Hawker Typhoons: 4 in 1/72

[ben_m]

After trying to build two Typhoons simultaneously a few years ago, and failing, I decided it would be easier to build four(!) at the same time. One of the four is the left-over from the first attempt, see this thread on Aeroscale: Tale of Two Tiffies .

I am using three different kits: the Pavla car-door, the Brengun bubble-top, and two of the Airfix late-war version with 4 blade prop and Tempest tail planes.

The schemes I have chosen are:


(Top two profiles by Chris Davey from Osprey's Typhoon and Tempest Aces of World War 2 by Chris Thomas; bottom two profiles by Chris Thomas from 2nd Tactical Airforce Vol. 4 by Shores and Thomas)


I have spent several days already on getting the parts to fit together, which for the Pavla kit has been a considerable hassle! The wings and fin have had to be thinned considerably, as have the cockpit areas (and still the resin cockpit doesn't fit as intended).



Both the Airfix and Brengun kits mainly need the height of the wheel wells reduced to allow the wings to close properly. In the case of the Brengun, the tops surfaces were sanded to translucency, as well as the bottom edges coming up too.





The Brengun has the edge over the Airfix wheel wells, and in detail and accuracy in general, but every part needed some clean-up.



The Airfix open gun panels inspired me to open one wing on the Brengun kit, originally intending to use the Airfix parts in the wing. However, on closer inspection 1) they weren't a good fit, and 2) are not accurate enough. So I'll have to scratch build something.





All the parts needing silver painting were stuck to sticks and airbrushed, then given a brown wash.





I'm onto the cockpit painting now (black above the tubular framework, dry brushed with grey, grey-green below). The Airfix instrument panel transfers look OK, and for this scale, and considering it is really hard to see into the cockpit of the Typhoon, they will be fine.

[woody37]

I like one Tiffie....multiply that by four, how exciting !

Great start, keep us updated with lots of pics Ben

[-Neu-]

Awesome to see and a great start... buuut you should have done the CMR prototype boxing as your fourth

[ben_m]

I'll probably do a Mk.Ia at some point- Brengun is doing one soon, and I have plans for a white-nosed car-door from a Brengun too, as I don't have a Typhoon with unfaired cannon either.

[Sten Ekedahl]

Just a small question. Did the early car door Tiffies really have black cockpits? I was under the assumption that the black cockpits were a later "mod". Please correct me if I'm wrong.

[ben_m]

Hi Sten- good question. Certainly some/all early cockpits were interior grey-grey, but there is a photo of Beamont in the cockpit with the door open, showing this aircraft has a very dark-painted interior at this point. I think he had some modifications made to the cockpit to improve night flying (this was Typhoon was used as a train-busting night intruder), so black paint might have been one of these.

[Beard]

As I have the Airfix and Brengun (car-door and bubble-top) in the stash, I'll be following your build and hopefully pick up some tips.

[ben_m]

Comparison of instrument panels:

Airfix, Airfix, Brengun

The Brengun was drybrushed grey, then the dials picked out with a small brush, then drops of Klear put on top of the dials to replicate glass.

Pavla cockpit in place. The instrument panel is actually from the Academy kit. The cannon and camera buttons weren't really red!

I've added a styrene strip to the cowling joint, as the other side of the fuselage is twisted, and needs this to hold it straight.

Brengun fuselage with ResinArt Radiator on it (fits well, even though it is made for the Academy kit). Two Airfix cockpit lower halves above.

First Airfix ready for closing up. This is going to be 'Zipp' Button's aircraft. Note the mask added to the radiator before closing the fuselage.

In hindsight, I should have dry fitted/sanded more, as the radiator is too big for the fairing, and there is now a big gap under the chin....

Closed. It now has wings and tail feathers, but I forgot to take a photo.

Tonight was the Pavla kit's turn. I've being working on and off on this kit for four years!

I've been scraping the insides of these wings for hours and hours. I hate opening up shell chutes (the Airfix kit is missing the link chute next to each casing chute, but no way am I adding them...).

Finally got the wheel wells glued in place, and have closed the fuselage. This will be PR-G, 'Bee' Beamont's aircraft.

[thomastmcc]

wow like your style mate 4 at once ...

thomas

[ruudster]

Great stuff. Fun to see three different types being built at once.

[Serelle]

Wooowww.... Typhoon assembly line! I'll be following you! Nice job so far, you did some quite good job in these cockpits!

Serelle

[ben_m]

Thanks for the feedback. Today has been fun closing up the fuselages and adding wings and tails, but with a major down point too...

Here is the second Airfix cockpit. I painted the white outline of the blind-flying instruments in yellow, as there are photos online of a preserved cockpit with this feature. The other white borders of the segments of the panel were painted in dark grey I made belts as before out of Tamiya tape. I didn't make any fitting for them, as you can't see too much, and also because I am still unsure where they had Q-type or Sutton harnesses. I stuck on a piece of stretched sprue onto the back of the spade grip as the brake lever.

Pavla has wings and tailplanes on now...

But there is a problem...

The port wing has completely the wrong dihedral from the cannons outwards. I knew something was wrong when test fitting, but I couldn't tell what it was, nor correct it. Anyway, this kit is really time-consuming, and I would never make another one of these old-style short-run kits from Pavla. I could have carved the plane from a solid block of styrene in the same time. In fact, judging from the weight of the aircraft even after all the craving inside the wings, and fuselage, it is not far from being a solid model.

OK, three of them are now Typhoon-shaped. Now I have to do some scratch-building for the open cannon bay of the Brengun.

[ben_m]

Yesterday I was so annoyed, I was resigned to not bothering with correcting the Pavla's dodgy wings. Today I decided to act, and a few minutes later the razor-saw had cut half way through the wing from the underside.

In went some styrene strip, check the dihedral- too much now- a bit of shaving it down with a blade, then on to sticking it back together.

That is when things went a little wrong! As I spread the gap to get the liquid cement in both side of the strip, the top part of the wing began to crack quite severely! I am glad the wing stayed in one piece! With a bit of tape to hold the crack closed, hopefully it wil all fuse back together with the cement, and after some Mr Surfacer, no-one will notice....

[thomastmcc]

looking good mate..

[ben_m]

OK, so the dihedral issue hasn't gone away, but the problem is more complex than I first thought, the first section with slight anhedral is different each side, so when the wing tips are level, the is more of an elbow on ones side. And I am not convinced that both wings are the same thickness at the elbow point, either....

Anyway, that is how it will stay...

The Airifx kit has more fit problems than I realised, and it's outer dihedral looks too steep to me, especially on the model where I sanded the radiator to fit, the other one with the gap under the chin has less dihedral issues, maybe because of the spreading effect of the radiator...

Made the sides of the gun bay for the Brengun kit. I am liking the Brengun more and more.

Edited September 7, 2013 by ben_m

[ben_m]

I've slowed a bit over the last few days, just did a bit of cockpit work and some more to the gun bay, all for the Brengun.

Still a long way to go on the open bay:

This cockpit is the best out-of-the-box that I've seen, I think. I needed to add the quilted seat back, and the belts... arghhh... just realised as I typed that the kit came with PE belts... oh well... I can recycle them on another build.

Still needs more painting:

[woody37]

Their challenging you, but I know you'll bash them into submission. Loving your thread

[HOUSTON]

SPECTACULAR Project..

KUDOS to you ben_m.

[ben_m]

Thanks Guys. I seem to be having more dihedral issues in these builds than I have had in all the time since returning to modelling about 5 years ago. I had to put a spacer into the Brengun's wing root (even though when dry fitting it was fine...).

Anyway, more gun bay work on the Brengun was done before the wing halves were joined:

I know the ammo feed drums look poor- I have since sanded them with squarer ends...

I painted a few more bits in the cockpit, like the trim wheel in red-brown (bakelite), and the tubes in silver. Then closed the fuselage. And added the wings. The cannons are still removable, those blocks raise them so the barrels to be at the right height.

All four at the same stage now.

I don't think I mentioned that I used a steel tube (needle) for the tailplanes of the Pavla (dark grey), and today I used a couple of brass wire pins for the same joints on the Brengun. Both these kits had no locating tabs/slots for these. As I was drilling these holes in the Brengun parts, I noticed that a couple of panel lines needed rescribing on each of the tailplanes, which was a nuisance, but quite quick with the RB Scribe-R tool. There are more panel lines on the fuselage, and on the underside of one aileron, that need a similar treatment.

On the subject of panel lines, the Airfix tooling seems unable to cope with lines engraved on steep sides. The panel lines on the top cowling panel are shallow, and the lowest panels lines of the fuselage running to the tail has very shallow engraving, and the top-most lines running to the tail along the fuselage are not present at all.

I think the Brengun is increasing its lead in my mind as best Typhoon kit overall, despite the wing root needing work (if you look at the left Airfix model, I had to add as much to that port wing root too).

Edited September 15, 2013 by ben_m

[ben_m]

Still slowly working away on these. Lots of seam filling and sanding, and fitting the cannon fairings to the Pavla took a while too.

I invented a quick way of doing landing lights- I have previously experimented with embossed foil over the end of a paint brush, but here I used milliput to fill the gap into the wing, then used a piece of melted sprue (that makes a very shiny round surface) to press into the milliput to form the reflector.

Finished scratch-building the gun bay too. I in the end I did base my doors on the Airfix part. I used millput impressions taken from the other wing's bulges to make new indented parts of the covers. A bit rough, but these will be painted up as leather, so shouldn't be as bad looking as they are now in silver.

[Winenut]

you my dear friend are completely insane .....and I love it. Absolutely awesome build and thread....keep it up!

[TEMPESTMK5]

Good afternoon

Very impressing job you are doing on these Tyffies I like it ..

[ben_m]

Thank you guys! I am glad you are enjoying it.

I have embarked on the immensely tedious task of fitting wingtip ID lights, using sections of clear sprue. I started with a cylinder cut from a sprue, then flattened one side. I drilled a small hole and filled with clear red or green paint. One dry, I then painted the two back sides silver, including inside the hole/'bulb'. I initially used Revell's clear acryllic canopy glue, but this didn't hold the pieces in when I began sanding, so the parts were cleaned up and then fitted with superglue, which has the advantage that it fills space, and when polished blends into the clear part. I worked up from a nail board (approx. 160 grit) through different grits of a nail polisher (approx 400, 800 and 1200 grit, at a guess, but the last two are mesh-type polishers).

I have finally got the landing light covers on- they were lost on the floor several times, and the vac ones from Pavla were tricky to get to fit, but once on they look much more transparent than the inject Brengun ones. I thought the Pavla ones had fallen out at one point, they are so clear! I am glad that these were removed from later Typhoons- less hassle without them.

Finished painting the gun bay too. The big y-shaped pipe is the hot air ducting to keep the guns from freezing, which I guessed might have some form of lagging around it. The red wires were painted like that so they stand out, and are the firing mechanism. The connect to a cylinder mounted on the side of the bay nearest the fuselage- not sure, but I guess that the pneumatic firing button on the control column has air lines running to this cylinder which makes an electrical connection. But that seems odd, why not have a completely electrical system? Maybe I have it wrong, and the firing button was electrically wired to that cylinder, which then fired the cannon with a pneumatic system? Anyway, those red wires represent whatever it was that triggered the guns.

There is a piston in the bottom right corner of the gun bay that is the actuator for the flaps.

Only 4 more wingtip lights to go...

[Christer A]

Lots and lots and lots of nice Typhoons!

Did you finish them?

[ben_m]

Unfortunately, I've had very little time for modelling since I posted these- these are in a box in the shed, still in the same state as the photos above.

Thanks for the thread bump, I shall try to remember these when I have some spare time.