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Showing results for tags 'Roden 1/144th Vickers Super VC10'.
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Hi everyone, Just to put everybody at ease, work still continues on my F-4B (LOVEBUG) and my Corsair. Plus my Mosquito PR34 conversion. Following thru on my master strategy of building enough interesting subjects before i die, i came up with a method of subject selection. The cycle goes like this: Navy Jet Kooky and British Shelf of Doom Subject Spitfire Airliner Now, while opinions may differ on whether or not a Buccaneer counts as "Kooky", it did tick the box. Finishing the Spitfire, which was a Shelf of Doom resident gave me a double bonus on those two. And of course everybody knows i built 3 Tamiya F-14s and i have a Tamiya F-4B on the go, so that leaves us with an airliner. Enter the Vickers Super VC10. Why? Why Not??! There are enough finished Roden VC10s here on BM, but i haven't seen anybody do a "Deep Dive" on putting one together. So far, it has been....interesting. Construction began with the fuselage. The Roden clear windows, with some persuasion fit okay. About half of the windows stuck out somewhat proud of the fuselage, about half set either at or somewhat lower than the surrounding fuselage skin. The windows were glued in, putty was applied over them and after about 3 iterations of sanding i had something smooth enough to apply decal windows onto. The mating surfaces needed a bit of sanding to make them adequately level, but the good news is the surface texture is a bit smoother than that found on the C-133 or the Boeing 720. Next up were the wings. They too have somewhat uneven mating surfaces, plus there was a lot of flash on the trailing edges. In some places, you couldn't tell where the part ended and the flash began. I glued the trailing edges first, taping the wing trailing edge down to my benchtop in hopes of establishing a nice, straight trailing edge. The wings have been cleaned up, have a coat of Mr Surfacer Black on them, and are about to go into a secondary QC and cleanup process. Which brings us to the empennage. The VC10 tail section has been a favourite of marketing people for years, and it's every bit as recognizable at that of the Boeing 707, with its distinctive HF boom. IMHO its the neatest feature of the VC10, so understandably its come in for close attention. Unfortunately, it doesn't exactly fall together. The actual VC10 tailplane was a variable-incidence stabilizer that was built in left and right halves and bolted together at the centerline, with an aerodynamic fairing laid on top. It was a very large, monolithic construction. Roden has you build up the thing in left and right halves and then butt join them to the sides of the vertical. This results in some awkward, non prototypical joints that require some careful application of putty and sanding to attain something that looks more or less one-piece. After sanding back to bare plastic (why? i dunno. OCD or something), i was pleased to see that most of the recessed surface detail was still there and the imperfect areas were limited mainly to tiny pinholes here and there along the mating surfaces. Building up the empennage this way is the least-bad solution to addressing this part of the model. If it were one piece, i could have left it off until the end game which would have made my job a lot easier. After i get the wings sanded (again) it will be time to weight the nose and glue the fuselage halves together. Meanwhile, need to get back to work on the mighty Phantom... Until next time.... -d-