Sea Vixen FAW.1x2

[perdu]

1 hour ago, Brandy said:

That brings me to a different Basil...and reminded me of the fact I used to refer to my brother's first wife as Cybil, on account of the way she would snarl my brother's name!

 

Next drift please.....

 

Ian

Ah, the joys of Holy Acrimony...

[TheBaron]

Another week down and an unexpected day up in Dublin yesterday with the sun shining along the Liffey:

Good to see the melancholy spirit of James Dean Bradfield enduring in grafitti:

One of my favourite junk shops up near Mary's Abbey has a revolving cast in the window - this week it featured two 'oul dolls doing the walk of shame home after a night out  in their finery:

(Christ knows who the guitarist is meant to be...)

 

On 23/08/2021 at 15:14, giemme said:

Lovely greeblering going on here, Tony    Smart thinking on the fuse wire, very effective

Cheers G.

Fuse wire is getting harder to source these days round here but I did find a big roll of something quite close to its diameter and softness in Søstrene Grene so laid in a stock.

On 23/08/2021 at 16:12, Ex-FAAWAFU said:

It’s called O’Kra over here; a greener version

 

On 23/08/2021 at 17:30, perdu said:

O'Kra?

In Scotland: 'Och Ra!' (said upon seeing the Sun God appear in the sky.)

On 23/08/2021 at 17:54, Terry1954 said:

then I remembered the O'Bhindi's and the O'Bhaji's I met in a Dublin curry house long ago.

Hope it wasn't followed by 'O my guts' Terry.....

On 23/08/2021 at 18:08, LorenSharp said:

Tony be careful of that "O'kra" Blossom..... it may be a Triffid. Especially since all the bugs are flying around stoned. Jes sayin'...

Triffids ain't nothing Lauren If you've ever had to fight a Horseradish infestation in your flower bed. For sheer Scarethebejayzusoutofyou though the Lovecraftian Guarana plant beats all!

On 23/08/2021 at 21:36, hendie said:

Unless it was one of this lot of course

Awww. Did you make that ensemble?

 

On 23/08/2021 at 21:36, hendie said:

Hendie - trying hard not to resort to mentioning old children's shows with a fox and lots of booms

There's a joke about Samantha in there, as told by Barry Cryer perhaps....

On 24/08/2021 at 11:03, Ex-FAAWAFU said:

My friend’s 92-year-old Mum (who is something of a dab hand on the old iPad) wanted to help, so she put “Bitch with black nipple” into Google.

That phrase works to the tune of 'Black Betty' and now won't leave my head.

Or yours now.....

On 24/08/2021 at 14:30, Brandy said:

That brings me to a different Basil...and reminded me of the fact I used to refer to my brother's first wife as Cybil, on account of the way she would snarl my brother's name!

Hate to have been her builder....

 

Tucked away 'neath the inner pylon of each wing of XJ481 are a non-standard Sea Vixen feature, namely a pair of  'v' shaped bracing struts, as you can see to port in this lovely shot of the area by James ( @71chally). With the struts themselves being slightly flattened in cross section, I simply soldered the required shape from 0.3mm tubing and then crimped some 0.5mm tube around the two halves of the vee using flat-jawed pliers, like so:

The mounting spigot sticking from th apex was then trimmed to length and these were test-fitted:

Quite fiddly to finesse these fitting as the parts get sliding off the pylon, so It took about three attempts to get both sets of angles sorted so that they matched reality. In the end though I was convinced that the resulting structure would bear scrutiny from all directions at this scale:

Because of anticipated problems in getting even  coverage around those parts at the painting stage, those frames  will be painted separately so had have a coat of metal primer and been added to the brass pile. You can probably notice in the above shot that the penny dropped recently regarding damaging the aircraft so I keep it tucked on top of a small pillow on the bench for safety whilst working on it now , like a tiny and demanding king.....

 

From this point onwards we're really into the final stages of adding PE to this version of the aircraft:

A quick smoothing with 1200/2500 W&D and then a test fit the wing fences first:

These fit the wing profile so accurately in fact that they almost clip into place on their own:

I won't be taking any chances though and will again paint both fences separately with a view to adding them to the airframe after it's completed.

 

The airbrake fins/ventrals have however been fitted permanently at this stage as, after due deliberation, I reckon that the extra handling caution required at this stage is less of a problem than would be caused by having to fit and make good around them on an already painted airframe later on:

Using resin as adhesive I find enormously helpful with such jobs in allowing you the latitude to finesse the mounting angle of parts like this, and only then deciding at what point you want the adhesive to go off:

I reckon then that unless anything else I might have forgotten springs to mind over the course of the day, it might be time to chuck some primer on all of that at the weekend and see how she's shaping up.

 

Also about to move from the to-do to the have-to-do-now list is the design of some decals. Roundels and larger letters will all be masked & painted as standard for me these days, but for tiny markings (as well as that fiendish red matrix for the engine bay panels) on this aircraft, decals are the only option at this scale. As Pete has previously confirmed though regarding the red triangles for instance - and as the manual mentions for maintenance labels  - these themselves were transfers rather than painted elements of the airframe. I'd some clear decal film ordered for said job some time ago but it's considerably overdue and apparently in Schrodinger's postbox of will it/won't it now arrive....

 

Thanks for lookin in as always  - have a good start to your respective weekends and hopefully there should be some pigment to show you next time!

Tony

 

Pylons!

I have to drill the pylons for the stores. I knew I'd forgotten something....

 

 

 

 

 

 

[bigbadbadge]

Oh wow, some amazing miniature work Tony, really progressing well now.

Great work 

Chris

[perdu]

paint

 

 

 

mmm paint

 

 

 

 

lovely work Tony

 

 

is it implicit that the sweet oirish lasses I was schooled with might turn out a wee bit 'dollish' like the beauties in the shop window?

 

A tad too stiff after a night on the lash?

 

 

Shoulda stuck with them after all although Father D told me to let them go, mayhaps?

 

[Terry1954]

2 hours ago, TheBaron said:

 

That picture alone sums up this beauty for me Tony. Always liked a decent, detailed and curvaceous underbelly ............

 

So, we are talking of pigment at last. Sssshhh don't tell Giorgio @giemme! 

 

Have a great weekend sir!

 

Terry

[giemme]

50 minutes ago, Terry1954 said:

So, we are talking of pigment at last. Sssshhh don't tell Giorgio @giemme! 

Too late, I heard you!   

 

3 hours ago, TheBaron said:

namely a pair of  'v' shaped bracing struts, as you can see to port in this lovely shot of the area by James ( @71chally

Are you trying to confuse me, Tony? (more  than I already am, anyway....  ) Isn't that starboard? 😖      

 

Lovely job with them PE, can't wait to see some paint going on.    

 

There, I said it  

 

Ciao

[Navy Bird]

10 hours ago, TheBaron said:

That phrase works to the tune of 'Black Betty' and now won't leave my head.

 

Bam-a-lam!   

 

 

 

Lead Belly rocks.

 

Cheers,

Bill

[hendie]

11 hours ago, TheBaron said:

(Christ knows who the guitarist is meant to be...)

 

ah... that'd be wossisname, the guy that never made the cut at the Sigue Sigue Sputnik audition?

 

that underbelly looks so good I almost want to rub it.  But shall refrain.

 

 

[Ex-FAAWAFU]

Fabulous, comme toujours (as they say in Sligo).

 

”Schrodinger’s postbox” made me laugh out loud; I am now getting odd looks from my wife - pretty standard Saturday morning, I suppose.

[TheBaron]

I mentioned the garden being absolutely full of butterflies over the last week.

They're still there:

Like flying fractals of colour, the closer you look the more endless the patterns seem to be:

 

In other news:

 

I am reacquaint

with paint.

 

A quick word with the hecklers first though:

On 27/08/2021 at 15:06, bigbadbadge said:

Oh wow, some amazing miniature work Tony, really progressing well now.

Kind of you as ever Chris: work is liable to become uber-busy for the next few weeks so I wanted to get all remaining parts sorted in preparation for painting by this weekend. That way I can at least keep the ball rolling and do the odd bit whenever time and energies permit.

On 27/08/2021 at 15:42, perdu said:

is it implicit that the sweet oirish lasses I was schooled with might turn out a wee bit 'dollish' like the beauties in the shop window?

 

A tad too stiff after a night on the lash?

Having lived a life of utmost virtue and purity Bill it would be impossible for me to know of such things. 🙊

On 27/08/2021 at 15:46, Terry1954 said:

That picture alone sums up this beauty for me Tony. Always liked a decent, detailed and curvaceous underbelly ............

I know you meant aircraft Terry, being of a similarly pious nature to myself.

23 hours ago, giemme said:

Too late, I heard you!

Your equipment is more sensitive than I thought Giorgio! 😁

23 hours ago, giemme said:

Isn't that starboard?

It is. I posted the wrong photograph.

16 hours ago, Navy Bird said:

Lead Belly rocks.

Nice post Bill. 🤘etc.

Back in June I finally got round to purchasing an amp/preamp combination so that I could play the vinyl collection for the first time in about 30 years, including 'DC-7' from this feller:

'She said, "You made it back safe, but do you know?
I gotta kiss you son, You almost been to heaven."
I said why you said, mama?
She said, "You were ridin' that high-flying DC-7."'

15 hours ago, hendie said:

ah... that'd be wossisname, the guy that never made the cut at the Sigue Sigue Sputnik audition?

Whoever he is, owls shun him.

15 hours ago, hendie said:

that underbelly looks so good I almost want to rub it.  But shall refrain.

I think we can all appreciate the levels of self-denial shown here Alan.

5 hours ago, Ex-FAAWAFU said:

”Schrodinger’s postbox” made me laugh out loud; I am now getting odd looks from my wife - pretty standard Saturday morning, I suppose.

 

Enough of my waffling, you'll want some of this:

Almost back to a matt version of that tragic 1952 livery, XJ481 and sundry accessories has now been primed this morning:

 

I used Alclad Black for this - knowing that their primers have been causing a lot of people grief of late.  I can only say this stuff has never let me down over the course of several builds, though I waft it on gradually in three coats, starting with a fine mist to key it onto bare surfaces  before building up the subsequent layers incrementally and leaving the each layer to dry for about 2-3mins before applying the next. On the first build I ever used it on (I think the Barracuda but I may be wrong) I simply sprayed one thick layer and it lifted horribly with tape - using three fine coats though, this problem has never recurred. Who knows though if layer depth is a solution to woes, or that I've just been lucky with the batches I've bought over time?

 

Non-printed features like the cable ducting:

- and airbrake fins really start to integrate nicely into the overall design once some colour is on:

 

 

As expected, the small triangular antenna on the engine bay and on top of the hose break up the surface nicely:  unexpectedly though, I haven't got round to breaking them off yet....

All that effort put into cleaning the joins between parts seems to have paid of at this stage as (barring some clumsy remedial work I did to a scratch on the inside of one of the tail fins) I can't see any outstanding irregularities that need finessing:

 

Naturally enough, these merciless angles show the need to go back over the primer with some 2500 W&D. Some of it will also get a polish with the Dremel as I like the black of the primer so much that I've no need to consider adding another black pigment on top. If it look too dark, I may knock it back visually with some (very watered down) dark grey, but we'll see if that's necessary after further viewing.

 

The stores also look much smarter now with some colour chucked onto them as well:

The 150 gall. tanks:

All trace of the original drain holes on these that were necessary to let excess resin out after printing are invisible - another benefit using the same resin for quick repairs of this nature:

I've seen some shots of these tanks showing what looks like a quantity gauge/dial on their forward port sides - does anyone know if all of this tank type had this feature, as I can't see it in several photos?

The Martel test unit also came out nice and sharp under primer:

To visually mimic the flash of the camera lens under the protective glass I currently added a foil disk:

Not sure that it looks all that convincing as a camera lens tbh so I might have a go at drilling the lens cavity out with a conical diamond birr and add a drop of the Fabrika Decoru drops which did such good service for lenses on the PAS. The actual convex transparency covering the front of the Martel I reckons will be best expressed as a simple plunge mould. I only need it to be a one-off for this aircraft in this instance so can sacrifice one of the other Martel prints and put some Milliput over the front to form the required glass shape over.

 

I believe the overall finish of this aircraft was a satin one, so amongst other things up in Dublin recently I bought some W&N Galeria satin varnish to use for this task in Evans' (a treasure house of colour and artist tools).  Also purchased were a few kinds of metallic and non-metallic artist's pigments that I've not seen people use in modelling before, so whilst spraying primer earlier I did up a few mules to run tests on. If the results are in any way interesting I'll show them here - if they're not, then we'll never speak of them again.... 😁

 

She'll sit like this tonight and tomorrow I'll tidy that rear inner fin. A quick respray and then some light sanding & Dremel work to smooth the primer.

 

Recent sun over the week has also led to a sudden glut of ripening so I've begun doing sun-dried tomatoes in the oven - it seems to be working out ok and that lot are safely in the larder now in jars of oil and garlic:

I know. Bourgeois as feck but what ya going to do?

Yours in shame &etc.

Tony

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[bigbadbadge]

Great to see the paint going on and looks wonderful.  Sundried tomatoes, hmmm lovely.

Cracking work on all fronts fella. 

Chris

[Cookenbacher]

Hey Giorgio, @giemme, you're missing the paint!

 

Top marks for beautiful butterfly pics, Sea Vixen primer, music, tomatoes and humor. If you only follow one thread this summer...

[giemme]

34 minutes ago, Cookenbacher said:

Hey Giorgio, @giemme, you're missing the paint!

No, I'm not.

 

Tony, she's one beautiful black lady.  

 

Irish sundried tomatoes... for some reason, that sounds odd to my ears....

 

Ciao 

[Learstang]

Great work on your Sea Vixen - please send all the plans to Airfix and beg them to come out with it in 1/72nd scale! And Great Cthulhu - that Guarana plant! Is it also called the Yog-Sothoth plant?

 

Regards,

 

Jason

Edited August 28, 2021 by Learstang

[Hamden]

 

Simply stunning Tony superb workmanship!

 

  Stay safe        Roger

[hendie]

7 hours ago, TheBaron said:

Who knows though if layer depth is a solution to woes, or that I've just been lucky with the batches I've bought over time?

 

I always mist in the first coat or two before going heavier.  I'm pretty certain it's batch dependent.

 

Not a lot of words to say about the Vixen - all superlatives apply.  It really has been worth the effort, and all the hard work you put in at the beginning is now paying off. 

3 hours ago, giemme said:

Irish sundried tomatoes... for some reason, that sounds odd to my ears....

 

Yet the fact that he apparently has the Sun in his oven didn't raise an eyebrow?

 

Is Tony really the center of our universe?

[perdu]

Sun dried Vixens and guarana?

 

Hellovvaknockout performance Tony.

 

But dammit the Streetly Helicopter Works is seriously getting a hankering to tinker with the spare Froggish* Vixen in my spare room, I want one without ridiculously complex folded wings and maybe without oversized tanky booms but there are so many helicopters in the box to build, it may wait til next year.

 

*Froggish?  Something Express I think...

 

Tony you are the essence of inspiration mate, just wow.

[Brandy]

14 hours ago, hendie said:

Yet the fact that he apparently has the Sun in his oven didn't raise an eyebrow?

To be fair, he is in Ireland. It would be pretty hard to sun dry anything, or indeed to dry in any way whatsoever without the use of said oven (or a towel, which I don't think would improve the tomatoes much). 

 

To add to the list of things you're only ever likely to say on BM (or maybe not....) That little black vixen looks absolutely gorgeous. 

Nice butterflies too!

 

Ian

[Maginot]

Wow! So this is how it's done. This thread is all over the place; I'm taking notes. Awesome aircraft; awesome build; awesome thread!

[Ex-FAAWAFU]

Fabulous, Tony.  Just fabulous.  All that hard work (& talent!) has bigly paid off.  The triangular aerial on the nose is one (of two) IFF thingies

[Spookytooth]

PAINT!!!!!! .

Looks very nice Tony, smooth as a **** bottom.

Sun dried toms as well.

 

 

Simon.

[TheBaron]

Good afternoon.

This week I've mainly been labouring on mask and decal graphics for the aircraft, as with the day job consuming a lot of mental energy at present I simply don't trust myself concentrating on paintwork with a tired mind. A shufti at the visitors' book first though.

On 28/08/2021 at 16:56, bigbadbadge said:

reat to see the paint going on and looks wonderful.  Sundried tomatoes, hmmm lovely.

Thanks to you on both counts Chris.

Collecting this amount about twice a week at present and having to find lots of tomato-based recipes to cook with as well as preserve for the winter:

This year was really an experiment to assess yields in the greenhouse so next time I'll plant less of these lads  and grow a wider range of chiles instead.

On 28/08/2021 at 19:23, Cookenbacher said:

Top marks for beautiful butterfly pics, Sea Vixen primer, music, tomatoes and humor. If you only follow one thread this summer...

Knew I liked you Cookie. 🤗😁

On 28/08/2021 at 20:00, giemme said:

Irish sundried tomatoes... for some reason, that sounds odd to my ears....

The sundried spuds are taking a bit longer than anticipated Giorgio....

On 28/08/2021 at 21:09, Learstang said:

Great work on your Sea Vixen - please send all the plans to Airfix and beg them to come out with it in 1/72nd scale! And Great Cthulhu - that Guarana plant! Is it also called the Yog-Sothoth plant?

😁

I believe that its juice tastes of the void and is best served chilled to the bone Jason.

On 28/08/2021 at 21:24, Hamden said:

 

 Stay safe  

You too Roger. We had a meeting at work on Weds about the likely lifting of a lot of the restrictions here come later October so things in this neck of the woods heading in the right direction, fingers crossed. As a negative-positivist I expect the worst but hope for the best....

On 28/08/2021 at 23:36, hendie said:

I'm pretty certain it's batch dependent.

Sounds conclusive so Alan.

On 28/08/2021 at 23:36, hendie said:

Is Tony really the center of our universe?

Not this one. One of the other ones.....

On 29/08/2021 at 08:49, perdu said:

But dammit the Streetly Helicopter Works is seriously getting a hankering to tinker with the spare Froggish* Vixen in my spare room

Resist the occult forces Bill.

Draw a Circle of Sacred Rotors upon the floor and shelter from this dread propsect....

On 29/08/2021 at 14:23, Brandy said:

To be fair, he is in Ireland. It would be pretty hard to sun dry anything, or indeed to dry in any way whatsoever without the use of said oven

Pretty much what the monks at Glastonbury said about St. Patrick I suspect, albeit in Latin...

'Esse aequum, et in Hibernia. Esset satis difficile solem siccis aliquid'

On 29/08/2021 at 15:15, Maginot said:

Wow! So this is how it's done. This thread is all over the place; I'm taking notes. Awesome aircraft; awesome build; awesome thread!

Nice of you to say so Maginot. Thanks and welcome!

 

On 29/08/2021 at 19:03, Ex-FAAWAFU said:

The triangular aerial on the nose is one (of two) IFF thingies

Gotcha Crisp.

Somewhere in the maintenance manual there's a diagram of all the various aerial assignments that I'm just too lazy to go hunting for at this stage.

On 29/08/2021 at 20:11, Spookytooth said:

Looks very nice Tony, smooth as a **** bottom.

Sun dried toms as well.

Variety is all Simon! 😁

 

Anyway. I had me crayons out during the week and started with some mask designs for '481:

The manual rather helpfully lists the various sizes of the main markings and the relevant dimensions locating their positions  on the airframe. Having said information is particularly invaluable in being able to work out roundel ratios down at 1/72 scale, even for a mathematical ignoramus such as myself:

In photos of 481 in her trials livery you an see  the smaller roundels on either side of the nose, as shown in this s excellent shot by Chris England from 1976 have a white 'collar':

As best I can judge from various shots from this era, that is a standard 24" roundel with added white  around it, rather than a band of blue of slightly smaller radius.

 

I've also begun creating a similar set of masks for XN708 without that white collar. As far as masking goes it'll be roundels, wing numbers/letters and drop tank stripes for both aircraft, with the addition of boom 'Royal Navy' lettering for '708 (but not '481). Nearly forgot, the well-known 'broomstick' tail graphic of 890 NAS I found a nice perpendicular side shot of, which, after some image-processing to take out some of the noise and .jpg artefacts, let me do this up as a mask for painting also:

Tail numbers and maintenance markings seem to have mainly been transfers on the actual aircraft so these will be also be added as decals, so I've begun a visual tour of the airframes, using Illustrator to put the text and graphics together:

 

 

Due to its trials status, XJ481 has what I assume to be  a number of non-standard airframe markings -  such as the high voltage one seen above -  plus some indecipherable ones on its pylons that  I've no idea what they say as none of the photos are of high enough resolution to make out the words. In the case of the latter, I substituted part of an Eric Sykes' script to mock up their appearance. Don't tell anyone....

Black on the starboard pylons, white to port...

 

It took a while for me to realize that these letters don't use the standard 'Stencil' font you find on your computer, so after some digging around I found one called 'Aerorelix Stencil' that seemed to match closely enough. For the engine access panels themselves though, in reference shots such as this corker from Andrew Patterson I'm not seeing a stencil font used for the 'Keep Off' lettering:

So in the case of these panels I used a generic sans-serif font called 'Candara'. Never heard of it before but in terms of visual weight and letter shape it looked close enough to work at 1/72 scale. I'd quite honestly dreaded working  out the designs for those engine panels right since the start of the build but in the end I got lucky in that one of the GA reference drawings in the maintenance manual turned out (unlike the bulk of the others) to be very accurate in terms of shape and proportion. Having carefully taken a photograph of my mule print from directly overhead and using a focal length that didn't introduce any distortion/perspective, I was serendipitously able to overlay the panel drawing on top of the photograph in Photoshop:

I then moved this composite across into Illustator and set to work blocking out the panel outlines and adding text:

I largely ignored  restoration/museum photographs in favour of of images showing unrestored aircraft in whcich the original markings were visible, albeit as 'ghost' outlines, such John Niebel's shots as seen here:

The exact orientation of the 'keep off'  lettering was harder to ascertain for the rearmost panels, indeed I could find no single consistent orientation of these words within some of those larger the square/triangle motifs, so in the end just went for what appeared to be the most common arrangement - at 1/72 that shouldn't be a distraction.

 

I should have mentioned that in terms of the actual shade of red for the danger triangles and panel outlines &etc., I'd no official colour data from the period historical record to base my designs on in terms of an exact RGB value, so in order to get something realistic I took some sample squares of the red colour from a range of period daylight shots (importantly those that didn't have too much visible in the way of original film stock bias and/or poor white balance in reproduction), and then colour-averaged this range of hues to produce a working RGB value of 238/25/33 for the red.

 

Errr. That's about it. Thanks for staying te course.

 

I'd gone for a walk around Galway Bay with an old friend at the beginning of the week and we found the Land's End / Finisterre....

 

Tony

 

Addendum: whilst searching through maintenance refs I found a  drawing with upper maintenance panels listed just legibly enough to see the orientation of various 'keep offs', so I'll adjust the couple of spurious ones tomorrow...

 

[Pete in Lincs]

1 hour ago, TheBaron said:

The sundried spuds are taking a bit longer than anticipated Giorgio....

That's how I like mine. Cut new potatoes small (around half inch) Par boil, place on baking tray and drizzle with extra virgin olive oil.

Half an hour or so at 180C in a fan oven, they should crisp up nicely. Much more fun than oven chips!

 

Meanwhile, modelling, the black finish looks good. I thought everyone knew they were IFF aerials?

Nice work on the markings, Admirable research. And a mention of Eric Sykes! One of my comedy heroes. 

 

From what I've seen in the past with Aircraft being repainted, those Keep Off stencils on the engine panels would be stuck on wherever the painter decided.

So could be 'off' by an inch or more from Aircraft to Aircraft.

[TheBaron]

On 04/09/2021 at 21:30, Pete in Lincs said:

From what I've seen in the past with Aircraft being repainted, those Keep Off stencils on the engine panels would be stuck on wherever the painter decided.

So could be 'off' by an inch or more from Aircraft to Aircraft.

That's good to know from one who'd know Pete. Many thanks.

 

A quick teatime update on progress this week, largely consistingof an hour or two here and there getting designs for the masks and decals finalized.

 

With the raunchy Halloween party season kicking off next month it was that time of year to start preparing a fresh batch of transparent nipple covers to keep the wind off during outdoor gatherings:

By happy coincidence, said plunge moulds were a perfect match for the front diameter of a Martel test body, so trimmed down I reckon one should fit neatly over the front here:

I'd discarded the naff looking silver disk stuck on the front of the camera that you'd seen in a previous shot as a horribly cosmetic pretence, drilling the lens body out with a conical diamond birr instead. The resulting cavity then got a drip from the Dekoru glass bead bottle, which when rubbed level with a fingertip and allowed to dry overnight, gave a nice sense of 'lensy-ness' to the front of the camera when the light catches it. I'll leave the nose glass off of that until after painting, but am quite happy now that will look the part.

 

Various numbers and maintenance markings also got added to the master sheet - here on a green background so that the white ones will also show up:

I was going to show you the prinout, if young Marmalade here hadn't decided that they made a perfectly acceptable bed the moment my back was turned....

Most of those markings look to be close to the right size now, though the trestle markings on the drop tanks look to come a little too high up the sides so I'll reduce the length of that red strip:

Paint masks for the roundels and underside wing number got cut earlier:

The plan is to take several gallons of tea onboard tomorrow morning before masking up and seeing about spraying at the diagonal white half of the airframe.

 

I also want to play around and see if I can get a decal test print over the weekend. I forget what the brand it was that I used back on the Do-18 build but it was horrible thick grotty stuff, so this time I'm trying the Experts-Choice clear and white stuff that a lot of people have recommended on different posts. I even remembered to buy some Liquid Decal Film last time I was up in Dublin to spray it with as per the instructions. The tiny white lettering has given me pause for thought though as I'm aware of the limitations of not being able to print white on an inkjet, so I'll have to experiment to see how light a grey I can actually produce....

 

Triffids had been evoked in the previous update. I have slain several during fierce encounters over the week and am now drying their seeds to hang from the trees as bird food over the Autumn:

Hope to have something more substantive in the paint department to show next time.

Bye for now,

Tony

 

 

 

 

[Pete in Lincs]

Nice decals, cat and Triffid remains. Substantive paint on hold, Copy that.