Javelin Squared

[F-32]

Nice, I do like the Javelin!

[Vulcanicity]

Thank you everyone! Sten, I'll definitey take your advice about the tailplanes, thanks. Not sure what I can do about the exhaust pipes though: unlike the Airfix jetpipes they're mouled integral with the fuselage halves, and it'd make a right mess trying to cut them out...

As for the FAW.7 rear end, I guess you could try and kitbash it from the Airfix rear end (it had crossed my mind) but I suspect that you'd have to use a hell of a lot of filler/determination. At least underneath, the aircraft's skin was faired around the two jetpipes with a trough between them (like the rear end of a Lightning, or underside of a Vulcan's exhausts) rather than the flat-bottomed fuselage underneath the jetpipes seen on all the other marks. This could be tricky to make from scratch, I reckon.

I've been quite busy with my dissertation this week, so little of note has acutally got done apart from a bit more cleaning-up of the Frog kits wings, a bit more rescribing of the Airfix kit, and the painting of the jetpipe area. I'll post some pictures presently, when I get a moment!

Edited December 2, 2011 by Vulcanicity

[Vulcanicity]

Well, it's been a while. Dissertation, finishing the Airfix Valiant, and Tamiya Spitfire-shaped distractions have got in the way of the Javelins! However, I should now be back on track, and I'll start by updating the thread and getting it up to speed with my progress since December...

Having finished the two scratchbuilt exhaust faces for the Armstrong-Siddeley Sapphire engines, they got a lick of paint:

And then attached to some 9mm brass pipe, and placed into the rear fuselage stub from the Frog kit...

This required quite a bit of thinning of the exhausts from the inside. However, I was able to get the two halves together without too much fuss.

Meanwhile, my Airwaves airbrakes had arrived courtesy of everyone's favourite Lowestoft model supplier.

I was intending to pose them closed, and hoped that the nice Photoetched metal parts would leave me with a neater result than attempting to scribe endless tiny rectangles on the kit parts. Too late I realised that they weren't really designed to be posed closed: the slots in the airbrakes did not match up at all well with the raised panel sections on the backing panel:

Hmmm....some ingenuity required here methinks! Watch this space....

In an effort to forget the airbrake issue, I carried on cleaning up the Frog kit. A coat of primer revealed that my efforts at patching up the shattered fragments of the kit, then filling, sanding and scribing had been reasonably successful. I also cut chunks of 1mm plasticard to fill the slot for the stand and simulate closed nosewheel bay doors.

The only major part of the Frog kit missing was a sizeable corner of the port wingroot at the trailing edge (see the earlier pictures). This had snapped off leaving a clean, curved break. Not fancying trying to shape plasticard to match this break, I squared up the hole and cut a rectangular patch to stick in place.

I've also completely removed the missile pylon and gun stubs, smoothed the leading edge seams, and drilled holes for the recessed cannons of the earlier Javelin marks. Apart from the main wheel well doors, which I need to scratchbuild from plasticard, the Frog kit wings are more or less done.

That's it for today, in the next update I tackle those pesky airbrakes and finish off the exhausts...

[Nobby]

Looking great Phil from here! And people thought I was mad to tackle my Defiant! I really hope you see this through though!

[Work In Progress]

Yes, the Frog one in particular is looking surprisingly good considering the state it was in. Just goes to prove that things can be brought back from what may at first appear to be well beyond the grave ...

[perdu]

As I'm a great fanboy for Frog's old models I'm not surprised that the renowned industrial strength plastic has withstood time and mangulation well enough to be entered in "Restored Model Of The Year" and has a pretty close to "right" profile to be worth working on.

Doing the same with their Wessex myself after all

Your work so far, dissertation excepted (not sending it out for us to review I expect ) shows that you are winning, nice one

When you showed the pictures of the Airwaves stuff I was more than a bit amazed, surely to God it should correspond somewhere

Still, what you have done is great

I love to see a plan come together

[Vulcanicity]

Thanks all! No I won't post up my dissertation, unless you really want to read 7000 words about parental risk-taking behaviour in nesting songbirds! :b

Yes, the Frog kit is made of stern stuff! Unfortunately the plastic doesn't take all that well to poly cement: the joins hold reasonably well, but not as firmly as with more modern plastics. So I'm trying not to drop the fuselage halves lest they break apart again!

I too was rather disappointed with the Airwaves set, but I suppose the whole point of it was to pose the airbrakes open with minimal fuss. It's just a shame for me that Javelins on the ground never seem to have them open, and that Airwaves didn't think that people might want them closed...

[perdu]

Songbirds...nesting... sonds good to me

About the Airwaves stuff, I think I'd be tempted to use the b....y things as a scribing template then send em back as useless for purpose

No, only kidding

But they are a disappointment

Which "glue" are you using? I am doing quite well with the Revell semiliquid gloop stuff

bill

[Vulcanicity]

OK, here's my plan with the airbrakes. First, use CA to attach them to 1mm plasticard of roughly the right size and shape:

Then , fill the little slots with pieces of plasticard strip cut to size. 0.3x0.8mm strip works for some of them, but since the slots are of uneven size, some have to be cut out from plasticard sheet.

Then, run the scriber round the edges of the each airbrake slot to make sure the join between metal and plasticard shows up, cut a hole in the wing the right size and shape, and glue in the whole airbrake assembly!

OK, so the photo-etched etched airbrake built using this method (left) looks slightly better than the hand-scribed kit part-but I'm not really convinced it justifies the effort. Oh well, only three more to go!

Rather more satisfying has been the finishing work on the exhausts.

The real Javelin has a row of square holes around the extreme end of the afterburning exhaust pipe. On the original Frog kit, there existed a separate ring-shaped piece, which extended the exhaust pipe (by about a milimetre or two) to its correct length, and had these holes moulded in as dimples. However, little more than fragments of this assembly remained on Troy's Frog kit, and I decided to try and replicate this effect from scratch. I couldn't simply drill holes in the existing ends of the exhausts, as without these moulded rings Frog provide the pipes are too short. So after much trial and error and thinking over Christmas, this is what I came up with:

The 1mm plasticard base has recieved a 13mm hole drilled in it to match the inner diameter of the kit exhausts, and 28 pieces of plasticard strip have been glued on at (hopefully) equal spacing radially around it.

Glued to the end of the exhaust, and sanded down, here's the result!

Like the airbrake work, this is VERY tedious, but in this case I think it makes a real difference to the end result. Just got to face doing the other one now!

PS Bill (perdu) I am using Humbrol Poly cement. I was probably exaggerating, it's more than strong enough for my needs, it's just that the joints aren't quite as tough as with brand-new plastic.

[perdu]

Those tail pipe mods look the bee's knees (a definite for them)

(thought there may have been a tad of cheektongueology about the glues )

But a point worth wondering, how different are the modern plastics to that almost creamy consistency stuff Frog's are made of?

I remember the Javelin mouldings when new felt quite soapy to the touch even after washing off the mould release, which I often neglected on the old Airfix models because they usually "felt" dry enough to use.

[Vulcanicity]

OK! Some more progress despite all this pesky biology I keep having to do...

I rescribed the Airfix fin on both sides following my reference photos, and was amazed to discover that not only the pattern of access panels, but also the main structural panel joints are totally different on the two sides. Neither kit captures this, perhaps unsurprisingly! Staying with the tail unit, I cut the tailplane into three, because as someone noted back on Page 1, aircraft at rest tended to display the all-moving tailplanes drooping slightly.

I lined the mating surfaces of the tailplanes with thin plasticard, which neatly makes up for the width lost from the saw cuts and subsequent sanding. Then it was an easy task to complete the tail unit, although the pivot point for the tailplanes is a bit of a guess from photos.

There's little else photo-worthy been done on the Airfix kit, as finishing the other three airbrakes has been a long and tedious job.

So onto the Frog Kit. I've decided to finish the kit as an early FAW.1. This is partly because the contrast of a "clean" aircraft with the missile-laden FAW.9 will be interesting, but mostly because there was no way I can be bothered to rebuild the splintered remains of the underbelly fuel tanks, or spend hours scratchbuilding the rows and rows of vortex generators carried by all the other marks! Call me lazy, but...

The FAW1 pen nib exhausts can be scratchbuilt as a conversion of the existing Airfix tailcone; the instructions I used are here: http://www.btinternet.com/~javelin/p11_mod...el_javelins.htm.

First I stuck together the top and bottom halves of the severed rear fuselage to be glued straight onto the Frog kit, as this needs no modification. Then I made the recommended cuts to the separate tailcone, here are the two sections together:

It takes no time at all with the 1mm plasticard to scratchbuild the additions to make the skeleton of the exhaust section. The original rear fuselage had a flat face with holes in to take the undersized afterburner cans, which the instructions obviously call to remove. I replaced the bit with the holes recessed back into the modified exhaust subassembly, as it willl be ideal for holding the jetpipes in the right place.

The Airfix jetpipes are now redundant, but given that they have a reasonable compressor face into them, I decided to use them as intakes for the Frog kit. The finished Frog kit is going to hang on my ceiling, so the depth and shape of the intakes won't really matter: it just needs to look presentable.

The Frog kit came from Troy without wheels, undercarriage legs or doors, hence the decision to build it wheels-up and hanging! I still had to make some doors to fit the wings though, so I Tamiya taped the Airfix parts together and used them as a guide to cut a replacement from the trusty 1mm plasticard:

Turns out the Airfix doors are rather bigger than the Frog wheelbay: I spent what seemed like forever fettling the new door to fit! After installation, scribing and a LOT of filler around the very jagged edges of the bay, here's the result under a thin coat of Aluminium to show up the blemishes. Yes, it's far from perfect, but consider what it started out like. My sole aim with this kit is to get it looking presentable and in one piece...

So with the new "intakes" glued in, the Frog kit could suddenly proceed. The sharp-eyed will notice that I've been scribing the airbrake into the replacement upperwing panel I installed last time. This is very difficult and very tedious, I shall be extremely glad when all the airbrakes on both kits are behind me! That, a bit of seam work and drilling some guns into the starboard wing, and the whole lot can go together and the tailfin can go on. At last, something is beginning to look like a Javelin!

That's all for now, off to go and read about coral reef acidification...

[Nobby]

Great work so far Phil. Considering what you started out with, its looking like your going to have a decent model. Well done!

[Severus]

Still I'm surprised, how good FROG stands on! Got one F.A.W. IX - though not original FROG, but from USSR.

Is there any other tooling?

[Vulcanicity]

Thanks Nobby! Whenever I feel the scratchbuilding is getting me down I think of you with your Defiant!

Severus:

No, I don't think there are any other toolings to speak of apart from the Frog FAW.9 and Heller T.3 (which Airfix permanently modified to form the FAW.9). There is also an incredibly ancient Hawk kit of the prototype Javelin, but it's probably awful, and impossible to find.

The Airfix kit is definitely better and more detailed than the Frog kit , but really the aircraft needs modern, high-quality, accurate 1:72nd and 1:48th kits. (An Airfix kit of Valiant/Gnat quality would do fine!)

[Work In Progress]

Turns out the Airfix doors are rather bigger than the Frog wheelbay: I spent what seemed like forever fettling the new door to fit! After installation, scribing and a LOT of filler around the very jagged edges of the bay, here's the result under a thin coat of Aluminium to show up the blemishes. Yes, it's far from perfect, but consider what it started out like.

Phil,

I love what you're doing with this pair. The Airfix one is turning out a proper tour de force. It is truly fearless and economical-minded of you to pull the Frog kit back together, but I am amazed at how well it is starting to look.

Your dedication in making those gear doors is to be admired: but did it not occur to you to simply fill the wheel wells with Milliput and then just scribe in the lines between the door panels?

Edited February 28, 2012 by Work In Progress

[Vulcanicity]

Thanks! Well funny you should say that, I suppose it must have crossed my mind at some point! The main problem is that the bays are open-not at all boxed in. So before I filled the bays I would have to spend time boxing them in, so that the filler didn't just spread sideways into the wing... I suppose I thought that I had to break out the plasticard either way, I might as well just try and scratchbuild the doors. I was also probably spurred on by my success with the patch for the port wing. Lastly, I use Revell filler rather than Miliput, which is rather tricky to work with on that kind of scale! I'm really pushing it to its limits building up the pen-nib exhaust at the moment.

Perhaps I should invest in some Miliput but I've always been put off by the fact that it's a two-part mixture.

The Frog kit is proving quite a battle: between smoothing the Airfix rear fuselage into it, cleaning up the fuselage seams, and the wing joints it has used up an industrial quantity of filler! Sanding is hard because the slightly soapy plastic sticks to the sandpaper and clogs up my needle files.

I've still got to fill the fin-fuselage joint and clean up the gaping seams between the wing and fuselage, which I've already filled with plasticard strip. Somehow, I think that the fit of this kit would have been awful even without it being broken into multiple pieces!

However, it's looking like an aeroplane now, and the shaping of the pen-nib exhausts isn't quite as impossible as I feared! It's come a fair way in only four months, given how much biology I've also got done in the same time! After the basic structure is together and cleaned up, I'll prime and get on with the Airfix kit...

[Vulcanicity]

Hi all,

Little more to report, as recent work has simply been more cleaning up on the Frog kit. However, I have now basically finished the pen-nib exhaust!

So if you recall, it started like this:

The structure was perfect to add filler, and the inclusion of the end bit with the circular holes (to hold the jetpipes) proved a sensible idea. I coated Revell Aqua acryllic silver over the filler after each coat to check for blemishes and stabilise the surface.

The light isn't great, but hopefully this shot shows off the finished article! Having slid the brass jetpipes in, and added the little subsidiary exhausts from electrical wire sheathing, I just need to add some blanking plates to the forward ends of the jetpipes (I'm not bothering with turbine faces on this one), and then it's ready to just slot into the Airfix rear end, which I've finished grafting onto the Frog kit. Quite a Frankenjavelin!

[jimbuna]

Performing some great modelling work here.

[Nobby]

Looking good mate! Trying to get hold of the Airfix one myself and I've got the Novo/Frog kit coming from a bloke in Sweden who I talk to on Farcebook! Definitely inspired by your thread!

[keefr22]

Severus:

No, I don't think there are any other toolings to speak of apart from the Frog FAW.9 and Heller T.3 (which Airfix permanently modified to form the FAW.9). There is also an incredibly ancient Hawk kit of the prototype Javelin, but it's probably awful, and impossible to find.

There is another Javelin available, from ZTS Plastyk. It's boxed as being an FAW7/9. I don't know its provenence, but it's definitely different from the Frog & Airfix kits as it has engraved panel lines! I had one but sold it at SMW last year, as the plastyk (sorry!) it was moulded from looked & felt horrible!! As I'd already done most of the scribing on an Airfix kit I thought I'd stick with that!

Great work on your two Javs, I'm glad you brought up the problems with the Airwaves airbrakes as that's the next job on mine when I get back to it. Shall have to have a think about them...!!

Keef

[Vulcanicity]

Thanks Jimbuna, Nobby and Keef!

Good luck getting hold of the Airfix kit Nobby, they seem to be like hen's teeth! I snapped up mine on E-Bay a couple of years back-it came all the way from the US somewhere!

I've heard about the ZTS Plastyk one, and understand it's pretty awful. I hope that Airfix do the aircraft justice soon, but not before I've finished these two...! (and not before the Lightning in 1:72nd!)

[keefr22]

Good luck getting hold of the Airfix kit Nobby, they seem to be like hen's teeth!

I saw a couple for sale at Telford last year & they were both well north of £20! I was thinking of getting another to convert to an earlier version but left them well alone!

I've heard about the ZTS Plastyk one, and understand it's pretty awful.

Shapewise I understand it's possibly the best 1/72 one available, but I only compared it to the Airfix one - it looked much the same as I remember (it's a few years back now though!) & the panel lines weren't badly done, but not enough of an improvement over my scribing on the Airfix kit to warrant trying to work with the plastic it was moulded from. The kit came with some evil looking phial of what I assumed was glue - I'd read a review somewhere that said the kit was impervious to poly cement - but I really didn't fancy opening said phial in case it was actually some kind of chemical weapon . And I only use superglue if I can't possibly use anything else, so I let the kit go. The kit plastic looked & felt horrible - greasy, full of flowmarks & it appeared that it could be rather brittle. When I bought it it was really cheap on e-bay, don't know what one would fetch now though...

And I agree that Airfix need to do a new one, though having spent so much time on the 72nd one, I now personally think I'd rather they do a 1/48th to sit next to the Sea Vixen!

Keef

Edit;

I was just browsing e-bay & came across a 'Gomix' 1/72 Javelin FAW4/9 (not sure that both variants would actually be catered for), the picture of which I'm pretty sure is the same as the boxart of the ZTS Plastyk one I had. The seller states it has recessed panel lines, so may well be the same one - but maybe now moulded in a better plastic??

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/GLOSTER-JAVELIN-...=item3372a536c3

Edited March 5, 2012 by keefr22

[Pat C]

Shapewise I understand it's possibly the best 1/72 one available,

Keef - I didn't like the Plastyk one - the top of the fuselage seems to be completely flat. Looking at the real thing to my eye it looks more like a very gentle curve in that area which I though Heller (or Airfix) had portrayed better. As you say also the yucky brown plastic has a weird grain effect so it looks like it is carved out of a lump of wood!

Pat

[keefr22]

Keef - I didn't like the Plastyk one - the top of the fuselage seems to be completely flat. Looking at the real thing to my eye it looks more like a very gentle curve in that area which I though Heller (or Airfix) had portrayed better. As you say also the yucky brown plastic has a weird grain effect so it looks like it is carved out of a lump of wood!

Pat

The plastic in mine was black Pat - well, more like marbled black!! (although I did have a Novo moulding of the Frog one in a fetching chocolate brown plastic!!) TBH, I really didn't spend that much time looking at the ZTS thing shapwise!

Keef

[Pat C]

more like marbled black

You're right - black rather than brown. Still yucky though!