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Miles Master In Three Flavours, F340, Two finished, one for another day


AdrianMF

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I have been acquiring a set of Miles Masters:

F43-B420-A-1874-4-B46-90-C9-2305-ACB60-D

 

The parts are mostly flash free, and the plastic is very hard and brittle:

D0-B9-A630-0-D03-43-B6-9-EA3-B581467-BB7

 

My intention is to build one here as a Master MkIII, with a more detailed cockpit and a correction for the rear fuselage lack of taper. If time allows I want to do a MkII conversion and a Martinet conversion, using engines from a Revell re-pop of the Frog Blenheim, which is winging its way to a pickup point near me from EBay.

 

Regards,

Adrian

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Great to have you onboard Adrian. I'll put you down for three builds, however there is certainly no obligation to go that far. 

These kits actually look quite good and I'm surprised I haven't obtained one up to this point. That might change of course after this GB concludes! 

 

Cheers and best of luck.. Dave 

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Hi Adrian,

Built one of these many years ago but seeing that you and Heather are building some, I refreshed my memory on the machines and was surprised. I have come across a few British planes that at one stage or another had several different engines, but many of these were used in one off prototypes or limited production runs - only a few used 2 or 3 different engines in major production runs and I had forgotten that the 3 marks of the Master each had a different engine - Kestrel, Mercury and Wasp Junior,which is quite rare.  I see now why you are modelling so many. Guess a MkI with a Kestrel would be a bit tricky!

 

Good luck - I will watch with interest.

 

Pete

 

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9 minutes ago, PeterB said:

Guess a MkI with a Kestrel would be a bit tricky!

At a pinch I guess the wings and rear fuselage might just be usable. The hard bit would sculpting a new nose and that huge belly radiator. Mind you, if anyone can convert a MkIII to a MkI Adrian can!

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2 hours ago, PeterB said:

a MkI with a Kestrel would be a bit tricky!

Not so much... If you have a look at the Trainers GB you can see the Pegasus Master Mk I built up after comparing it to the FROG Mk III. They are pretty close - the FROG kit is much better engineered, whereas the Pegasus kit seems a bit closer in outline to the real thing. I’m sure that you could cut down a Hurricane or Spitfire cowling to make a Kestrel one.

 

Anyhow, Dora Wings are rumoured to be making a Master Mk I, which will be gorgeous if their other kits are anything to go by.

 

Regards,

Adrian

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3 hours ago, Greg Law said:

Isn't this the plane

Apparently (from Wikipedia) it was a Magister (even slower and more exposed than this!). @Heather Kay is building one here (diorama ideas??) and I built one in the Trainers GB.

 

Regards,

Adrian

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5 hours ago, AdrianMF said:

Apparently (from Wikipedia) it was a Magister (even slower and more exposed than this!). @Heather Kay is building one here (diorama ideas??) and I built one in the Trainers GB.

 

Regards,

Adrian

I just checked this with Alan Deere's book Nine Lives. It was a Master. Most likely a Mk.1 I expect. I thought it was a Magister as well and ordered one from Special hobby. Only to find out that it was this one. 

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2 hours ago, Greg Law said:

I just checked this with Alan Deere's book Nine Lives. It was a Master. 

Ah, I guess that’s Wikipedia for you. Nearly right most of the time. Like that Abraham Lincoln quote: “Never trust what you read on the internet”...

 

Regards,

Adrian

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Hi Adrian 

3 in 1, you could name an oil after that :idea:

Really looking forward to how they turn out, lots of us have one of these so with any luck you will encourage us all to build them 

cheers Pat

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A Master I conversion from the FROG kit appeared in the first issue of Scale Aircraft Modelling in 1978. IIRC, the nose of a Hasegawa Spitfire I was grafted on to the FROG fuselage.

 

You might need a bit of wet and dry on the kit as the Novo kits I have seem to have raised scabs on the surface looking as though there was rust on the mould.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Hi Pat,

 

I’m just (yesterday) back from a week away working. I’m keeping out of the way while Heather builds hers by putting together the Westland Wyvern. In my absence I’ve had some extra bits delivered so I can pick these up again after the Wyvern is done.

 

Regards,

Adrian

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The Wyvern is done and so rather than get more boxes out I thought I’d crack on with these. I don’t know if I need a separate thread for each kit in the long term, or whether I can have a single thread called “Miles Master - three ways” like some fancy restaurant dish, but I thought I would get some industrial production started for the cockpit details:

D68-CA103-2-A0-A-4-C1-F-BC41-CEDE47-FD07

Parts for three front cockpits and two rear - in the Martinet the back has a stool and the winch gear.

 

Having bought a Revell Blenheim to get the Mercury cowlings for the II and the Martinet, I decided I didn’t want to waste the rest of it so I sprung for some SBS Mercury cowlings as well, which are dearer than the kit!

 

Regards,

Adrian

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One thread for all three works for me Adrian and am sure it will make things easier for you in the long run. Nice progress and am sure you’ll supply plenty of excellent modelling and scratch ideas as these builds develop. 

 

Cheers.. Dave 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Sorry to barge in late with negative thoughts but the Frog Master is a nasty pile of misshapen unmentionable. As it happens I have three kits of my own and have taken them out many times and put them away again.

 

The problem is with the forward fuselage. The Master fuselage never really changed from the original Kestrel-engined shape. Miles added external wooden fairings over the original from the firewall back. Frog's amorphous blobby school of aircraft design totally ignores the origins of the fuselage. The original is much slimmer at the forward cockpit - of all three marks. Really, it needs an entirely new fuselage. I have cadded up shapes for x-plane and I suppose I could transpose them to .stl for printing but then I'd have nothing to complain about.

 

Problems problems.

Edited by smellybeard
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