Avro 504K, 1/32, Scratchbuild

[Bandsaw Steve]

Ok - no sweat. I’ve painted it once I can paint it again, if I decide to get keen.
 

By a very weird coincidence a mate of mine in Adelaide has independently (many years ago) modelled exactly the same airframe that I’m doing, and his model also has the heron motif rather than an emu. So, either he has fallen for the same incorrect reference as me or perhaps both emblems were used , probably by the same unit, at different times. 

 

After all, I imagine it would only take one decision by the squadron CO, something along the lines of ‘stop painting herons and start painting emus’ and the change would be made.

 

Interesting stuff. 

If anyone has any further info please write in.

 

 

[Marklo]

Or if it were me I’d remember it was to be some kind of bird but then have no idea which.... So I probably just guess 

[Martian]

This is really beginning to blossom, the Martian is muchly impressed.

 

Martian 👽

[Bandsaw Steve]

Running out of Excuses

 

There are heaps of little jobs to be done before I face the dreaded do-or-die 'affix the top wing' step.  This is good as it allows me to purposefully procrastinate and delay a little bit longer.

Here's some bits and pieces that really must be done before the top wing goes on.

 

First paint on the leather padding bit that runs around the edge of the cockpit sill. I think it might be called a 'coaming' but am prepared to be told I'm wrong.  Anyway, I was going to try to make it all fat and puffy and upholstered by mixing paint in with this Vallejo filler but in the end I didn't bother; just used thick undiluted Red-Brown Tamiya acrylic and slathered it on with a hairy stick.

 

See what I mean. A bit rough really but the job is done and I'm hoping that it'll be sort of hidden behind rigging and wings and things and that polite viewers will keep a respectful distance.

 

This is what it looks like finished. At least no-one will doubt that this is a scratchbuild! 😀

 

And now find some clear plastic and cut masking tape out to the exact right shape to make two templates for windscreens.

 

It seems that streamlining wasn't the number one priority during this design phase, on the real thing these are just two upright planes of glass. On the model they are just two bits of clear plastic held on with clear two-part epoxy.

 

After leaving the glue for 24 hours to get a really good grip I peeled the masking tape off to reveal...

 

This, which looks a bit rough in close-up, but it's done now.

 

So two more preliminary jobs are now complete and there's only a handful to go.

It seems I'm starting to run out of excuses. That wing will have to go on soon! 😨

 

Bandsaw Steve

 

P.S. For those of you with an interest in Baby Bandsaw's  Hogwart's Express build, keep an eye open. Summer school holidays have started here in Australia and she's asking me about when we can get back into the project so there's likely to be some action soon.

[hendie]

4 hours ago, Bandsaw Steve said:

but am prepared to be told I'm wrong

 

you're wrong.!  

 

 

4 hours ago, Bandsaw Steve said:

and that polite viewers will keep a respectful distance

 

that's me counted out then.

 

 

Nice update. Small but beautifully formed.

 

 

4 hours ago, Bandsaw Steve said:

and she's asking me about when we can get back into the project so there's likely to be some action soon

 

mine eyes are peeled

[Marklo]

Looking good Steve, I use 1mm heat shrink slit along one side for cockpit coaming painted in an appropriate leather like shade.

 

polite viewers hmm while I am aware of the term, ehhhhhh

[Martian]

8 hours ago, Bandsaw Steve said:

It seems I'm starting to run out of excuses. That wing will have to go on soon! 😨

In the words of God in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, "Get on with it!" 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1YmS_VDvMY

 

Martian 👽

[Bandsaw Steve]

OK...🙄

[hendie]

and you thought I wasn't polite!

[Bandsaw Steve]

Roundels

 

I have been thinking for a while about whether to go internet shopping for 1/32 WW1 RNAS / RFC / RAF / AFC roundels but in the end have decided that it shouldn't be too difficult to paint them on. This is especially true on the fuselage where, on this particular airframe there was no annoying difficult fine little white marginal rim around the outside of the blue circle. The fuselage roundels will be painted on before the top wing goes on but the wing roundels - for which I still might resort to decals - definitely must be dealt with once the upper wing is attached.  

 

Painting roundels on is a relatively straightforward process. The only really tricky bits being making sure that the colours look OK (a matter that's already sorted to my lax satisfaction), the edges of the marking come out nice and clean, and that the various circles in the roundel are truly concentric.  It's the last consideration that is potentially the tricky bit.

 

I used this circle cutter to cut the first circle. 

 

In this case it's the outside masking that's required. The use of gridded masking is important as it will help me line up the various circles later on.

 

Use plenty of masking.  I've said it before; there's little to be gained in leaving areas unmasked, but a lot to be lost.  More than enough masking is way, way better than not enough.

 

In this case I used a rattle can. I like rattle cans, there's a lot less fine-tuning and cleaning up than with airbrushes.

 

Earlier this year my dad gave me a set of centre punches and it just so happened that one of them exactly matched the diameter of roundel's white circle. Nice!

 

A few seconds after this photo was taken I had a perfectly circular mask...

 

that fitted here. Note how by ensuring that the centre of the various circles lined up on the grid, the grid can assist in getting the masks concentric.

 

 

Now spray paint the blue circle, this time using an airbrush. As always use several light coats allowing drying between each one.  The temperature in Perth on this day was an unusually chilly 36 C so it was a long 4 to 5 minute wait between each coat. 

 

And here the masking is coming off...

 

Leaving this - which would be ideal for an RAAF WW2 bird. But this is not to be.

 

What we need is some RAF insignia-red circles from some old partially used monogram P40 decal sheets. It just so happens I have two such sheets! 

 

So the final step was pretty simple really. Just stick the red circle in the middle, move it about until it's dead-centre and press it on. 

 

There's only one more post to go until the moment of truth when the upper wing goes on.  

I'm building up my courage. 😟

 

Sorry about the slow progress of late. I hope some of you are still following along.

 

Bandsaw Steve

 

 

[Courageous]

Pukka job that...now the wing roundels. 

 

Stuart

[Bandsaw Steve]

2 minutes ago, Courageous said:

Pukka job that...now the wing roundels. 

 

Stuart

Nope, Sorry not yet.
The top wing has to go on and the rigging needs to be done then sand to clean up the top & bottom wing surfaces that will inevitably suffer damage. Then corrective paint work and then - as one of the very last steps- complete the wing roundels.

[Brandy]

Nicely done. I hadn't thought about grids on masking, but it makes perfect sense. I'll probably forget all about it now! 

 

Ian

[hendie]

17 days to paint two roundels?  No wonder this thread is taking so long - and you complain about the time I take in my poor train build.  

 

 

nice roundels though. I particularly like how you achieved that "painted on" look!

 

 

[Bandsaw Steve]

9 hours ago, hendie said:

 

nice roundels though. I particularly like how you achieved that "painted on" look!

 

An effect largely achieved by taking the photo from a sensible distance. 🤪

[DMC]

22 hours ago, Bandsaw Steve said:

hope some of you are still following along.

Yes, still.

[Redshift]

On 03/12/2019 at 13:42, Bandsaw Steve said:

stop painting herons and start painting emus

Very wise, we should all heed the Zen of the bandsaw.

 

Not sure you can put off the fitting of the upper wing any longer. Remember, cut once, then measure twice, then cut again then sand and fill repeatedly.

[Bandsaw Steve]

Ready to Rock

 

"Not sure you can put off the fitting of the upper wing any longer" wrote Redshift above. He was wrong.  There were two sets of preparatory jobs that I can justify as necessary to do before the upper wing attachment rather than as outright procrastination.

 

Here's the first lot. Drill some holes for the rigging. I have thought long and hard about the rigging and have decided to complete this task the simplest way I know, which is also by coincidence the only way that I have ever rigged a biplane. It was a 1/48, Roden, Gloster Gladiator if anyone's interested. Anyway, the method involves threading stretchy line through a network of carefully positioned pre-drilled holes, you'll see more of it soon. For now I just have to drill the holes.

 

This is a 0.5 mm drill bit in the Dremel drill-press drilling a series of holes around each of the interplane strut slots.

 

Here's what the result looks like close-up. A bit rough looking at this stage but I think this will come right once the entire job is complete and the holes and slots are filled, sanded and repainted.

 

See, lots and lots of holes. The more the better because each positive locating point for the rigging will save time later on.

 

And now for finishing the interplane struts prior to use.

 

Initially I was just going to varnish these and leave the wood grain visible but there were two issues with that. Firstly, in this case the varnished wood was going to be too dark. Restored Avro 504s wooden parts are a medium to light shade of wood whereas these, when varnished, are almost mahogany coloured. Secondly, since the cabane struts on my model are not made of wood, if I just varnished the wood I would never get the colours between the two different types of struts to match. So I decided to paint all of the struts to look like wood.  Here's how I did that. First - stick some undercoat on any exposed wood. The white is the first bit of undercoat on an interplane strut.

 

And here's all eight of them undercoated and lined up like little soldiers.

 

I think Tamiya dark yellow is one of the most versatile colours available. I always have some of this on hand. Here I've sprayed all of the interplane struts dark yellow and sanded them back smooth. They got their second coats a few moments later.

 

Once the final layer of dark yellow is on we can do a bit of magic with some Burnt Sienna oil paint.

 

Irregularly blotch some oil paint onto the struts, as you can see on fourth and fifth ones from the left. Then use an old bristly brush to spread the oil paint along the strut until they look a bit like numbers six, seven and eight in this photo. The irregular blotching is intended to give a slightly irregular distribution of colour - just like real wood - and the use of a coarse old brush gives a suggestion of wood grain.  The exact technique is up to the individual but I think the main thing is to use an oil paint. Oil paints impart a translucent shine and lustre to the finish that, to my mind, makes for a convincing representation of varnished wood. 

 

Here is the same technique applied to the cabane struts. The ones on the left of the photo are straightforward Tamiya dark yellow; the ones on the right have had the oil paint treatment.

 

So now here we are... 

 

All the preparation's done. There's no putting things off any longer. The upper wing goes on tonight.

 

For better or worse - we are ready to rock. 😧

 

Yours Fearfully,

Bandsaw Steve

 

 

[bar side]

Critical moment Steve.  By the way happy new year & all the best for 2020

[hendie]

'Happy New Year Steve

 

7 hours ago, Bandsaw Steve said:

The upper wing goes on tonight.

 

10

 

9

 

8

 

...

 

 

[Bandsaw Steve]

7...6...5...4...3...2...1...

 

Make or break.

 

I started this model on 1 April 2018. This means that I have been working on this for 21 months now - although it's actually 17 months because I put this aside four  while building RMS Carpathia.  Either way it's a damned long time to spend building a stupid model, and for much of that time I have been worried about whether or not I'm going to wreck the thing when I put the upper wing on.

 

Despite what the legions of hardened WW1 aircraft scratch builders say;  'It's easy you just use a jig!  there's plenty that can go wrong at this stage...

 

Sitting up there, balanced on a bunch of flimsy toothpicks, the upper wing might not be affixed correctly, it might wobble about forever-more and one day fall off bringing skeins of rigging with it. Paint finishes can be damaged while inserting the inter-plane struts & glue can be spilt in difficult to reach - but easy to see - places. Flimsy structural bits can be broken, get lost and generally cause all sorts of problems.  Above all, without due care and good luck the upper wing can go on 'off skew' in any combination of plan, frontal or profile view. In which case the model is basically ruined.

 

On the other hand - the damned thing's a biplane. If I ever want to finish it that wing has to go on. 😱   So this is it... The moment of truth. This step can make or break the project. 

 

Let's put the aircraft in the jig. Remember the jig? That thing that I built to make sure everything lined up and is held in exactly the correct place while I just effortlessly glue the relevant bits and pieces into place. Keep watching and you'll see how that worked out.

 

First though I have to cut off the big planks of magnetic Formica that have held the top of the cabane struts together during all these months. They've done a good job those two big lumps, without them the cabane struts would have been snapped off ages ago. The use of magnetic Formica for these parts has worked well and I'm very pleased I nabbed a silly number of samples of the stuff a year ago from the kitchen design specialists that renovated our kitchen.  A pair of tin snips cut the stuff with ease.

 

Here are the four, now isolated, cabane struts each hanging on to the fuselage by the tiniest of flimsy bits.  From here I even managed to sand the tops into shaper ends without snapping any of them off - although I came damned close at one point.

 

And now - very carefully - I just have to slip the top wing into the jig and engage the cabane struts into their very carefully positioned and slots.   Can you see the problem?  Somehow the jig was pushing the entire top wing structure off to the Starboard side so that the cabanes, when viewed from the front were forming a sort of weird parallelogram.  This was not a good start at all! 😖

 

There's no photos of the wrestling match that followed but suffice to say that I could not correct this issue and simply gave up on the Jig. The rest of the alignment work was done entirely by eye but actually there wasn't much to do because I had been sufficiently careful when positioning the slots so not much adjustment was needed in the end. Following @phoenix's advice I set about securing the outermost  struts first and got to the following point fairly quickly.  Here everything's dry-fitted - no glue yet.  I was somewhat encouraged, and then...

 

I completely lost my mind!

 

As many of you will know I'm something of a glue enthusiast. I have my favourites and have a good working knowledge of a variety of adhesives many of which; PVA, two part epoxy araldite, cyanoacrylate, liquid nails, I return to over and over again depending on the job I am tackling.  So now,  for no apparent reason,  during this most critical of build stages I decided to try something I've never even seen used before. UV fixative, plasticy, sticky, glicky stuff. Looking back  I can't really say why this idea appealed so much to me, but I think it had something to do with the idea that while wrestling with the damned wing and twelve struts and other bits and bobs I would be able to spot the critical moment of perfect alignment switch on the UV lamp and 'freeze' the joint into exactly the correct spot in a few perfectly timed seconds. It was an enjoyable fantasy - while it lasted.

 

Here's the theory in action. The bluish white UV lamp is hitting the glue in the cabane strut slot right now.  I used this for the four cabane struts and the two outer interplane struts you can see in the photo two above. 

 

Initially things looked quite encouraging. However, it transpired that mistakes were made.

 

Unfortunately I had only attached the front outer interplane struts but I soon learned that you need to put the rear ones in as well before you try to secure the upper wing with rubber bands. What has happened here is that the force of the rubber bands (removed before this photo was taken) pulling down on the trailing edge of upper wing caused the entire thing to pivot backward on the tops of the rear cabane struts. Because there were no interplane struts to prevent this rotation the whole front of the top wing has just popped off its attached struts.  The new UV glue was no-where near strong enough to hold the upper wing in place and some bad, bad, awful language was used.  I'm ashamed to say that words like 'gosh' and 'jolly cobblers' emanated from my factory.

 

Now,  just to be fair to the manufacturers of the UV glue,  I will make the following points: The stuff did essentially work as advertised. It went hard and grippy and set in about five seconds once the light was on it. Also I must emphasise that I bought that tube about 5 years ago, so I would not be at all surprised if it has somehow weakened in the meantime. It would also be true to say that I doubt most of my other preferred glues would have held under those circumstances - although I think fully cured (say 12 hours) two-part epoxy would probably have held. But those points notwithstanding, this glue seemed to give way very easily when put to the test and I will not be using it again for structural work. I think that it will be useful however, when securing fiddly bits that refuse to stay put for any length of time. For example, I think it would have been ideal when I was trying to get those damned push-rods to stay in place while working on the rotary engine. 

 

Anyhow, with the rear outer interplane struts in place preventing any rotation of the upper wing, two-part epoxy on the cabane struts and PVA on the wood-to-wood joints between the wing and the interplane struts, we were starting to make progress.  Rubber bands are truly wonderful inventions!

 

Fitting the mid-span struts was tricky. They had to be short enough and springy enough so that they could be gently warped and manoeuvred into position and just 'pop' into place to engage with their slots. This was achieved by repeated trial and error - trim a couple of mm off the strut and try to fit it. If it could not squeeze in - trim another mm or so and try again and so and so and so until all four were positioned. Then use a toothpick to slide some PVA into the slot, from above or below as appropriate, to hold the strut (and the wing) firmly in place. 

 

By rotating the model around and looking at it from all angles I convinced myself that the wing was sitting in a sufficiently symmetrical position and that the general alignment was pretty good.

I let the model rest like this for an impatient two hours waiting for the glue to set. Ideally I would let it sit for about 12 hours or longer but I just couldn't wait to cut those rubber bands and see... 

 

This! 

 

and this! 

 

What a relief  phew...

 

Happy with that! 

 

There are few more 'pinch points' remaining on this build - notably painting the roundels on the wings.  But that's the big one in the rear view mirror - and achieved without disaster all on New-Year's eve I might add. 

With that sorted I was off for a James Boag's Premium to celebrate! They make a good drop of larger those Tasmanians!  Have a happy and safe new decade one and all!

 

Bandsaw Steve.

[Brandy]

I'm amazed this survived intact with rubber bands around it. You have no control over the force applied and it would be quite normal for all the struts to snap or bend when rubber bands are applied.

To quote Monty Python:

"You lucky, lucky, b****rd!"

 

Nice result though!

 

Ian

[hendie]

8 minutes ago, limeypilot said:

I'm amazed this survived intact with rubber bands around it.

 

I'm just surprised he actually got this far - that's two decades he's been working on this and still not finished!

 

 

 

Nice work Steve and glad you got things straightened out in the end.  The rigging should be a doddle after that

 

[Bandsaw Steve]

8 hours ago, limeypilot said:

it would be quite normal for all the struts to snap or bend when rubber bands are applied.

 

Sappelli and jarrah! Two of the hardest and strongest woods known to humanity. Magnetic Formica is really just mild steel sheet with two skins of resin applied. Definitely couldn’t  have done it with balsa and probably not many plastics either.

[Work In Progress]

Just popping in for a quick applau 

👏