Airfix Sea Vixen, with some aftermarket help

[71chally]

I mix my own by eye using blue and grey, but I think the consensus is Light Admiralty Grey, I think Humbrol 87 or 127 might be close.

Gear legs, they were often finished in natural aluminium, but sometimes they were painted in that same grey, might have depended on period that they were used up to.

 

[Christer A]

James, you're a treasure of information!

Thanks a bunch!

[perdu]

He is, isn't he...

 

I use Vallejo 70.973  Light Sea Grey for wheel well interiors and u/c legs for Naval machines, I really don't think it is far off hue.

 

If at all.

[corsaircorp]

Hello Christer

I was also talking about .... Me !

Looking at your Vixen is more and more tempting...

Have a great modelling time;

Sincerely.

CC

[Christer A]

Wheels received a coat of Tamiya rubber black and a tire kreep mark. I was toying with the idea of making one tire rotated with a cut white paint mark, but those CMK tires look all new so I didn't bother.

 

Slow setting CA-glue is no fun! Especially when the tweezers get more tacky than the mating surfaces of the parts, but in the end I got almost all resin stuff in place in the main wheel wells, with some help from Gator Glue. Now just waiting for paint.

 

I also took the plunge to detail the plastic main landing gear.

Reinforcement ribs, lightening holes, holes for shafts, brake lines and hoses...the list goes on. A fun time was had, and the time flew by. All of a sudden it was time to pack it up and do the dishes...

Oh well, I'm hoping to shoot some primer on this later this week.

Edited September 25, 2017 by Christer A

[71chally]

Lovely detail work in those legs Christer, wheels look really nice as well.

Definitely made the right choice detailing the kit legs.

[matteo44]

I don't like so much the real plane... but I like very much your work.

[Victor K2]

I seem to remember that the stbd inner door was lowered by disconnecting it when the aircraft was parked. Inside the wheel bay was a hydraulic hand priming pump. This was used to prime the 4 hydraulic systems prior to engine start on a pre flight, then once achieved the door was re connected. The hook was also disconnected after flying and touched the floor, as if the hook was operated under full hyd power it could lift the aircraft off the ground. it was also a safety feature so that it didn't whack some erk on their swede due to accidental operation. 

I also remember 924 landing and taxiing in minus a port flap. The South African pilot (Laidback) had lowered the flaps above the design speed. The flaps had a blow back valve which should have prevented this from happening, some how this didn't occur on this occasion, Laidback (nickname) said it never affected it's handling and that he never noticed that it was missing. On his last flight in 924, he raised the undercarriage as soon as he was airborne and at an extreme low height, aimed the aircraft towards the Hangar where most of the ground crew were gathered to watch his final sortie. The Hangar doors were open at this end and most of us thought that he was planning to fly through (a fete achieved many years later in a Pitts? check it out on U tube).  At what seemed to be the last possible moment he raised the nose and altered his flight path to our right. At the corner of the Hangar (known as the Meteor Hangar) was a static water tank of some considerable size. The eflux from the 2 Avons created a water spout that rose to the guttering of the roof. An amazing sight and a few of us needed to have a change of grundies. We also had a German pilot (Sepp) who flew the Sea Vixen (including it's ferry flight to Swansea) as well as all of the aircraft operated at LLanbedr. 

Bob.

( you will be pleased,or not,too hear that I have a lot more sandbags to pull up)

[Gondor44]

Nice legs, shame about the boat race......

 

Gondor

[Christer A]

Thanks @71chally , @matteo44, @Gondor44 and especially@Victor K2 !

Ok, so all things that could hang limp and loose in the morning will do so, and so will the starboard inner main gear door. Excellent!

I think I'll need to add a boarding ladder later on.

 

For the last couple of weeks, progress at the modeling bench has been very slow. Winter is coming and it takes away all the light in the evenings but I'm slowly starting to adapt to it. Need more artificial light I think.

But I have been doing some stuff!

The standard air brake bay looks a little boring.

Pavlas resin replacement seems a little hard to get by nowadays so I decided to add some details myself.

Not visible here are all the lightening holes that I drilled in all reinforcement ribs. I'll see how it looks with the (oxygen?) bottles in place. I could probably add even more wires and pipe work I guess...

 

I've also decided on what paint to use for all the innards, Tamiya XF-25. It's a light blue color that I saw someone use but my camera makes the paint look green.

 

 

 

Those Aires wheel wells look VERY nice, don't you think?

Next step, detail painting and a wash to bring out the details even more.

[71chally]

Lovely work on the u/c there Christer and yes those bays look lovely!

[Christer A]

Thanks James!

I've finally had some time to do some modelling again. Off course, being away on the C4 Model contest in Malmö over the whole weekend helped a bit, even though I had to explain to the public what I was doing over and over. (and no, none of my models won any awards. Competition is fierce, and neither Aussie Eight #1, or the Brigand or Beaufighter were up to scratch...)
The wheel wells recieved a wash mixed from Tamiya panel line inks, of the brown black and grey varietey thinned with some Zippo lighter fluid to help with the flow.

The main gears goe the same treatment.

Now I see that I need to to some more filing and filling on the nose gear, since I don't think the door attached to the gear will cover it all.

Itäs good to have something to do I guess...

The airbrake itself was the next one up for wash. Looks suitably grubby.

It's installed in the lower airframe together with the bay, but I didn't glue the brake in place yet. This way it will act as a cover for the bay, even though the fit is not 100% good.

Speaking of bays, here's the airbrake bay itself:

It could or should have a lot more wire harness and piping I guess, but I need to makes sure that the hydraulic arm for the brake still fits.
We'll see how it goes. Good and understandable pictures are a bit hard to find though.

 

After this voyage in the seas of dirt I turned my attention to where one normally starts,
Cockpit time!

A good helping of plastic, finely cast and also a quite big set of self adhesive etch. I haven't tried that before, but how hard can it be?
Actually not that hard...

The whole lot is painted with Ultimate black primer. I was going to to the entire pit in Tamiya Nato Black, but when looking at the Eduard fret that is very black I decided not to.

If I add some dry brushing here and hope for the best?

It should be passable for a british 50:s era cockpit atleast.

[(ex)Sgtrafman]

Looking very nice, very nice indeed 👍

[amblypygid]

It looks good, Christer. You'll see very little other than the etch once the fuselage is closed up, even with the canopy open (or off, in the case of my still unfinished kit).

[71chally]

That etch cockpit looks absolutely just so, great work.

The Sea Vixen has some colour in that otherwise black cockpit, especially in the missiles ready, hyd gauges, and SWS panel, and they all look very good there.

[Christer A]

Thanks guys!

Sticking pieces of self adhesive etch onto primed plastic feels a lot like cheating. I don't even have to glue it! Well, almost not...the consoles that has a round mounting surface did require a little extra persuasion to hold in place, and some TETC did the trick just fine.

 

Watching paint dry is a fun old modelling sport, so I thought I'd add to that.

Having recently bought a bottle of MrPaint Extra Dark Sea Grey and big bottle of Ultimate Thinner I thought I should compare how MrPaint compares to my trusty but quite hard to spray Xtracrylics EDSG.

Two brand new bottles of each.

I know that MrPaint is very thin so I started with a quick coat of primer

Since it's a quick paint test, I didn't bother with polishing or cleaining of the surface, just blast the paint on.

First thing, to thin Xtracrylix with Ultimate Thinner was excellent! I had the feeling that it worked better than with Xtracrylix own thinner, and it did spray a bit better too. Very nice!

MrPaint is off course pre-thinned and extremely thin, so no problems there.

How does it look then? Like this.

Flash on and flash off.

MrPaint to the left and Xtracrylix to the right.

The sheen is a little different, but the two EDSG seems to be very close together, where Xtracrylix might be a little darker. Nothing that really sticks out when looking at them with the old Mk 1 Eyeball though. Maybe they'll look different if I cut them loose and put them on top?

Bottom line for me is that both will work, and a mixture of different paint on different panels will probably be even better!

 

[perdu]

Ultimate Thinner

 

Something for me to add to the long Telford shopping list

 

Both of those paints look good Christer, I have some of the Xtracrylics here

 

It may get used on a Buccaneer of my acquaintance

 

☺

[Paramedic]

Nice work, love those legs and the ´pit!

[Martian]

This is shaping up very nicely.

 

Martian

[Christer A]

Thanks guys.

I need to test UMP Thinner some more, but the result so far is promising.

[Christer A]

Today is a day off due to an autumn leave for all the kids.

Naturally they want me to help with Super Mario Odessey but I have other plans...

I need to do some detail painting in the office!

I've bought the True Details resin bang seats and they look fantastic!

The only edge that Airfix have over them is the canopy breakers on top of the observers seat, but who cares about that little detail?

Too tricky to add I think.
What's a little more awkward is trying to get them to fit in the cockpit tub, but even Airfix is too wide here

It's actually platic to plastic contact and not an interference with the etch.
The resin seat is a bit more narrow, but does not quite fit either.

Another thing. The rear bulkhead has a rail for securing the seats (and also for the ejection sequence to work)

However, the resin seats has a fully detailed ejection gun/rocket and therefore cannot use this rail.

I sanded it off and replaced it with plastic strips, suitably sanded to fit.

Right, time to look at details of the real cockpit for a while to get inspired!

Edited November 6, 2017 by Christer A
Dual pictures changed to correct ones.

[Christer A]

Cockpit is finally completed! After recieveing a flat coat to blend the etch with the painted parts, this is how it looks:

 

Painting of the bang seats were tricky business!

I looked at reference pictures high and low, and finally settled for a look that I was satisfied with.

Very tricky to paint this stuff with everything molded in place, but a big black wash sure helped!

 

A quick dryfit in the fuselage to see how it fits...

I really need to redo the black and yellow stripes on the pilots seat. It looks so out of place compared to the navigators.

Not much visibility for anyone in this machine, and they actually landed this beast on a small carrier in the dark?

Seriously impressive!

[71chally]

Absolutely superb result!

 

Interesting point about the seat rails etc, in reality neither seat has a bulkhead or panel behind them, but you are in a whole world of scratch pain if you remove them from the kit!

The Obs seat can actually tip forward - rather like on a Mini or two door car!

 

Fantastic work.

[amblypygid]

Splendid work, looks really tidy.

[Martian]

Lovely work on the cockpits and thanks for the heads up about the seats.

 

Martian