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Revell 1:48 Mosquito B Mk IV (finished!)


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So here is my first GB entry since my return from the wilderness... :)

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Its the Revell kit, which is known for faults in the landing gear - ie its too tall and too flimsy. So my solution to that is to build it in FLYING mode!!! Gosh imagine that, building a model of an aircraft actually doing what its supposed to do rather than just sitting on the ground! The Heresy!

Now the fundamental problem with that idea is that there are NO PILOTS in the kit. So to solve this I turn to PJ Productions who do some lovely resin figures and in particular a very nice RAF pilot. So here is the aftermarket stuff I've got for this build:

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Thats 2 Pilot figures, canopy masks, cockpit PE, kit decals (missed them off the sprue shot above) and if required some RAF instrument dial decals from airscale. Don't know if I'll need the last one, but its there if I need it!

I shall commence the build tonight as I finally finished the 1:32 Hurricane I've been building since mid-December. Need to post photos it the thread for that...

Tally ho!

Edited by Kallisti
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The landing gear is actually too short!

the spiners are too short which makes then too blunt, compared to both Tamiya and Airfix

The leading edge radiators are a bit short as well.

all fixable.

The old Airfix mosquito comes with a couple of very well sculpted figures, in particular a navigator looking to one side and pointing to a map on his lap.. but that's a bit late now :(

HTH

T

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Hi Kallisti

I'm building one of these as well so looking forward to seeing what you make of it!

I checked the gear legs and wheels against the Tamiya kit and the legs a re a couple of mm shorter, also the (dampers / reserviors??) on each side of the leg are slightly shoter and thinner than the Tamiya ones. The wheels are a couple of mm larger diameter as well..

I know the spinners are a bit blunt in profile but when i checked them against a scaled drawing the width to length ratio seems about right so dont think they are short.

Anyways, looking forward to seeing this come together,

Cheers, Stu

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Welcome along for the ride! So to begin - as I said I want to make this a flying model so we need pilot and navigator. This is the superb resin figure from PJ Productions:

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There is a tiny bit of flash but its easy to deal with. The moulding is superb. I tried him out in the chair:

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After this when test fitting to the cockpit I realised the lags had to be bent down a bit at the knee so the feet came close to the pedals and sadly the feet had to come off as they didn't fit onto the pedals because of the thick mouldings from the Revell kit. You won't be abel to see it when the cockpit is closed up however.

Speaking of the cockpit, here is the radio from the Eduard Zoom set test fitted:

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To my mind it looks a bit... mmmm... cartoony. I do like the side panels though and the front of the panel next to the navigator seat is excellent.

So what about the navigator/bomb aimer? Well my vision is to have the model with the bomb bay doors open so that means the navigator will most likely be in this position:

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As you can see I've filed off most of the parachute he would normally be sitting on and will be attaching the torso differently to the way the pilot goes together. I've been able to source a replacement parachute from the ICM RAF figures set I used originally in my BoB Diorama a couple of years ago. I never used the pilot in the diorama so he's still on the sprue and he comes with a separate parachute pack!

Since this photo was taken I've worked on the side walls of the forward fuselage and added all the odds and sods that stick otu and had to make some compromises with the nav. His hips have had to be slimmed down so he fits in the restricted gap. Hir right arm has been trimmed off just below the shoulder as that would not be visible as he's using it to support himself while the left arm will be over the bomb sight mechanism to his left.

I've added the pilot's console as well but don't have a photo yet. I'll show that in the next update.

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Update time!

First off, a quick check to see how well the navigator fits into the bomb aiming position:

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Its actually a very tight fit! I've had to trim back the rack of oxygen bottles that usually sticks out of the right fuselage interior, plus trim his right arm down to just the shoulder. The left arm has had to be completely removed as it interfered too much with the bomb sight mechanism which had had to be pushed over the left slightly. The left arm will just show the shoulder again and I've trimmed off the left hand which will be visible on the floor under him as if he's supporting himself. The rest of the arm will essentially be invisible behind and below the torso.

From behind it looks like this:

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Next I painted up the two pilots. The navigator comes in two parts - torso and legs. These are joined together by a pin made from 0.7mm wire. This will allow me to put the legs into the cockpit first and attach the torso later. Here is a view of them after painting:

First with the navigator torso in focus:

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The navigator has been given a moustache to differentiate him from the pilot since they are the same face :)

Next with the pilot oand navigator leg sin focus - notice I've now added the parachute from the ICM RAF figure set

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From the side:

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So what about this flying pose? To do that I need to support it on a stand. Well fortunately, I have a stand left over from the 1:32 Tamiya Spitfire IX I built a couple of years ago so I thought I'd use that as its well constructed and sturdy. This stand has the added advantage of a nut and bolt joint to keep it secure. So I cut down the original Spitfire slipper tank fixture which is how the stand was originally supposed to be attached to the model, just keeping the core fixture with the bolt embedded.

Then it came to the scary part - cutting a hole in the side of the model at the RIGHT angle to pose it well. I quickly dry fitted the back and rear fuselages together and added the starboard wing to I could judge the height I needed. Then can the drill! On measureing the size of the boss on the top of the stand it worked out a 5mm. So I carefully drilled a 5mm hole in the side of the rear fuselage.

Oh... coupel of problems... the boss is smaller than 5mm and the hole is too high and too far around the fuselage so the plane is banking at about 70 degrees which means the starboard wing intersects the table its resting on... oh bugger!

Turns out the boss is 4.5mm in diameter. So a second hole was carefully drilled further back and more on the actual curve of the fuselage as it goes under... This seemed to work well so the boss was glued into the inside of the fuselage. Then some 5 min epoxy was added and then the left-over milliput I'd mixed got added on top. "Left over?" I hear you ask... well yes, I had to use something to fill in the bloody great gaping hole I'd made!! A slip of spare plastic card was inserted as a backing plate and the hole was filled with milliput and we get this:

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If you look carefully you can just see where the bad hole was drilled and then filled.

This is what it looks like inside - its a very solid blob holding the thing in place. The Tamiya Spitfire kit came with a small screwdriver to tighten this bolt, so I've cut the handle and trimmed it so that it fits very conveniently here:

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This is so that I try to avoid loosing the bloody thing when this model travels around!

So the last couple of days has seen a lot more construction - the forward fuselage side were joined and closed, resulting ins a lot of swearing and filler and sanding as the side don't fit very well as has been noted by others as well. In the meantime, I've joined the tail elevators together, giving a slight down tilt. Then built the wings up fixing the ailerons at the angle appropriate for the way the model will be posed.

Earlier this week the front and rear fuselage were joined and tonight the wings were attached, so a test of how the model will look is finally available:

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Woo hoo its taking shape!!

Edited by Kallisti
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Been a bit quiet here for a while but work has been progressing.

The prop blurs arrived from the USA so I started work on them. Here you can see the prop blurs have been painted X-18 and ready for masking for the yellow tips. I cut a circle in some tamiya masking sheet and stuck that onto one side. Then I cut between each prop and folded the marking paper over onto the other side so both sides were masked. Simples!

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By the way can you spot the mistake in the previous photo? I didn't until much later...

So here you can see the pilot in his position looking rather good I reckon.

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however ther eis a slight problem...

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Bugger! So I'm afriad the (IMHO) superbly painted helmet and goggles have had to be sacrificed so that the bloody canopy will fit as I can't squidge him down in the seat any further.

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There, that did the trick!

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So here we are stuffing wet tissue paper intot he bomb bay and the tail wheel bay has also been stuffed so we should soon be already for painting!

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This next one was the intermediate stage, XF 82 has been sprayed where it should go and will need to be masked off for the XF 81...

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and voila... with all the masking taken off and the prop blurs added to test:

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It was this stage when I first tried out this pose where I noticed the mistake I mentioned earlier.. .can you guess what it was? It has been fixed in this photo.

Bomb aimer looks good:

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and this final photo with the flash on looks quite good I think...

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Next will be some Klear coats to protect for the weathering and decals.

This so far has been a relatively simple and straightforward build, even WITH my attempts to complicate things! I guess its straightforward FOR ME anyway... :)

Edited by Kallisti
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Great progress Andy even with the minor brain surgery :)

The prop blurs look really effective - not seen them before, much better than the acetate disc type - would i be correct in assuming that the mistake was having them spinning counter rotational instead of the same direction?

The spinners look good - did you get on OK with the template or did i misjudge the shape looking odd OOB, they look nice in the pics either way.

Not getting on anywhere near as quick with mine but hoping to have the pit and bomb bay finished and matted down over the weekend so i can post some pics before closing it up and losing it all.

How did you get on with the moveable control surfaces, are they still moveable or better glued into the position you want to keep them in?

Cheers, Stu

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Hi Stu

Yes the template was excellent. Yup I had the spinner rotations in opposite directions which is wrong on a Mosquito. If this was a DH Hornet that would have been correct but not for this one. I had to chop the spinner up again and reapply it, in the process sticking a scalpel into my finger... sigh!

I've glued the ailerons and the elevators, but the tail is still moveable. I'm amazed the sticky out bit on the tail hasn't broken off yet!!!

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  • 2 weeks later...

Sorry I haven't updated much lately - its been painting and weathering which has taken a long time as I was using oil paints to do the panel lines and I've put too many coats of Klear on and the panel lines aren't very deep lol

Anyway tonight I put the finishing touches to the whole build and will photograph it properly tomorrow with daylight, but here's a couple of snaps to whet your appetites...

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I meant to photograph it in the conservatory today sine we had such a fine, sunny day but the car needed washing (its first in a long time and it showed!) then I had to empty the shed because with the GF coming back from Portugal for longer stays I'm going to have to move the modelling stuff out to the shed, so first I have to make it habitable, that means filling all the holes in the walls, performing an arcahnid genocide and putting up plasterboard inner walls and insulation to keep the heat in and the damp out. So the photography got forgotten :(

Tomorrow... I promise!

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