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Airfix T.1 Tucano 1/72


Jered

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Right. 

I'm new here, hi. This is the first scale model I've done in what feels like forever - probably since 2011 or even longer? Who knows 🤷‍♂️ 

My significant other gave me this kit at Christmas... Which was a lovely surprise and being completely honest not without a little dread. She knew I used to do scale modelling long before we met, little did she know she catalysed my interest in modelling and reignited my dormant O̶b̶s̶e̶s̶s̶i̶o̶n̶ passion. So on boxing day I ordered the CMK and Quickboost interior, exterior, control surfaces and wheels... And paints... And a few tools 👀

 

Next step - reorganise all my kits, sundries and etc. into something resembling neat. This meant taking an entire room apart which was being used for laundry, sewing, art and keeping my two racing bikes safe and dry (Scott Plasma III and Ridley Noah SL both on Ultegra Di2 for those interested!) 

 

Finally organised (gutted) the room, kit still sat unstarted on the shelf which brings us to fig. 1 

DSC_0043

A tidy workspace. 

As you can see there's various art media for various projects. Most tools are in that ugly plastic set of 3x3 drawers which I'll eventually replace with a nice wooden machinist's chest. 

Now that's sorted (legit, two weeks later of clearing and tidying) I can make a start. 

Fig. 2 the box art

DSC_0056

 

 

Nice. Going with the Leeds gloss Black livery as I already have the paint and I think it looks cool. 

 

Where to begin but the cockpit. 

Fig. 3 a comparison between the OOB and the very finely detailed CMK interior set. 

DSC_0021

 

 

Fig. 4 the whole set from CMK 

DSC_0031

The instrument panels were fun to work on - the resin gets filed quite thin and the part feels very fragile. Good result though. 

 

Fig. 5 shows the first pitfall I've made so far in that I wish I'd mounted the nose cone onto the rest of the model before putting the props on or at least removed it from the part tree first! 

DSC_0041

Anyway, cockpit assembled and painted as well as engine put together. 

 

Fig. 6

DSC_0040

 

Beautiful, fine control surfaces. My only gripe is that I feel like the packing of these delicate parts could be improved to stop or reduce damage in transit as I have quite a few fine details knocked off parts. 

 

Fig. 7

DSC_0052

Probably hard to see, but after sawing off the moulded on flaps, the edges must be skimmed down on the inside in order for a decent fit. The result is beautiful though and worth the effort. I took the edge down to around 0.15mm or so. 

 

Fig. 8

DSC_0049

Fuselage together with a bit of thinning down the inside to fit the cockpit. Sadly, I think the extra bulk of the cockpit, the softness of the plastic and my not skimming the fuselage wall thickness down enough resulted in a slightly skewed glue up with the tail out of center ever so slightly. Lots of filing and sanding to get the shape nice but I'll have to rescribe quite a few lines.

Also I mistakenly removed part of the fuselage. 10 points if you can see what I've done. I'll replace it with something scratch built. 

 

Fig. 9

DSC_0055

Wings on, engine, exhausts, prop, cargo bay all on. The fit of the wings is quite poor so its on the filler list for later on. 

Coming together nicely but I need to get some filler soonish as I don't have much more to add to the fuselage before I need to fill, sand and prime. 

 

Thanks for looking!

Jered

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Hi Jered Welcome to Britmodeller and welcome back to modeling. It doesn't look like you've lost your skills as that Tucano is coming along nicely. I'll follow this one if you don't mind. About the bikes they look like serious machines so I take it you race. What do you do? Triathlon or Road? I used to Road race in the eighties and nineties and still ride in the summer months. My bike is a rather less exotic Focus Culebra I've had for 5 years. Anyways good luck with the kit.

 

Cheers Allan

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Evening all. 

On 16/01/2019 at 00:49, almac said:

Hi Jered Welcome to Britmodeller and welcome back to modeling. It doesn't look like you've lost your skills as that Tucano is coming along nicely. I'll follow this one if you don't mind. About the bikes they look like serious machines so I take it you race. What do you do? Triathlon or Road? I used to Road race in the eighties and nineties and still ride in the summer months. My bike is a rather less exotic Focus Culebra I've had for 5 years. Anyways good luck with the kit.

 

Cheers Allan

Culebra. Solid bike that. 

Cheers, I'm a bespoke furniture maker by trade so a lot of the skills are transferable plus an eye for detail helps! 

I mostly do road and circuit racing at 2nd cat level with a wee bit of time trialling too. Got my first UCI stage race in April which I'm looking forward to.

 

Fig. 10

DSC_0060

Got the resin tail plane assy on. The moulding is really crisp, however a LOT of sanding is needed to get the rest of the fuselage flowing nicely. Also, there are a few panel lines missing on the surfaces. Undecided whether to scribe them on or not. That being said, I've sanded through several already. 

 

Fig. 11

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2 part filler on all the gaps. This stuff goes hard in an hour or less which means I could get on to some painting tonight too. 

 

Fig. 12

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Masking off the canopy with a brand new blade. 

 

Fig. 13

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Clamped in place with a couple of tiny spots of CA and then pva the rest of it. 

Also got the flaps on. They look fantastic from the top but not so great on the underside... Luckily the plane will be black so the gaps won't be too horrid. 

 

Fig. 14

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Making a base to hold it by for spraying. 

 

Fig. 15

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After a coat of alclad II grey. 

That is a horrendous glue line on the canopy/fuselage! I'll get filler on it later. 

 

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Coming along nicely, Jered.

It's been a long time since I worked on them so I've forgotten a lot of the details.

But, before it's too late, Ailerons, one up, and one down or both neutral.

I do have the Airfix kit but have never gotten around to building it.

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Only a micro update as I've been away all weekend. 

Fig. 16

DSC_0073

 

 

Picked up some fresh milliput from a petrol station (of all places) on my way home from North Wales back to Oxfordshire which enabled me to fair in the canopy. I found this quite challenging to try and get a decent shape to minimise sanding later on. 

Repositioned the ailerons and still have a couple of antennas to go on as they're fragile I was going to do them after rescribing some panel lines

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I have to say that your lay off from the hobby doesn't seem to have had any adverse effect on your abilities. Its all looking very nice.

 

Martian 👽

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Thanks! I'm enjoying your Marchetti build. 

I will probably re do the control surfaces assembies as I'm not happy with the gaps. I work as a bespoke fine furniture maker so it feels more like all my woodworking skills are transferable! Still a learning curve getting back into it. 

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TBH I don't think the gaps are too far out. Your flaps are set around the take off position,

IIRC there is a screwjack that pushes them back and as they move rearwards they rotate down .

Two of us once spent days on an early Tucano as the flaps went to different

settings depending on whether selected from the front or rear cockpit!

The aileron gap isn't bad at all. 

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On 21/01/2019 at 19:07, Pete in Lincs said:

Two of us once spent days on an early Tucano as the flaps went to different

settings depending on whether selected from the front or rear cockpit!

Uuuuurrrrgh that sounds like an absolute nightmare! How did you end up fixing it? 

 

Fig. 17

DSC_0074

Coat of Alclad black primer which revealed that I need more careful sanding. I ended up double sided taping a small piece of paper onto a piece of cork sheet which did a nice job of faring in the sides. 

 

Fig. 18

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"zenith" painted the engine details hopefully to give it a bit more depth come the paint job. I wish I had painted each component individually now! 

Ah well, learning curve and all that 

 

Fig. 19

DSC_0081

 

Undercarriage and hatches/covers done save for the yellow edges. Moulding of the undercarriage isn't the best, a little vague and slightly misaligned but doesn't look too bad after painting and a wash of dark. 

 

Hopefully I'll get the colour coat on this weekend. I'll be using zero paints jet black as it comes out quite transparent so I'll be able to put some subtle variation in the panel colours. 

 

 

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2 hours ago, Jered said:

Uuuuurrrrgh that sounds like an absolute nightmare! How did you end up fixing it? 

I think we got it down to an acceptable measurement in the end. Something like a 1 degree difference 

between the front and rear inputs. It was a bit of a nightmare system anyway. The levers operate Teleflex

cables  https://www.teleflex.com/global/about-us/history/cable.jpg which turn a cog which operates 

microswitches which control the hydraulics which turn the screwjacks which move the flaps.

It was a case of tweak/adjust and try over and over. A warning was written into the F1500 & it flew on.

I think it was one of the early ones, ZF13? No two Tucano's were exactly the same.

Pete

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