1/48 Hph B-36 SAC Part1

[LorenSharp]

The Port and Starboard Panels also gt the Oxygen hose treatment and of course,more dials.

The just for the heck of it I wanted to see if I could make circulation fans and their covers. I used some brass faucet screen for the front and nylon window screen for the sides,(they bent easier)

Cut some plastic card for the fan blades

After tat attached the seat harnesses.

[MattSimps74]

Wowsers! Hats off to you Loren!!

If, in another life I were to get my hands on the B-36 kit I don’t think I could resist converting it to an NB-36H - you know, the FLYING NUCLEAR REACTOR!!! Mad times the fifties - the intention was to power the thing by Nuke but nobody at Convair could figure out how to do it without massive contamination, so the plane remained a proof of concept vehicle. I’m sorry i can’t get the pic to link up but there’s a great pic at Wikipedia, brilliant colour scheme. Loads of lead shielding on board of course.

6 turning, 4 burning and one just glowing! Bonkers. Best of luck with your builds, your Valkyrie is a work of art.

Cheers,

matt

[LorenSharp]

Put it all together and here is what you get.

Here is a better shot of the throttle levers

The interior IS actually Interior Green. The photos come out more like Zinc Chromate. But it is darker.

[LorenSharp]

2 minutes ago, MattSimps74 said:

Wowsers! Hats off to you Loren!!

If, in another life I were to get my hands on the B-36 kit I don’t think I could resist converting it to an NB-36H - you know, the FLYING NUCLEAR REACTOR!!! Mad times the fifties - the intention was to power the thing by Nuke but nobody at Convair could figure out how to do it without massive contamination, so the plane remained a proof of concept vehicle. I’m sorry i can’t get the pic to link up but there’s a great pic at Wikipedia, brilliant colour scheme. Loads of lead shielding on board of course.

6 turning, 4 burning and one just glowing! Bonkers. Best of luck with your builds, your Valkyrie is a work of art.

Cheers,

matt

I've seen the pictures MattSimps74, One of the reference books I have devoted an entire Chapter with a bunch of images including the reactor. It's pretty amazing.

[LorenSharp]

Now I can finish the building the master for the turrets that I can make vacs from.

I have the basic shape, now to trim out where marked and lower the height just a tad.

Then I"ll smooth it out and coat with a glazing compound before making a vac u form part.

[LorenSharp]

The other thing that will need attending to is cutting the nose weight disks in half so they will fit under the forward turret assembly. If you were wondering how much weight is needed to keep this little plane from being a tail sitter.Well they supply 2 disks-the diameter of the fuselage. They weigh 250g Each. Thats not a misprint. I weighed them. Solid plate steel. and a pain so far to cut with my dremel. I may have to go old school and break out the hack saw. This may take a while talk amongst yourselves and order another round while I tend to this.

[bar side]

That a couple of great lumps of metal.  Hope the undercarriage is nice & strong with that & the best Erin weight.  Looking good though

[LorenSharp]

The landing gear is the same as on the "Beast", Solid brass soldered rod core encapsulated with the resin form. Actually very stout. I had to modify some of the gear on the Beast and I had to use the dremel to separate the pieces.. I'm hoping the ceiling rafters will be strong enough. The only way to display will be to hang it up. Instead of my usual lightweight fishing line I'll use braided fishing line to play it safe.

[LorenSharp]

 

2 hours ago, bar side said:

That a couple of great lumps of metal.  Hope the undercarriage is nice & strong with that & the best Erin weight.  Looking good though

My camera work leaves much to be desired. I may retake them before permanently installing in the fuselage.

[modelman182]

Oh, I am SO disappointed that you haven't built in an anti-grav unit to allow for safe suspension of the kit, once completed! 😉

 

Cockpits are looking real good, Loren. Hope you've got the wide angle lens ready for the airframe pics! That's another 'biggie' for your collection!

 

Kev

[LorenSharp]

Wide angle is easy Kev, its the Closeup thats become the issue. Although you are right about one thing,I'm going to have to build a holding stand for the Fuselage and the wings. Probably use some foam board and construct like a good old fashioned rifle rack. That way they can be held in a padded stasis out of the way while drying or while working on something else. It will get bigger and since it's designed to be built so the wings and fuselage can be stored/transported more easily. Shhhhh I was going to put the Anti-grav in the rear near the flux capacitor and PU-238 Space modulator.

Edited July 22, 2019 by LorenSharp

[modelman182]

😁 Doc Brown would be happy to see the Flux capacitor in use again, but I'd avoid using the PU-238 cos there's this little guy who gets VERY irate if you use his tech for anything other than pure destruction! 😉

 

I was lucky enough to pick up a clean (used) memory foam mattress for free a few years ago - still using it for support, packing and transit of models. Took me a bit of effort to strip out what I wanted (ie. just the foam) but I reckon it was worth it. The stuff is light, reasonably dense and nicely protective without putting too much pressure on the precious cargo. Just a thought.

 

As to the Close up problem - I bought a second hand Olympus digital camera which has a macro function and I can get as close in as I like with it. In US money it cost me less than $50. Worth looking around for something like that, perhaps?

 

How did it go with the disc cutting? - not a job I'd like to have to tackle, I must admit.

 

Kev

[LorenSharp]

The camera I have is NIkon coolpix, picked up on ebay for about the same. Normal closeup its fine t I'm trying to do macro closeups and the auto focus gets a little wonky trying figure out what it is that I'm trying to focus on from 5cm away. disk cutting is slow. trying to not lose too much weight from the disks while cutting. Dremel is the fastest, but its a case of cut for 5 minutes let the disk cool down for 10 min and the dremel cool down for 30 min because of heat transfer.at this point I'm 40% through the first disk. A hacksaw wouldn't have gotten me this far in the same time.So its cut, stop, work on something else, then cut, stop and repeat. C'est la guerre The memory foam is a good Idea, I just create a little cradle to temp hold big parts while drying and out of the way to prevent accidental flight breakage.🤨 Been there done that don't want to repeat. I think I may have stumbled on a way to clean the large resin parts though, Good old  Sodium Carbonate washing powders.  I experimented with it  working with the P/E to get the photo resist to stick properly. Simple clean water wasn't doing the trick. But in both instances, the washing powders clean the mould release faster and with less effort than I've had with anything else. Now the paint should stick to the big parts without flaking off at the drop of a hat. That was the really biggest pain working on the Great White Beast constantly having to redo the paint job. The NMF should adhere with no problem I want to make sure the Alclad sticks.

[modelman182]

Hi Loren,

I'm surprised the Coolpix isn't performing well under macro focusing conditions - I was looking at getting one of those (before I found the Olympus) as they have a good rep.

I suspected the disc cutting would be slow work - only way to do it without damaging valuable tools, eh? I use Lego to build support cradles during construction and painting, usually covering the contact points with some thin foam to protect the plastic/paint. For longer storage (shelf of doom style time periods) I use the memory foam.

Thanks for the handy tip about Sodium Carbonate washing powder - I shall have to see if I can get some as the resin parts of the Anigrand SeaMaster are very mucky indeed! I'd been trying to figure out what to use - and now I know. Cheers 🙂

 

Kev

[LorenSharp]

The cameras short comings are more to be from my ham fisted attempts. and not using proper lighting than anything else. Because the main parts are so big, I cleaned them in the bathtub. Enough warm water to cover then a about a cup or so of washing powders mixed well. Seems to have done the trick.

 

 

[modelman182]

Glad I don't build MONSTER models like you do - cos I ain't got a bathtub, only showers. 🙂 I should be fine with a washing up bowl...

 

Got my washing powder on order, so I'm also glad to hear it has worked so well.

 

Try your local dime store for a cheap small tripod and then use delayed shutter (which I think the Coolpix can do, same as my Olympus). Set up, select shutter delay, click and stand back - simple, eh? 😁 Makes a lot of difference to the shot, even in moderate lighting.

 

Kev

[LorenSharp]

I'll give that a try thanks.

 

[LorenSharp]

Well I have one Disk nearly cut in half ,30 minutes total time doesn't seem like much until working with a Dremel.So while letting it cool again here some work attaching the Horizontal Stabilizers and various other exterior bits.

The forward part of the stabilizer is one big piece of resin that  goes through the tail area. The aft portion is 2 wedge pieces The instructions called for cutting the openings along scribed lines, unfortunately that made the opening about 12 cm too big.

That and the wedge leaves a gap of about 3-4 cm off.time to break out the plastic card and Milliput.

 

 

[LorenSharp]

Here's with the card added and a little bit of Milliput to fill the gaps. Also added the fairings for APG-41 Tail Gun Radar.

 

This gives an idea of the size of the tail. My little Moonbat is't quite big enough to exceed the span of the tail.

Edited July 24, 2019 by LorenSharp

[LorenSharp]

The Nose turret add and sanded down.

The An/APS-23 Search Radar added

 

[/url

And a top turret correction, I trimmed off too much. so I cut off a small piece from the original,strengthened underneath,reattached and used a thin coat of putty to fill. Once everything is dry I can sand them down and apply the first coat of primer to see what else needs to be filled.

 

Edited July 24, 2019 by LorenSharp

[LorenSharp]

Having learned from the last foray into building really big planes and having them fall over constantly then needing to be touched up, I made a small cradle out of foam board to keep it semi out of harms way while drying or being worked on.

[Corsairfoxfouruncle]

Really enjoying the build so far. Your Moonbat looks great and would love to have it in my collection. 

[LorenSharp]

That little moonbat was a real exercise in frustration.It was an OLD and I mean old Combat  Models Vac. Old enough the white plastic had turned yellow. It was frustrating ,but fun. I had profiled it here:

I think it's still available, and probably better moulded now as compared to when it was made years ago.

 

[LorenSharp]

Welcome back! It's time for more exciting adventures in building stupidly big planes. When last we saw our stalwart adventurer,the fuselage had been prepped for priming. Tail turret added and smoothed,

Light coat of primer to check for imperfections,only the top spine in  few places really needed anything. The lower seam came out smooth as silk.

 

I did find a small discrepancy in the top turret opening of about 10-12 scale inches too big.It showed up while test fitting the main cabin bulkheads. A piece of the original body part I cutaway and some scrap plastic tor enforce came out like new.

Let that dry for 24 hrs and black base coat for the metallic coat sprayed on. I'll let this dry for 24 hrs before light sanding and adding another coat. I shaded the panels vertically to give the metallic coat some variations. The second coat I'll darken further to mix it up a little.

 

Edited July 27, 2019 by LorenSharp

[LorenSharp]

While working out how  to mass  produce the turrets. I dug out my trusty old Vac-u-form to see if it was possible to get a reasonable facsimile of the turret body.

This little jewel is older than most of you children and almost as old as me. Got this as a present when they first came out and aside of updating a few of the movable parts has performed flawlessly. Granted you can't make very big parts but it's adequate for my uses.

In fact I noticed that the tail turret was the same type AND size as the tail on the B-47 so I made a set for t while I was at it.

The resin part I used as a master held up nicely against the heat from the vac machine and hot sheeting