Search the Community
Showing results for tags 'VC-10'.
-
Today's Antiques Road trip showed expert Paul Harper finding a FROG VC-10 - with flashing lights ! in an antique shop. He briefly said about how it took him back to hos childhood, when his mother would occasionally treat him to a model aeroplane kit. He looked in the box, showing the "original instructions", and then closed the box and pointed out the shop wanted £120 for the kit! I thought he was going to see if he could get that price reduced and get it, but to my surprise, he said it was too rich for him! It did get me thinking though, for a FROG VC-10 kit - I didn;t see the scale, but it was a large box so I'm guessing 1/72, in its original box, would £120 - retail - be a reasonable price? I realise the kit is only worth what someone would pay for it, but does to (initially, perhaps) ask £120 seem reasonable these days ?
- 26 replies
-
- 3
-
-
Well, she is done. my first finished jet airliner model. First, the executive summary. Subject: Vickers-Armstrongs Super VC-10, type 1151. Manufacturer: Roden, Kit No. 313. Scale: 1/144th (Twice as good as 1/72nd scale!) Paints Used: A combination of Tamiya Acrylic, Lacquer, and GSI Creos Mr Color and Mr Super Clear gloss lacquer finishes. Decals: Sourced from 26Decals sheet, No. STS 44276. Additional parts used: FOD covers, landing gear doors, blade antennae and water drains from NH Detail, A144-023. Montex Windscreen/window/wheel hub masks, SM 14416. Anti-Collision beacons from ELF. It's my first Roden kit, and i probably could have picked an easier one. However, it's now finished and in the books. Despite all the work, i'm pleased with the end result. For those of you who want the whole guts of the online build, you can find it here: The best way to describe this project is to say it was a learning experience, both in practical problem solving as well as program management. It was a testbed for many techniques i'd acquired over the years, incorporated into one single build. The first thing you need to know going into this project is, you will have to block-sand and fettle with the fit of just about every part, before you glue anything together. Many of the sprue lands are on the mating surfaces. The plastic is thin and brittle out near the delicately shaped stabilizer and wingtips, and you'd better be prepared to do some damage control on these, as they're not very well protected in the box. There is some flash, and out near the wingtip trailing edges its sometimes hard to tell where the part ends and the flash begins. Just about every locator pin hurts, more than helps. On surfaces like the vertical fin and wing trailing edges, there are gaps that need to be filled with C/A or .005 plastic sheet because they cannot be sanded to a perfectly flat knife edge. The cabin windows are represented by plastic strips with embossed windows which are installed from the inside. When installed, they do not all uniformly sit flush with the surrounding outer skin. This led me to my first learning experience: Tamiya White Putty doesn't work for cabin windows. The Tamiya putty was a bit fussy to spread over the cabin windows, and while i was prepared for the inevitable shrinkage and air bubbles, i was not prepared for it lifting out of the windows when masked over. On several occasions, right up to decaling and touchup repair, some Tamiya putty pulled out of the window depressions, which required tedious and messy localized re-filling and paint repair. On VC10 No. 2, i've gone with a hybrid of epoxy and CA (not by choice) and at least so far the results have been better. The fit of the main assemblies to each other is for the most part, vague. Which leads us to the second lesson from this build: Assembly "A" + Assembly "B" + 90-degree Joints = Filler. The two worst offenders here are the joint at the base of the vertical fin, and the engine pylons to the side of the fuselage. You can see all of the gory details over at my Work In Progress thread, but the bottom line is the butt ends needed to be built up with CA and re-profiled to attain a sharp 90-degree joint where there were considerable gaps. The wings incorporate a 1960s-vintage tongue and slot assembly which results in a mediocre fit at best. I sawed off the locator tongues, block sanded the butt ends of the wings flat, and fashioned new spars from plastic and aluminium tubing. It took a bit of work, but the fit was much better. With all of the major sub assemblies cleaned up, primed, and cleaned up again it came time to start bringing them all together. Which brings us to the next takeaway item from this build: Alignment is a @#$%^. The VC10 is not what i would consider a "complex" geometric shape, but the combination of the high T-Tail with the acute sweepback, along with the gracefully curved Kuechemann wingtips made getting the alignment nailed, difficult. Some of it is attributable to parallax, but some is also attributable to the slots in the sides of the vertical fin being maybe not perfectly symmetrical, leading to some minor variances in incidence. You could look at the tail from some angles and it would look fine...and from other angles, clearly something was amiss. i did my level best (pun intended) to make sure the vertical fin was glued on perfectly vertical and square to the lateral axis of the fuselage. On some days i think it looks okay, on others i feel like i was being a bit sloppy. Fences are not something to be afraid of, and brass is your friend. Sometimes. The NH detail set includes a lot of little extra details for the Roden kit, but i ultimately used only a fraction of them. One of the main items i used were the large fences that run over the wing, just inboard of the slats. Even though NH included locating pins to fit the corresponding holes for the kit plastic parts, the fit was...tenuous. I used Krystal Kleer and MiG Ammo acrylic glue, along with Mr Surfacer 500 to join and fill the 90 degree joint. Throughout the final assembly process, the fences got in the way. I was constantly putting my fat fingers on them, or next to them, causing me to bend them and crack all the filler work loose. The best way to install things like these would be at the end of the painting and weathering cycle.... ....which is exactly what i did for the smaller, leading edge fences that Roden and NH forgot about. Cutting a slot in the wing leading edge and fabricating small fences from brass sheet worked perfectly for installation at the end of the build cycle. Looking at the photos, i think they came out looking pretty good. (that should read: May 18, 2022). On VC10 Numero Dos, i've repeated the process of cutting slots in the wing leading edge, but i made the saw cuts before the upper and lower halves were glued together. I also made a very long/deep cut into the inboard upper wing plank to take a new scratchbuilt wing fence. We will see how that goes. Now, once appropriately sized pilot holes are drilled in the right locations, installing the blade antenna and drain masts was very easy. You just have to time things right so that they don't get in the way of installing other things. In my case, these go on very late in what i call the "End Game". The model was assembled mostly with Tamiya extra thin liquid cement, and i had few if any problems with joints cracking open. However, one issue that kept coming back were "ghost seams" that kept reappearing on the upper and lower fuselage joints. I inspected these areas carefully after sanding, and after priming. Once the gloss white went on the top and the gloss grey went on the bottom, the seams started to re appear. I went back over several areas to fix them. In some cases the fixes were permanent, and in others the seams came back again. In most cases, you really need to look for them, but sometimes when light shines laterally across the top of the fuselage, they jump out at you, bright as day. I don't have an explanation or excuse for this. I don't know if its operator error, or if there is just some sort of chemical incompatibility problem between the Roden styrene and the solvents in the Tamiya and Mr Color paints. The model was initially primed with my experimental mix of Mr Base White 1000 tinted with Mr Color H27 and Green. The white solar cap coverage was started off with Mr Base White 1000, and over that i applied Mr Color H1 Gloss White. When dry i sanded it down with 4000 grit micro mesh. I then sprayed the model with Mr Color Light Gull Grey and when that was dry the "ridge" where the masking tape was removed by sanding with wet 6000 micro mesh. The characteristic, dark blue "Speedbird" cheatline was masked and painted by hand. I used a mix of Tamiya Royal Blue and White for the cheatline. The Tamiya acrylics responded very well to "Carpet Bombing" with Mr Leveling Thinner and gave me a very high gloss. However, the paint was not as dry as i thought it was when i masked over the nacelles, which led to the next painful lesson: Tamiya Tape does weird things to Tamiya Acrylics and Lacquers, if they're not *really* dry. Strangely enough, i did not have similar problems with Mr Color, but when i removed the Tamiya tape from the engine nacelles, the gloss had been completely ruined, and what remained was a dull, flattish appearance which was not sticky, but somewhat rough. I had to wet sand, re mask and re paint. I'm not sure if this is a result of the solvents in the paint outgassing through the Tamiya tape, or something else. The takeaway here is to give those colours 18-24 hours to fully outgas and harden up before masking over them. This happened both with masking over the Tamiya Acrylic Royal Blue, and the Tamiya Gloss White Lacquer. Decals: Since i painted the majority of the markings, i relied on the 26Decals sheet for smaller details like the Golden Speedbird and the BOAC CUNARD logos. The 26 Decals sheet do not give you enough of the gold "Royal Mail" crests that go on the doors, so its a good thing that i bought 2 sheets. Mine has two; i think you actually need four. The decals themselves performed pretty well, but the ones provided for the cockpit windows and cabin/cargo door outlines were too big for the kit, which leads me to conclude that the sheet was really designed for the Welsh Models vacform kit, and not the Roden injection molded one. When i get round to decaling the second VC10 i will forgo using the outlines for the cargo doors at a minimum, though i will probably have to use the distinctive, split blue/white outlines for the cabin doors. After reading all the feedback from other modellers who built the kit, i decided to use the Authentic Airliners BAC 1-11 decals for the cabin windows. This tuned out to be a double edged sword. On one hand, they were the perfect size and shape for VC 10 windows and they were beautifully printed and applied just fine. The down side is, the spacing between windows on a BAC 1-11 and a VC10 are not the same. I was only able to use sets of 4 windows at a time before the slight difference in window spacing had a cumulative effect and started to throw everything off. Because the decal film was relatively thick, the edges of the decal film show up in some photos when the light his them just right (FWIW, i emailed AA, asking them to consider doing a set of cabin windows specifically for the VC10 along with some 3D printed vortex generators and windshield wipers). The final phases of painting and weathering were more or less trouble free, aside from the fact that gloss finishes require careful handling and lacquer paints are delicate and prone to chipping until covered with enough of a protective clear coat. The GSI Creos Super Clears are the best in the business for this sort of thing. Fast drying, sandable, and respond well to "Carpet Bombing". Undercarriage: This was easily the most stressful and aggravating part of the build. Why was this?? For starters, the left and right halves of the strut came together unevenly when the injection mold halves came together. This led to a stagger/offset of both all the struts, but worse, the axle locations. The axle stubs had to be cut away and almost completely rebuilt from scratch. i had to make a best guess and choose the side that was "least terrible" and carefully drill through the struts to crate new pilot holes for the axles. There is not much "meat" in this area, so to beef things up, i punched small discs from .010 styrene to create more "Flat Plate" area that would make mounting the wheels easier. Brass rod and aluminium tube was used to make axles and bushings to take the wheels. Oh by the way, the wheels aren't really round. More aggravation ensues... The good news is the struts installed more or less trouble-free. I ditched the kit provided side braces and door connection rods and replaced these with Evergreen rod. The nose gear joint is extremely weak. I got around the problem by boring out the mounting hole in the lower fuselage to take another piece of Aluminium tubing. i then lopped off the mounting pin from the top of the nose gear strut, and bored a hole down the core of the strut into which i inserted a telescoping piece of brass rod. This arrangement provided more than enough mechanical strength for the nose gear. The final undercarriage installation is fairly robust, though there was a lot of angst and head scratching in order to get there. I added the NH FOD covers, not so much because the inlets turned out badly, but because there is nothing inside the tailpipes; just 4 gaping, Conway-sized holes. Plus, i thought they would add a nice splash of colour. So, i blocked off both ends to be consistent. This has been a much longer RFI report than i usually do, but nobody up to this point has done an exhaustive "Deep Dive" narrative on building this kit...and to a lesser extent not much like this has been written about 1/144th scale airliner building in general. I know it might sound like i'm being rather hard on the folks at Roden and on this kit. IMHO, it should not have been this much work to get the desired end result. However, the model is miles better than the old Frog Super VC10 and Airfix kit, though the latter is an apples to oranges comparison. I'd love Airfix to do an all-new-tool Standard VC10, because more of those were built and there's a much wider range of markings options for those. You must admit though, its hard to beat a BOAC Speedbird in blue and white. As always, comments, thoughts, follow up questions and the like are most welcome. And now, there's this Douglas jet i heard about that they called "The Whale", and of course my Tamiya F-4B Phantom beckons. Fly Navy!!
- 37 replies
-
- 71
-
-
-
- Vickers Super VC10
- Roden 1/144
-
(and 1 more)
Tagged with:
-
One of the great things about Britmodeller is learning from and being inspired by other modellers’ work. Some time ago @Turbofan posted a wonderful BOAC Super VC-10 in RFI and that was the push I needed to do one of my own, despite knowing I could never match Ian’s standards! My model was actually completed several months ago but I didn’t post it at the time because I wasn’t happy with some aspects, particularly the finishing. Unlike Ian who sensibly painted his cheatlines and fin, I used Two Six Decals. The cheatlines proved to be thick and intransigent and the less said about the fin decals the better. In fairness to Ray these problems are not typical. It was an old sheet which had been in my stash for some time and I see he is now using BOA for his printing so hopefully more recent issues will be better. I was also unhappy with the over-scale pitots and some of the other smaller details so I didn’t really feel the model was up to RFI standards. In the early summer my wife decided we were going to redecorate our shared office-cum-hobbies-room which meant a massive (and much-needed) clear-out during which I found the remains of an old Two Six Models photo-etch fret intended for the Airfix VC10. There were a couple of pitots and some other small parts left. That prompted me to revisit G-ASGD and after a bit of smartening up here she finally is. The kit is, of course, by Roden. As I’ve mentioned, decals are by Two Six. I supplemented them with Authentic Airliners BAC1-11 cabin windows, another idea pinched from Turbofan, and BM member @Malair provided the excellent windscreen decal - thanks Martijn! Although finishing was a bit of an issue, building the kit itself was easy and straightforward. I have a second one laid aside for conversion to a Standard, again borrowing ideas from other Britmodellers. No timescale for that just now but hopefully it will appear in the next couple of years. Thanks for looking and as always constructive criticism is welcome. Dave G
- 35 replies
-
- 75
-
-
Sorry if I got all you Strictly fans out there all in a tizz expecting sequins and all that pizazz, but there's no Foxtrot in this thread (just a Hotel for the Tail code I'm afraid). We could publish a photo or two of Ola at some point though if I can find a tenuous enough reason to add her to this thread! I've now started my first attempt at an oh so fiddly 1/144 kit for over 35 years and I tell you that the eyesight is now definitely poorer and the fingers porkier, so this may be a trial by fire, but hey we all wanna see that don't we - car crash moddeling at its best! We are attempting the Roden Super VC-10 K3, to be finished in the Hemp scheme to allow http://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.php?/profile/98-roland-pulfrew/ to add the all grey version of this beautiful bird (can I add Ola's photo after this comment he thinks?) after he's finished his East African civvy version. On to the box shots (stop it before you even start Ced!): And a couple of quick photos of some flash with various parts attached to it! and some photo etch which I'm sure will result in my being stuck together with CA as usual! Hopefully this will be a far far quicker and more rewarding build than the 1/24 Spit that I've just beaten into submission finished. Look away if you love your Spitfires with dihedral!!! I've cleaned up these monster sprue attachment points on the fuselages and have cleaned up and stuck together the tail parts, the wings and the engine assemblies. I have added some brass tube to the exhausts to give some depth to them, and have started building the photoetch cockpit. I will clean these up and restore lost details before I show and tell these parts as I have found the Roden plastic extremely soft and liable to deform/warp/get covered in fingerprints after an attack from Tamiya Extra Thin. Anyways will upload some more piccys to Flikr as and when we get a bit further down the road for your delectation. Thanks for looking in, until next time - Keeeeeeeeeeeeep Modelling!!!
-
Vickers VC-10 RAF C1K XR808. XR808 was the first VC-10 delivered to the RAF nd the last one to be retired. Now at the RAF Museum at Cosford. Pics mine.
-
Greetings everyone I am almost done with my Lazarev build and I had a really hard choice of what to build next: 1/48 SU-33, 1/48 Viggen, 1/72 TU-22 Blinder, 1/72 TU-160 Blackjack or 1/144 AN-22. Instead, the 1/72 VC-10 won out because of my recent experience with the Anigrand C-5 Galaxy. I thoroughly enjoyed making that, so I pulled this one out ready to go Upon taking photos and an earlier exploration, I realised that this one is vastly different. It's no where near as good as the C-5 in terms of fit but the quality of the casting itself is brilliant. Very few bubbles and the ones that are there will never be seen Now, no one can ever say that I wasn't warned about the challenges of building an Anigrand kit! This one will certainly have it's own ......issues to fix, as you will see in the below photos. I've only shown some of them - not all as I am sure I haven't found them all yet. Good news is that they are all relatively minor and are fixable! So, what do you get for your $260AU kit? Quite a bit of resin that's for sure but disappointingly, you don't get any bonus smaller kits. Which is a shame but not the end of the world I will be using the 26 Decals for the 90th Anniversary scheme (VX-105) - the most attractive in my eyes. The only thing I am not happy about with the decals is that the black tail is literally a decal - I don't have the option to just paint the tail - which I find annoying. I just want the fancy logo and writing. I can paint black all on my lonesome thanks... However, no one else to my knowledge produces said decals in 72nd, so I shall make do. I have done a lot of internet searches for this kit and I have found only 3 of note - 2 of which allude to cutting the cockpit. Initially, I just thought that to be a bit...anal retentive, however, upon dry fitting the canopy - I can now see why said cuts are made - and it's not just to conform to a drawing. The fit of the canopy is f....well, let's just say it's never going to be a "perfect fit". In fact, it does it's very best to not fit at all. But again, it should be fixable. I am going to try and fix it without having to cut up the body. So, enough talking, here are some pre-build photos to see what you get: not the smoothest joint ever: Some slight warping presumably making a not quite all together mating of the rear body halves: the front end isn't much better: the canopy fitting - or not as the case maybe: the only air bubbles I found: With the wings joined up, there is a distinctive step left on the leading edges - I forsee some major sanding coming up.... And last but not least, a shot of Anigrand's incredibly comprehensive instructions: I will be making this one in-flight, so will not have to think up a way to display it on a stand of sorts. This should be fun! I will be back later once i make a solid start on this. If you have any ideas or experiences with this kit, I would love to hear it Till next time! Simon
-
Well I finally finished her... I have to say a big thank you to BM member sailorboy61 for kindly sending me a replacement BOAC decal after I managed to rip off the original removing some masking tape! Cheers Iain
- 16 replies
-
- 17
-
-
Morning all! This is my quick OOB (almost) build of the Roden VC-10 K3 1:144 kit. Nothing much more to say so lets get on with it : Kit: Roden VC-10 K3 1:144 (From my LMS- Mike's Models) Paints: Vallejo Model Air custom-mixed grey (based on reference photos) Vallejo Model Air black, Model Color silver Washes: Vallejo Model Wash-dark grey Additional Details: Refuelling basket (inside the central refueling pod) made from rolled up tissue paper Spare RAF roundels had to be used on the side of the fuselage due to an error made by myself Flaps were produced, cutting out the kit's flaps on the underside of the wing and using plasticard to make up the rest of the structure Spoilers/speedbrakes were produced from paper Pros: Great recessed panel lines on the wings and rear control surfaces Nicely detailed engine pods (especially the thrust reverser gratings) Lots (and lots!) of decals, especially on the refuelling pods, which were not all used in this build Window masks (which i stupidly put on every single window and ended up running out of masks half way down the other side!) Relatively cheap- depending on your LMS/supplier Numerous tiny aerials and probes supplied Cons: Very shallow panel lines on the main fuselage body Ejector pins on fuselage join, when these were removed I found that there was a poor fuselage join Very unusual scheme, I can find only one image of this scheme on the internet-apparently the crews "were not a fan" Decal placement sheet was sometimes difficult to interpret Base kit does not have an option for spoilers or flaps Quite a few decals were out of register, but this shouldn't really matter Thanks for having a look Kind regards, Sam
-
Just made a start on this kit, I did intend to build one for the group build but I ran out of time! The kit looks very nice and looks like it will be a lot less work than the C-17! The main problem with this kit is that despite what it says on the box, it's not a K.2! It is a mix of K.2 and C.1K. Although this kit will be built as a C.1K (XR808), I will point out along the way, the alterations needed for each version and the corrections needed for both. It never ceases to amaze me how Anigrand managed to cram such large aircraft kits into relatively tiny boxes! The kit appears to be based on the A A P Lloyd drawings and matches them very closely...... ..until you get to the nose and cockpit section! The resin is quite thick and very well moulded with only a couple of small air bubbles to fill on my example. There are large locating lugs that will aid positioning and strengthen the joints. The following is a correction needed for both versions. I made a start on the cockpit, it's not too difficult to correct, the outline looks accurate and only requiring a couple of cuts and a small amount of filling and filing. The section above the cut line was removed and raised to match the plans. The cockpit interior acted as a support for the upper section and aided the filling of the resulting gap in the nose section. With the upper nose section raised, the cockpit windows are now at the correct height but the line is wrong. To get the window line right and the roof outline correct, I removed the shaded areas The result is a much better outline and cockpit window position. The fuselage has been positioned off the drawing to compare with the outline. With the exception of extra detail work, as it stands, the fuselage is now correct for a K.2 More to follow tomorrow!
-
..and I thought you might like to see Also If anyone here uses Facebook, I now have a page that I'm slowly filling up too, that can be found HERE Some tricky conditions and some not-so-tricky, anyway - onto the pics! 87-0023 MC-130P - Brize Norton by Totallyrad.co.uk, on Flickr 87-0023 MC-130P - Brize Norton by Totallyrad.co.uk, on Flickr XV104 by Totallyrad.co.uk, on Flickr Head on with a classic. by Totallyrad.co.uk, on Flickr Untitled by Totallyrad.co.uk, on Flickr N545CC - Kidlington by Totallyrad.co.uk, on Flickr UAE C-17 - Brize Norton by Totallyrad.co.uk, on Flickr XV214 by Totallyrad.co.uk, on Flickr Untitled by Totallyrad.co.uk, on Flickr Farnborough 2010 by Totallyrad.co.uk, on Flickr Farnborough 2010 by Totallyrad.co.uk, on Flickr Climbing out from Hanoi. by Totallyrad.co.uk, on Flickr 9M-AHN taken from ATR-72 RDPL-34174 by Totallyrad.co.uk, on Flickr RDPL-34175 by Totallyrad.co.uk, on Flickr Let-410 RDPL-34158 - Wattay International Airport (Vientiane airport, Laos) by Totallyrad.co.uk, on Flickr Untitled by Totallyrad.co.uk, on Flickr HS-PGM by Totallyrad.co.uk, on Flickr 5020 by Totallyrad.co.uk, on Flickr F-AZJS Supermarine 389 Spitfire PR19 by Totallyrad.co.uk, on Flickr M-JACK - Farnborough 2010 by Totallyrad.co.uk, on Flickr A400M - Farnborough 2010 by Totallyrad.co.uk, on Flickr A380 marking it's terrority! by Totallyrad.co.uk, on Flickr C-27J by Totallyrad.co.uk, on Flickr Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor by Totallyrad.co.uk, on Flickr
- 11 replies
-
- 3
-
-
Hi all Can someone tell me what museums have received an RAF VC-10 Please. I understand one has gone to Newquay Museum Is one going to Cosford? Whats the one a Dunsfold there for? Has a complete one gone to Brooklands? Thanks Bradley
-
Here are some from the Brize Norton photocall, only 200 places and I was very lucky to fill one of them! Very sad loss to our skies. I do have a few more to add, I will do once I have finished editing them. Hope they are of interest. MB9T9967 by Rainbow 1984, on Flickr ZA147 Vickers VC10 K3 - Brize Norton Photocall 22/09/2013 by Rainbow 1984, on Flickr ZA147 Vickers VC10 K3 - Brize Norton Photocall 22/09/2013 by Rainbow 1984, on Flickr ZA147 Vickers VC10 K3 - Brize Norton Photocall 22/09/2013 by Rainbow 1984, on Flickr ZA147 Vickers VC10 K3 - Brize Norton Photocall 22/09/2013 by Rainbow 1984, on Flickr ZA147 Vickers VC10 K3 - Brize Norton Photocall 22/09/2013 by Rainbow 1984, on Flickr
-
Walkaround of a Standard VC10, BUA spec and the fuselage of a BOAC spec. There are also a couple of VC10 C1k pics with the flaps, slats, RAT, antennas and gear doors deployed. Reg's are A40-AB (G-ASIX), G-ARVM, XV109, XR807.Pics from Mike (mike1275)