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B-2 Spirit - Testors 1/72


Skii

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Firkin what!!!!! How sweet is that........damn I wish I had the patience to do that, the cockpit entry shaft is superb, and the cockpit itself is awesome!

Will be maintaining a watch on this beauty!!

Looking good mate.

Rgds,

Eng

PS -

Its not good, far too many builds on the go at once, nothing finished, disorganised chaos everywhere, filthy looks from the accountant (sorry i meant fiancee)

and bits of various projects in every corner of the house.

So I started another one

Damn that's me in a nutshell - just fished another 3 kits out the loft today!! LOL

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:gobsmacked: John if the rest of the build is as impressive as the "pit" you have a prize winner, hands down.....no doubt!!!. 'nuff said!!!.
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AMS - that feared and dreaded disease! :analintruder:

:crap:

How wonderful it is when someone else has got it too! I'm really enjoying this one - and learning a lot from it. :thumbsup:

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Thankyou guys, glad you are enjoying the build :)

Right - I got a bit bored this weekend, still pondering about how to simulate the shrouded engines, once the intakes are assembled the engines are quite visible from some angles so the blank wall in the kit doesn't really cut the mustard.

I've been looking at 1/144 resin airliner engines to see if they will do the job, and whilst pondering on this solution decided to have a go at scratchbuilding an engine

sooo, I used a piece of shaped sprue for the axle, thin strips of styrene card for the blades, and a short section of casing from a ballpoint pen, some foil tape and a piece of metal mesh

et voila

engine1.jpg

Now i need another 3 !!!

Similar mountain to climb here - I've scribed vertical tread onto one of the main gear wheels, fairly happy with the result.... 11 more to go :(

wheel1.jpg

still..its progress...

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Don't know if you've tried this method before Skii, superglue the wheel onto a toothpick or similar thin stick, and chuck the whole thing in a motor tool, then as the motor tool spins, all you have to do is touch a pin (be careful to secure the pin in something, and be ready for the impact because otherwise the pin will go flying/make a squiggly line) to the wheel and it makes a perfectly straight line ;)

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Don't know if you've tried this method before Skii, superglue the wheel onto a toothpick or similar thin stick, and chuck the whole thing in a motor tool, then as the motor tool spins, all you have to do is touch a pin (be careful to secure the pin in something, and be ready for the impact because otherwise the pin will go flying/make a squiggly line) to the wheel and it makes a perfectly straight line ;)

Thats what I did mate ;) The wheel was mounted in my dremel but needs a lot of tidying up afterwards with a scriber and sandpaper :)

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Great job John old chap, nice to see someone else who'se into getting right into the guts of the thing...lol,

Looking forward to seeing the end result fella,

(by the way, sorry if you've already seen it ,but have you had a gander at the awesome John Vojtech model over on ARC , truly inspirational , I've seen this up close and it is really amazing !!)......................... no pressure then ...LOL

Keep up the good work,

Cheers,

Andy

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  • 2 weeks later...

cheers Melchy , its certainly an inspiration to work to, and I've been chatting to a certain Mr Vojtech via email, he's been most helpful in assisting me with images from his build and reference pics for the engine intake assembly, hes certainly a very nice and helpful chap :)

Talking of helpful chaps a certain Mr Neil Burkill has been helping me out again with my engine, he very kindly has cast me some perfect copies of the engine and treaded wheel as I didn't fancy the prospect of attempting to make 3 more identical copies !!!

resinengine.jpg

So I've been working on the engine intakes and exhausts, firstly the kit exhaust plate which fits into the rear of the upper wing was drilled out, more on these later ;)

exhaustbefore.jpg

exhaustafter.jpg

Next the air intakes, I dremelled them back in order to accomodate the resin engines, this necessitated building a u-shaped channel from styrene card and mounting it in place with copious amounts of CA, once secure the upper side was smoothed in place with milliput and sanded / primed until a seamless channel was created on both port and starboard sides.

intaketrunk.jpg

intaketrunktop.jpg

now with the lower intake assembly done I turned my attention to the upper intake assemblies, here is the part before

intakebefore.jpg

The auxiliary doors were cut open and styrene card strips inserted around the door holes, these were drilled and provide a base for the auxiliary doors to sit on, a central splitter plate has also been added to the upper intake mouth.

intakeafter.jpg

Whilst figuring out how to mount the engines into the finished channel I decided to try to use the casting blocks whilst still attached to the engine, 2 of these separated by a thin sheet of styrene card holds the engines together perfectly and can be fixed in place to the fuselage - hey...it works !!!

enginestestfit.jpg

Now with the engines in place the upper intake assembly in place shows a glimpse of the engines through the auxiliary intake doors

intaketopon.jpg

From the front

intakedone.jpg

more to come :)

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This is top quality work! Any chance of it making Telford?

Martin

cheers Martin.

I suspect no sadly, it would have been a cracking maiden flight for her :(

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Talking of helpful chaps a certain Mr Neil Burkill has been helping me out again with my engine, he very kindly has cast me some perfect copies of the engine and treaded wheel as I didn't fancy the prospect of attempting to make 3 more identical copies !!!

Whilst figuring out how to mount the engines into the finished channel I decided to try to use the casting blocks whilst still attached to the engine, 2 of these separated by a thin sheet of styrene card holds the engines together perfectly and can be fixed in place to the fuselage - hey...it works !!!

more to come :)

Blimey, the postman must of been wearing a personal jet-pack, I only posted them late yesterday afternoon :D

Coming along nicely John.

B)

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For some reason I havn't picked up on this thread before, maybe I didn't think I was authorised!

Amazing work Skii, attention to detail is supurb, love the engines, really nice, actually, so is the rest!

Look forwards to seeing more....

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John,

Well, I didnt think there was much you could to one of these things, but boy have you shown me wrong :yikes: The cockpit and the bomb bay details are simply out of this world :worthy::worthy:

I never thought Id say this about a B2, but Im actually looking forwards to seeing this one finished :goodjob:

Thanks for sharing

Bex

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  • 1 month later...

thanks again peeps, very kind of you :)

Its been a fair while since my last update, and a lot has been done, but I'm still only halfway there...

Fuselage halves together, some bracing and bending was required due to some warping of the lower fuselage which is mostly ironed out now, I've spend literally hours sanding the joins to be seamless, 120 grit sandpaper is the good stuff and thankfully there is no surface detail to preserve in the process, 2 bottles of CA, styrene card and rod for the particularly bad joins, and voila.

fuselagetogether1.jpg

as you can see I've dropped the 'beaver -tail' which required filling out with milliput and plastic card, the same can be said for the inboard flaps.

flaps.jpg

flaps2.jpg

more to come

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