smoke to make it look a bit grubbier and some drybrushing with a sandy grey (Hurmbrol 28) have created a fairly weather beaten look to it. Still some work to do though, I'm thinking based on the camouflage scheme this would be an urban scheme for a desert world perhaps (Ash Wastes of Armageddon anyone? ;-) ) so I might have a go at making it look a bit on the dusty side before I seal it all up with a matt coat to take the sheen off that the Tamiya smoke created. Made a start on detailing the base as well, which I always thinks really sets the model up, especially with Warhammer 40k stuff. This got a coat of Humbrol 187 to act as a base to work from and was then washed with a brown oil paint wash to add some depth to the gravel and drybrushed to bring up some of the detail. Still some more work to do to bring out the detail on the base, in particular the large chunks of rubble will need to be painted to distinguish them from the gravel and details finished off like the discarded Lasgun lying among the rubble and the girders sticking out made to look like worn and rusted metal. One question for all you guys out there, I've been away from the 40k side of things for a while, so I'm not really sure how to approach one particular aspect of the model - the vision slits on the cockpit and the lenses on the searchlight thingy on top of the cabin. Anybody got any suggestions on a good way to tackle these? I don't want them to look totally flat and one dimensional, but I'm not really sure how to achieve that kind of effect on something that is actually flat (I think that makes sense...), so any tips or pics showing how you guys approach something like that would be pretty handy! Hopefully it won't be so long between this and my next update! Cheers! Nik

This is looking very good indeed, will be using what you're doing here with all the Aires resin as reference for if I ever get round to mine! Nik

Evening all! Inspired by the awesome work on here by Tom Probert on his magnificent Shackleton and then the Superfortress and Rich's B-17 I thought that I ought to take the plunge and have a go at the dark art that is a vacform kit. Armed with a bit of knowledge gleaned from t'interweb I decided to start on something fairly straight forward and having heard Dynavector are up there among the Rolls Royce of vacforms and the Wyvern is one of the easier of their kits to build, when one came up cheap on eBay it was a golden opportunity. By the way, apologies for the photos, they were taken on my iPad, so may not be the greatest. A rather pleasant little surprise came in the form of a resin cockpit tub, which looks to me like it may be part of the Compass Rose resin set for this kit (I could be completely wrong of course, but I've not been able to find any other details of resin sets for this kit). Sadly it was just the tub itself and not the full set, but beggars can't be choosers I suppose. No shots of the cutting process, but following John Aero's vacform guide which is on the site somewhere, the parts were drawn around with a felt pen, scored with a new scalpel and snapped from the backing plastic. Definitely one of the scariest parts of vacform building, but not too bad once you've practised on a few corners of scrap backing sheet. A little bit of Tamiya NATO Black for the cockpit and some drybrushing really brought the detail in the resin tub out quite nicely. Because I only had the tub itself from the resin set, the IP is the Dynavector metal part with some Airscale instrument decals from the RAF WWII and Early Allied Jets sheets, just to give it a little more interest. The metal seat supplied with the kit is pretty crude... Since my scratchbuilding skills are nowhere near on a par with Tom or Rich I took the easy option and grabbed an ejector seat from Pavla to replace the kit part. Once all the appropriate prep work for the parts had been done (LOTS of sanding!) construction of the main fuselage and wings went together really quite quickly after a fair bit of dry-fitting to make sure I'd sanded to the correct line and thinned the trailing edges of the wings enough (which still look a little clunky, but it's my first attempt at a vacform kit so don't be too harsh on me! :-) ) The plastic itself is quite soft, so it responds well to Plastic Weld, which has really helped in avoiding seam lines between the fuselage halves and other parts. The detail in the undercarriage bays is a little soft so I added a couple of strips of evergreen to sharpen it up a little bit. Thankfully the inner halves of the u/c doors remain shut, so I didn't have to do too much, just a little bit of wire to add some visual interest and the two ribs. I decided not to go too nuts with adding wires and detail to the u/c bays, as this was mainly to try out the techniques involved in constructing the kit itself and not an exercise in super detailing. Here it is, taped together just to make sure everything fits. The join underneath the fuselage between the wings and the fuselage itself required a bit of fettling, I took too much plastic off of the fuselage halves so had to add some off-cuts into the gap I'd created and smother it in glue in an attempt to get it even. I'm currently working on the tailplane (both have been cut-out and glued together and push fitted onto the spar supplied with the kit to get the angle right. They just need some shaping where they meet the fuselage and then attached and filled and then I think the back of this will have been broken. Well there it is, nowhere near up to the standards seen elsewhere here, but I'm quite pleased with it so far, and hopefully posting a build on here will work as a bit of motivation to actually keep making progress on it. Any tips or constructive criticism would be greatly appreciated though guys, these are unknown waters for me and while I'm enjoying it very much, I'm eager to learn from those of you who know better! Cheers! Nik

That's great news about all the spare bits and pieces! Sounds promising indeed for the whole Phantom Phamily coming out. Of course this does now create the problem of what markings to choose - with an aircraft like the Phantom there is so much scope for special schemes and even some of the more interesting 'standard' schemes it could be a real headache! Nik

Looking good so far, this is one on my hit-list for 2013 so I'll be keen to see how it turns out. Interesting that Academy have chosen to have a drop in panel where the IFR point on other marks of Phantom is located... Hopefully this means a whole range of every mark of Phantom! 2013 could be a BAD year for my wallet! Nik

Tom, Agreed, the Dynavector vacs are absolutely brilliant, the ideal starting point for a first foray over to the dark side. I have to admit I'm absolutely loving it as well! So much so that I sourced one of their Scimitars as well for my next vac project. Then I'm considering tackling something a bit larger like one of the Sanger Shackletons or possibly their B-47! I hadn't set up a WIP, mainly because my build speed at the moment could best be described as glacial as a result of work and a pending FAA application. I have photographed all my stages of the build though, so I might start one up in the hope that it gives me a bit of a kick to get things finished! Nik

Stunning work as usual Tom, this has been a bit of a masterclass in vac-form building and this and your Shackleton build were enough of a kick up the bum to tempt me to try my hand at a vac-form (Dynavector Wyvern) and the stuff you've been showing in these builds has been a huge help! Keep up the great work! Nik

I've been following this one for a while now and every time I look at it I still have a lot of difficulty believing this is anything other than 1:1 scale. If it weren't for the items around the model to put it into 'size context' I'd bet money on this being the real deal. Please keep up the outstanding work! Nik