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Vulcanicity's...Vulcan


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Hi y'all.

It's been a while since I've done a WIP, so I thought I'd take the plunge with my long-running Vulcan build. This has been on the go since last autumn, but keeps getting put aside for other things, or long fieldwork trips to the jungles of Borneo (Eskimo, Arapahoe/Move their Bodies/To and fro/Hit me with your rhythm stick).

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I last built the Airfix kit when I was twelve, and gave up while trying to strip down and rebuild it a few years ago. My Valiant has been desperate for a friend for years, so I ended up buying a new kit at an airshow a year or two ago. Hopefully I'm also doing my bit by increasing the chances of a new tool being announced... (Ahem, Airfix). I'm planning to keep the 301 engines represented by the kit, and complete the Vulcan as an aircraft of 101 Squadron during their late 1970s Waddington days. In particular, I've settled on XM605 pictured here at the Queen's Jubilee in 1977. To me this is the archetypal Vulcan B.2 look, and I've always loved the markings of this particular squadron since being wowed by the Duxford machine aged about 11.

Most of the work so far has been panel line scribing. Lots, and lots, of panel line scribing. Using photos as a guide, I've added quite a bit of extra detail not represented in the kit, including drilling out some small exhausts and drain holes, and scribing in some small access panels. SO DULL.

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I've also decided on a course of action for the small splitter plates immediately inboard of the intakes. From experience with my previous kit, cutting the clunky kit efforts off and smoothing the wing was pretty hard work, so I elected to thin the kit plates out from behind. Fiddly, but I think it makes a difference.

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Now, I bought the amazing Wolfpack intake and undercarriage bay sets back when I was still trying to revamp my old Vulcan several years ago. Back then I was an undergraduate with very little income and a lot of beer to drink, so I pretty soon realised that for the prodigious cost of £50, my new resin sets would be wasted on an old kit. This was one of the main drivers for getting a new Vulcan. (that, and it was proving incredible hard work to hack out the intakes of the old kit, doused in eight-year old glue!)

The intakes are beautiful, seamless, and handily moulded in a nice satin white. I'm wondering if I can get away without painting them, as I don't fancy my chances of getting a good finish by directing a rattlecan down them.

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There's one issue though. The masters were clearly based on the kit parts, and if you sit the holes in the intakes into the pins on the centre section halves, they fit just as badly as the kit intakes. In addition to this gap, there's a bit of a step where the inner surfaces of the intakes don't quite meet the curve of the leading edge. Some shimming needed here I feel...

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I can't wait to play with the undercarriage bays. The detail is crisper than I've ever seen in a resin aftermarket set, and they fit together like a dream. Better than any of the kit parts fit to each other, in fact! Absolutely no fettling required!

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Until next time :)

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Brilliant I will be watching this. I had the same trouble with the intakes I ignored the mounting pins and glued them to the top half moving them forward. It improves the fit alot. But still a pain to blend.

Wonderful re scribe that must be a pain to do

I left my In takes unpainted too and I like the look of them. :)

Edited by robvulcan
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Will be watching as well, I'm having an urge to get myself an XH558 version of the Airfix kit.

Could learn a few tricks from your build, loving the resin as well. I've never had much success with resin parts, usually end up binning them (after spending a small fortune on it) and going back to the kit parts.

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I too will be keeping an eye on this build, I fully intend to build the Airfix kit as 558 when I get home early next year. I haven't managed to get hold of the intakes or U/C bays as yet but they are on my wanted list! I do however have the Flightpath PE set and the Heritage U/C, how much of the PE I actually use remains to be seen though.

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Thanks all! Nice to have you on board.

Much of my recent work on the Vulcan has been on the interior. Now, I realise that the Vulcan's interior is largely black, you can't pose the canopy open, and the windows are tiny, and therefore that it's a bit pointless trying to build much of any of it.
However, I want to have the crew door open, and there's a reasonable amount of detail under the rear crew members' floor which is pretty visible through the aperture. This is a mix of structural bits holding up the floor above, the two jump seats which carry "spare" crew such as mechanics on overseas deployments, electric and hydraulic lines, and various esoteric black equipment boxes. So I've been busy tinkering with these bits as you see below.

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This superb walkaround of the interior on BM has been invaluable. Thanks, Fmk.6John!

I've also been making a start on the exhausts. Now, my subject XM605 is an Olympus 301-engined machine, so I haven't bought resin replacement jetpipes - they just don't seem to exist. Instead, I'm going to represent them with brass tube. The plastic jetpipes need thinning to a wafer thickness in order to accommodate the pipes, so I purchased a full-sized, DIY-style rasp file and set about them.
You know it's a proper model when DIY tools are involved! The sharp edges of the pipes themselves also make an excellent planing tool when pushed vigorously through the hole (innuendo fully intended). First photo shows the unmodified kit exhausts, while the second is the modified side, although only the leftmost pipe is basically finished.

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That's all for now folks :)

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Great start and something different too. It's a shame there are no 301s available yet and they are quite hard to capture the kit ones are not right for them even. Good enough for Jazz though.

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  • 1 month later...

Well, it's been a while, what with hammering away at my Hurricane conversion for the BoB GB, meeting lots of funny people with BM badges at Telford, and various other things, including an ongoing attempt to catalog and label my late grandfather's fossil collection. Anyone on here an expert in Lower Cretaceous brachiopods?

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Anyhow, some Vulcan has got done in this time.

The exhausts are done. You can hold the fuselage halves up to the light and practically see through them, but the brass pipes fit. Just.

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The cockpit interior is all done and primed. One of my bits of foil on the bulkhead (designed to replicate the loose fabric covering/rudimentary padding in this area has fallen off and got lost at some stage. Since it's going to be almost completely invisible, I've not bothered with replacing it.

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I improvised some rear turbine faces for the engines by cutting down the kit engine faces (remember I'm using resin replacements). The brass tubes I'm using are about 3 inches long and it's very, very dark in there. However, I am emphatically *not* wasting time. Or at least, that's what I have to keep chanting to myself.

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I wouldn't have bothered with the rear crew seats, only I had three handy seats kicking around the spares box. These are from the Valiant kit, they're pretty well useless if you want an accurate Valiant (the sort of mistake Airfix were making not even 5 years ago!). I decided they were also not very useful for anything else either, except that they look quite like Vulcan seats. You'll have to perform quite a contortion to see them, but they'll be there.

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Speaking of stuff that looks almost right, I've been preparing these ejector seats from CMK. They're not actually V-bomber ejector seats (which seem to be unobtainable), but they're for the Canberra PR.9 and to my eyes look pretty much a dead ringer for the real thing. The ejector seats are almost the only part of a 1:72 Vulcan you can even see from outside (without peering up the tiny crew hatch) so I though they were worth the effort to tart up. Apart from this the top deck is going to be entirely OOB.

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Ta-ta. I'm off to sit down and do some painting in the esteemed company of a Highland Park 12...

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Very very nice work mate and great seeing you at Telford. I like the effort on the 301 exhausts im just working on yet another and working on some 201/ 202 and 101/104 cans as well.

I took some close ups of XM655s tail pipes I think I'll have a look if you like.

Love the interior work :)

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Nice work on all that,

Now that you've done so much rescribing Airfix is SURE to release a 1/72 Vulcan in modern model style. Thank you on behalf of all the wishful thinkers.

I hope so. Seems quite a few Airfix Vulcans are being built on here at the mo it's good to see :)

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Airfix is SURE to release a 1/72 Vulcan in modern model style.

You'd think people had suffered with this kit enough, wouldn't you? We can but hope, and scribe panel lines.

Thanks for keeping up with this people! It's gratifying so much interest and nice comments.

Rob, yes, it was great to catch you at Telford. Looks like you've got some cool builds going on yourself there...

Anyhoo. We're marching towards getting this whole thing buttoned up, so the bulk of the tough stuff is finally behind.

I was really very impressed with the CMK "Vulcan-ish" Canberra seats. All that's needed is a overhead pull cord from a strand of picture wire, a dash of paint, and Bob's your relative. The keen-eyed will notice that I've cut down the pilots' floor section from the rear so it joins nicely onto my bulkhead when the two halves are plonked together.

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Another very nice sub-assembly are the Olympus intake faces which come with the intake set. They're light years away from the kit attempts, and the only blemish is a tiny bubble in three out of the four dome bits. These were easily fillable with a dash of thick Alumnium paint from an old pot.

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I hate painting and weathering white finishes, so I was deeply nervous of the undcercarriage bays. As it happens, my attempt at a dark wash came out not too badly, and certainly looks fine when touched back up again with the White. The latter is Vallejo acryllic brushed over Tamiya white primer.

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Then all the bays needed was a few boxes picking out in black and aluminium, and they are ready to put together.

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I will take the time to labour this point: These are by far the best-fitting resin detailing sets I've ever come across. They actually slot together far better than a lot of injection-moulded kits I've built, and frankly the glue is just a formality in some places. I freely admit to spending quite a bit of time when I started this build just playing with the undercarriage bays. I realise this is a clear indicator of an unsound mind, but they're just such solid, neat, dependable pieces of resin I couldn't resist.

The nose section is all painted now, and I've added a hefty amount of Ms. Vulcanicity's Parent's Patent 17th Century Roofing Lead to the nose. This is wonderful, (and deeply toxic) soft lead flashing, and you can shape it to fit an awkward space like this quite easily, and is a far cry from the stack of pennies I attempted to stick in to my first Vulcan with poly cement. I used so much that I ended up warping the underside surface of the nose!

Now wash your hands, boys and girls, no lead poisoning for you!

I also added the bomb-aimer's glazing, which is quite a lot too large for the hole, and needs sanding down on all sides so that it doesn't sit too recessed into the aircraft. Of course on the real Vulcans the need for an actual bomb-aiming person was long passed; this was just a useless space for the crew to store old sweet wrappers, or perhaps whisky if they were flying over to Nevada or wherever for a Red Flag deployment.

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You might also notice from the above that I've put some blanking plates inside the intakes; this is to provide a backing of sorts for the inevitable filler when I've fitted the resin intake insert thingies.

Last picture for today is not, as it appears, two Vulcans, but evidence of my slightly unorthodox construction order. A combination of watching a fair few Vulcan builds on here over the years, and memories of my first build, suggested to me that the way to avoid nasty steps on the join between centre and wing sections is to do the joins this way round, i.e make two big halves from the three upper and lower sections then join them . It's going to be a monster job doing the join, but at least any gaps will be manageable ones at the leading and trailing edges...

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Ta for now. I'm off to stick some exhausts and intakes in my Vulcan with tonight's tipple, which is a glass of old and dubious Harvey's Bristol Cream :cheers:

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Very nice work! That is going to be quite a join. That's one thing that's put me off building my 1/72nd scale B-36 - just the idea of glueing that monstrous fuselage together, then sanding the join down afterwards is a little too daunting to me.

Regards,

Jason

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi y'all!

Well, about the beginning of last week, I finally summoned up the courage to stick all my modifications into the fuselage halves. It really brings it home quite how much of these internals are non-standard: all three u/c bays, most of the cockpit, the intakes, and the exhausts.

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I then stuck the whole lot together with what seemed like a gallon of glue, forgetting in the process to take any pictures. I blame the necessary glass of Scotch.

So, what's the damage?

1. Ho-hum.

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2. Hmmmmm....

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3. Oooooffff.

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5. Aw gawd.

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I've shown the worst bits to be fair, the extreme nose and outer wings fit fine, and the tailfin also went on with minimal bother. But as you can imagine, the rest of the gaps have kept me busy for days, slathering on filler, shimming with plasticard and sanding until my arms ache.

There's a little tiny bit more sanding, and coincidentally a little tiny bit more sherry.

I'll see you on the other side.

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You will get there! Just think how good this is going to look alongside the Airfix Valiant and Victor! You know you want to build the other two.

Martin

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This is an inspiring build :worthy: . I have an MPC boxing in my stash and admit to being fearful of starting :blink2: . I hope to build a Falklands Vulcan. I haven't built a model in 12 years (and before that 30 years) so I really appreciate you sharing this build.

Keep on keeping' on (as perhaps Bob Dylan said?). This is going to look wonderful. I'll be staying on board with this one, you finally got me out of 'lurking' mode! :popcorn:

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  • 6 months later...

Well, it's been a while!

You might have guessed that I didn't get anywhere near finishing my Vulcan before heading to Borneo in January - and obviously a 1:72 Vulcan isn't a practical proposition to take to the jungle in a backpack-so I built a Vampire instead.

I've been back from the Orient for about 6 weeks, and have got a fair bit done on the Vulcan, although it still feels like I've got a long way and a lot of stressful jobs to do before the finishing line.

After a mammoth session of filling, sanding and more sanding, I've got the lion's share of the gaps dealt with, and a complete-looking basic Vulcanny shape.

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The ugly gaps forward of the intakes on the fuselage sides needed packing with Plasticard before adding putty, this helped to stabilise the joint although the putty keeps chipping and crumbling so I'm looking forward to getting this area primed and a bit more solid. You might also notice I had a final effort to get the intake splitter plates down to size, as they're not only too thick but also somewhat too large.

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The huge gap at the joint with the tail section also needed Plasticard. Unlike the nose gap, which stems from all my aftermarket and scratchbuilt additions, this is just plain awful fit. I have no idea why Airfix didn't mould the fuselage top halves from nose to tail-it's not like the tail section needs to be a separate part on a kit which is exclusively a B.2. Maybe it would have needed an excessively long box otherwise. I've also attacked the sink marks near the trailing edge and on the braking parachute bulge.

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You might have also noticed that I attached the duct on the rear fuselage, I believe this was a cooling intake for all the heat-pumping ECM equipment in the tailcone. This got drilled out at both ends before attachment.

Underneath, I hollowed out the four auxiliary exhausts that sit fairly far aft on the engine panels. To me they look more realistic like this.

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I also thinned out the four heat exchangers/coolers/whatever (I have no idea what they are) that sit further forward. Looking at walkaround shots suggest that they have several internal features, and definitely aren't as see-through as Airfix show them. Basically they look a bit like radiators, with a horizontal splitter plate in the intake side. This separates the intake air into a thin boundary layer stream directly flush with the underside of the aircraft, and a broader stream which takes up the rest of the duct. Then there's some kind of central core, and three vertical splitter plates in the exhaust end.

This was a bit of a bind to reproduce, as it required six plasticard inserts per duct, and then priming before two rounds of painting, with black for the central core and Light Aircraft Grey for the splitter plates and ends of the ducts.

Here's a duct in primer, with the front end of the core to add. They all ended up being slightly different in cross-section, hence the individual marking inside the duct to make sure it gets the right plasticard inserts!

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The other area which is unpaintable after assembly is the deep trough between the two starboard engines, which will be mostly covered up with the Heath Robinson affair that forms the Red Shrimp electronic jamming antenna. So this bit, plus the antenna itself, needed priming and painting before assembly. Having attached the long pipes that run along both troughs, I took the opportunity to mask off the undercarriage bays and prime a larger area over several bits of filling and sanding to see how much work there was remaining. The results are pretty encouraging!

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Lastly, I've added the refuelling probe which, like every part of this old kit, was thickly clogged with flash. I've bought a NATO standard probe tip from Master, so I clipped off the blobby, misshapen kit representation, and drilled out the probe. The turned metal tip doesn't need painting, I'll add it in unpainted right at the end.

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