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A bullet with wings - Eduard 1/48 Bell X-1 Mach Buster


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After having my last 2 projects ending on The Shelf Of Semi-Doom, I was looking for something easy and quick. And it doesn't come more easy than the Eduard Bell X-1 ProfiPack, if you ignore the etched parts that is.

Which I won`t.

 

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I don`t think there is any need to give a history lesson on the X-1. It was built to break the sound barrier, shaped like a 0.5" bullet since they knew those were stable in supersonic flight, and it did so in 1947.
 

The Eduard kit is about 20 years old (I think?), and has few parts and pretty rudimentary detail so the addition of the photo etched harness and instrument panel(s) is very welcome: 

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There are no added detail for the wheel wells, but it does come with 3 nicely detailed resin wheels:

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Since the X-1 is one of the most famous airplanes in history and was put in a museum in 1950, there is an incredible amount of online reference pictures for the cockpit and other details, with the notable exception of the wheel wells... 

So if anyone have any good pictures of the X-1 wheel wells I`d be happy to see them posted here, or a link provided. :smile:

 

I`ll try my best to add some details to this kit, partly because I want to give this important aircraft the treatment it deserves, and partly because I have quickly grown fond of trying to scratch build stuff since I first tried it a couple of models ago. 

Where there are no details, any added detail is an improvement, right? :thumbsup:

Edited by Eivind Lunde
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After having read through some builds of this model I decided to try my hand at some simple detailing of the instrument panel backside, as this should be visible through the cockpit glass.

 

I used one of my fantastic Japanese drill bits and drilled holes in the plastic instrument panel:

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And filled them with round Evergreen sprue to simulate the instrument bodies peeking out from the panels backside:

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I will file them down to size and drill a small hole so that each instrument can get its own electrical cable, that should hopefully make the backside more interesting to look at.

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4 hours ago, Eivind Lunde said:

So if anyone have any good pictures of the X-1 wheel wells I`d be happy to see them posted here, or a link provided. 

If memory serves, Aerofax or Aerophile did a monograph on the X-1 that might have had undercart and wheel bay photos. I don't have that one, but maybe one of our colleagues does and can check for you.

Mike

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This kit is on my wishlist, I think Eduard has come out with an additional etch set to compliment the new resin wheels. All a nice upgrade to the older kit. 

 

Looking forward to seeing how you can complete this kit! Thanks for sharing!

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On 13/09/2019 at 06:10, RadMax8 said:

This kit is on my wishlist, I think Eduard has come out with an additional etch set to compliment the new resin wheels. All a nice upgrade to the older kit. 

 

Looking forward to seeing how you can complete this kit! Thanks for sharing!

Yes, and I think that set fixes one of the biggest problems, in addition to the lack of detail in the wheel wells, namely the made up left hand console in the kit.

I assembled the cockpit parts and spray them Vallejo Olive Drab, as that matches the pictures pretty well indeed (it is darker in real life), but what does not match the references is the details.
 

This (granted, without photo etched instruments):

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Does not look much like this (Picture courtesy of NASM):

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It is obviously just an open shelf without any instruments, so I feel the urge to redo it and scratch build the shelf part of it.

A bit disappointing this, one would think it would be easy for Eduard to get this right even 20 years ago. :unamused:

Edited by Eivind Lunde
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On 13/09/2019 at 06:10, RadMax8 said:

This kit is on my wishlist, I think Eduard has come out with an additional etch set to compliment the new resin wheels. All a nice upgrade to the older kit. 

 

Looking forward to seeing how you can complete this kit! Thanks for sharing!

If I had known about the other detail set they make I would likely have bought that, instead of relying on my meagre scratch building ability. But then again, trying to do this myself rather than using photo etched aftermarket is kinda old skool, and satisfying if I can pull it off.

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Eivind,

 

From looking at the NASM cockpit photo you posted, they should have put Future on those instrument panel dial faces! That original interior sure looks like FS34151, interior green to me, or possibly Bell's version of interior green. The wheel bays and gear struts were also finished with the same color, and it appears that some structures in the bays and the inner surfaces of the gear doors were finished with untinted zinc chromate primer. The attached link was all I had regarding the interior of the wheel bays and undercart of the real airplane as well as a model build- hope this helps you!. The nosewheel looks like a P-39/P-63 wheel!

Mike

 

http://www.partworkmodels.co.uk/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=8678

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46 minutes ago, 72modeler said:

Eivind,

 

From looking at the NASM cockpit photo you posted, they should have put Future on those instrument panel dial faces! That original interior sure looks like FS34151, interior green to me, or possibly Bell's version of interior green. The wheel bays and gear struts were also finished with the same color, and it appears that some structures in the bays and the inner surfaces of the gear doors were finished with untinted zinc chromate primer. The attached link was all I had regarding the interior of the wheel bays and undercart of the real airplane as well as a model build- hope this helps you!. The nosewheel looks like a P-39/P-63 wheel!

Mike

 

http://www.partworkmodels.co.uk/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=8678

Interior green sounds plausible (and is pretty close to olive drab as far as I can tell), but I read a recommendation made by another X-1 builder who had researched the colour, and he meant olive drab was closest. 
I have to admit I am on shaky ground here since I am red/green colourblind and some hues of green look grey to me! :blush:

I was sort of leaning towards Russian Green too, that is a greener hue, but took him at his word when he stated he had put down a lot of time researching it. 

 

EDIT: Thank you for the link, that helps a lot!

Edited by Eivind Lunde
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23 minutes ago, Eivind Lunde said:

Interior green sounds plausible (and is pretty close to olive drab as far as I can tell),

Sounds plausible but is wrong. The X-1 interior was painted "Bell Green" which is darker than interior green and bluer than olive drab

 

 

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3 hours ago, VMA131Marine said:

Sounds plausible but is wrong. The X-1 interior was painted "Bell Green" which is darker than interior green and bluer than olive drab

 

 

Thanks for the info, but the Vallejo olive drab coloured ship has sailed now. I did compare a colour sample to the pictures of the X-1 cockpit on my calibrated TV, and it was close enough for me. :smile:
 

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Well, have amused myself with some detail work including the photoetched instrument panel. I painted around the details in Nato black since I don`t like the grainy look of the Eduard paint, and I also laminated it as I feel using clear gloss paint don`t really look like a glass pane.
The problem is to find clear plastic that are not only thick enough to not crease, but thin enough so you won't get a fat instrument panel that no longer fits!

 

So after trying out different things, plastic lids, blister pack material, my eye was caught by my DVD/BR collection on my wall...

 

EUREKA! The clear sleeve on the DVD cover is perfect! :thumbsup:
Very thin, clear and easy to cut, it makes a perfect glass pane for instruments: 

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The only problem is how to glue this together. I used super glue, but feel that this is less than ideal for sandwiching photo etched parts together and it doesn't really bite on the smooth plastic surface of the clear plastic. 

So it took copious amounts of super glue to make this stick good enough, but any suggestions on what glue to use for things like this will be very welcome.

 

As you can see I also took a shot at making the oxygen (?) hose that is so prominent on the instrument panel, it was made with thin wire wrapped with sewing thread and came out pretty convincingly for a first try.

The round dial it is attached to is in fact an undersized MG 15 ammo drum from an ICM Henschel 126 kit I cut in half, I just LOVE examining old leftover sprues looking for parts I can use to make something completely different! :idea:

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I couldn't live with the closed boxlike structure, so I traced it on a plastic card to have a pattern for the shelf, took a saw to it and cut it away. After some work I got a shelf glued to the battery box, made a simple rendition of the switchbox located on it and painted it all. 
I also added the photoetched instrument panel, but decided that just using clear gloss would be enough for the glass, and regretted that immediately. Once you have started using clear plastic there is no going back, it just can't compare. :nah:

 

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This will just need some semi gloss shine and electrical cables (there are a LOT of those in the X-1 cockpit!) to be ready for use.

And I have entertained myself making the door. One of the photoetched handles broke off, so I had to replace them both with stretched sprue.

I added an etched part from an Eduard Me-108 which didn't make it and some sprue, to make it more like the real thing. A quick and sloppy (the upper line is not straight :facepalm:) run with a riveting tool added subtle and nice details. This is the first time I have used a riveting wheel, and it certainly won't be the last!
 

I will need to make a proper door release handle in time. The door is still not totally correct, but at least a lot better than it is out of the box. 

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A bit more progress.

The mysterious circular bump on the box beside the seat has been removed since it is not there on the real plane, and god knows why Eduard wanted to include it. 

I made the metal plate shielding some cables in front of the steering yoke from a piece of plastic cut and bent to shape, and with an Airscale decal as the placard.
 

In front of that is an old oleo leg from a P-40 kit, cut down to size to somewhat look like the.. err.. thing that is there.
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I added the very visible yellow cables running down the side of the seat using a Albion metals brass tube as the opening, and some thin stranded wire from an old IKEA lamp.

I sprayed the metal with Vallejo primer from a can as I know that acrylic colours do not  seem to like metal at all, and the very pleasant AK Interactive pale yellow colour seemed to bite alright without flaking off. The undercarriage retracting handle is just made from sprue.

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I have ordered the full Flory Model wash set as my MIG enamel washes seem to have expired like milk, and now leaves flakes everywhere :swear:

It is going to cost me a fortune (*sigh*), but I hear good things and look forward to try them out on the cockpit parts, to hopefully bring some life into this.  


To add more detail I made the green oxygen flask on the right wall from sprue, with one of the photo etched instruments from the kit cut to a circular shape and framed by an Airscale brass instrument bezel, and adorned with yet another Airscale placard.

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I do like how the Airscale decals add some interesting detail, but they do look pretty low res for 2019. Fingers crossed someone will release some new, improved, cockpit placards soon!

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  • 3 months later...

Well, I'm a slow builder and it will likely take me as long to build this as it took to build the real one. But since I have gotten a bit itchy to start something new, I have gotten at least a little bit of work done the last weeks.

 

The cockpit parts was glued together after adding some wires running the wall underneath the oxygen flask. There are a LOT of visible wires in this cockpit, probably because it is an experimental plane and nobody cares, and because many of the wires are yellow and very visible.

I made the shelf over the access door using plasticard and ran all the wires from the back of the instrument panel over it so I had a place to put them. And also because the real thing has a thick cluster of cables running there.

 

I didn't remember to take any pics before I closed the fuselage (  :headbang: ), so a pretty crappy one taken through the hatch is all I got. But the cockpit ended up looking pretty busy, and there is little to be seen when the canopy is installed anyway.

 

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Closing up the fuselage was pretty easy even if the kit lacks any sort of guiding pins. You just have to start with the tailfin, which is easiest part to align, and carefully glue your way towards the nose.

I'd say I got it 96% right because I still ended up with some slight ridges here and there, but they were easy to sand off.

 

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With a bit of adjustment, both wings and tail planes fit nicely, overall this is a pretty easy kit to build. The only sort of ill fitting parts being the cockpit which needed a piece of plastic card as a shim to fill a gap between the floor and the wall, and the canopy, which I didn't get to fit perfectly as it seemed to be ever so slightly bigger than the opening in the fuselage.

 

But I think it won't actually be visible in the end :fingerscrossed:

Next up is to gather some strength to mask the canopy (thank god masks are included) and then prime it.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Strength gathered, canopy masked, model primed. 

But I wouldn't be myself without having at least one crucial moment of stupidity. So even if I made a mental note to myself not to prime the canopy before I had sprayed it with the inner colour which looks grayish/silverish, perhaps a sort of primer, I lost concentration and sprayed the whole model with Vallejo white primer to make it ready for the orange final colour. <_<
 

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So now the inner frames of the canopy will be white :headbang:...

I do hope it won't be noticeable since the canopy is very flat and the aircraft has a short, stubby, landing gear, so it should be difficult to see without lifting it up.

Even so, if I was to build this model again I would mask and spray the canopy as a separate item and glue it in place afterwards.

 

It does fit pretty good after some filing and testing, even if mine is ever so slightly misfitting, probably because it moved while the white glue I used dried.

Oh well, once again a lesson learned that I will likely never have any use for again.

I polished the primer with a cloth to make it pretty smooth and ready for the first layer of Vallejo Orange Rust, which should be very close to the original colour.

 

Not sure if I should force myself to complete the landing gear and bays before doing that, since I find that part to be pretty boring, or just go ahead and spray it orange since I may or may not get run over by a train tomorrow. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

She got her final coat of colour now, well if it indeed is the final coat that is. The Vallejo Orange Rust has the absolute worst coverage of any colour I've used so far, yes even worse than yellow, so the picture under is the result of no less than 5 coats!

 

And still the tail is kind of spotty, so it may even need another... :unamused:

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But oh boy, what an eye catching colour it is! 

Too bad they found out that white is even easier to spot and repainted it later, because this by far the coolest colour IMO.

 

Guess I will spray it one last time while pondering what to do with the panel lines, if anything. :wonder:

Edited by Eivind Lunde
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Well, if life has taught me something (and it hasn't) it is that nearly everything you learn through making mistakes is a one off thing that you will never have use for ever again. 

I learned that restoring my 1971 BSA motorcycle, which gave me lots of lessons on how to deal with the peculiarities of the 1971 BSA FireBird Scrambler, but is of little use unless I want to do that again.

Which I won't.

 

So this weeks useless wisdom is that you are much better off masking and painting the canopy on the Eduard X1 as a separate item before glueing it in place, than the other way around as I did. If you do that you won't have to touch up the outer frame afterwards, it will just be perfect.

 

Another more general lesson learned is to stay away from orange coloured models, as they require an extraordinary amount of spraying to get a deep colour. I had to add another two coats before I was happy, ending up with seven in total :phew:.

 

IMO, one of the most exciting parts of a build is to remove the masks to see the fruits of your labour, and this revealed the final lesson for this week:

Priming doesn't necessarily make paint stick better, which was a surprise to me. This is only the second model I have primed in my life, and I primed it with Vallejo white primer because I thought it would be a better base colour for the final orange layer, but removing the masks took both spots of the black canopy framing and a flake of he orange paint with it. :unamused:

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Well, it is not the end of the world, it just adds some unnecessary work at a stage in the build where I feel the need to just finish the damned thing and start something else.

 

But I have plans for this plane to be in a sort of mini diorama, so I have also invested in a new product that will help me make it a bit more interesting. The single coloured, neatly kept X1 isn't that visually interesting after all.

 

The product in question is a bottle of Krycell Ice & Snow Wash:

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This will be used to try to replicate the frost forming around the liquid oxygen tank, as seen in this pretty stunning photo of the later Bell X1-a:

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Credit for the idea goes to this article at IPMS Stockholm, excellent build and worth checking out for those who plan to build the X1:

https://www.ipmsstockholm.org/magazine/2001/11/stuff_eng_bell_x1_part1.htm

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9 hours ago, Eivind Lunde said:

Krycell Ice & Snow Wash .... will be used to try to replicate the frost forming around the liquid oxygen tank

I’ve been curious about this product so will be interested to see how it works, and if it gives you the effect you’re looking for. 

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I feel that pain with Vallejo's primary colours.. switched to Tamiya for the yellow  & red (one of the reasons my DH.88 is stalled).

That ice/show wash looks interesting, though..

 

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On 21/02/2020 at 05:28, billn53 said:

I’ve been curious about this product so will be interested to see how it works, and if it gives you the effect you’re looking for. 

Based on the pictures I've seen on the net it should be pretty good. Looks like you can vary between ice and thawing ice, which would be cool. I have sprayed a piece of plastic orange to test it on, so one day soon I will try it out.

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Sooo, I touched up the canopy with some black paint and had a rare moment of genius when I was thinking about how to paint over the "vertical" parts of the canopy frame without messing up the clear panels with black paint. 

 

Instead of using paint I used a black Derwent watercolour pencil I bought to use when I man up and try to make a laminated wooden propellor for my Eduard Fokker DVII, the idea being that the colour would only bite on the rougher primed surfaces and not on the smooth clear plastic.

And it worked like a charm, making a job I feared done perfectly in 5 minutes. :like:

 

After that I sprayed the first two passes of gloss, using an acrylic floor polish I have been using for that. I have no idea if it lives up to the mythical Future, as this brand is impossible to get here in Norway, but I suspect it is not quite in the same league. It does spray right out of the bottle with no thinning required, but takes a lot of time to build up to a high gloss finish. 

I still prefer that to using gloss paint, since it is so thin and dries so quickly that dust and hair just can't manage to attach itself to the model and ruin the finish.

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BUT... It does seem to make the clear parts matte, I'm hoping it will disappear when the layers have build up sufficiently to level out. If not I will hopefully be able to fix it using proper gloss acrylic, or just have to live with it.

I am sure I tried dipping a test piece of clear plastic in it one time to test it, and it came out fine, so fingers crossed. :fingerscrossed:


I can't remember where I bought the base for the life of me (don't think it's Noy's Miniatures :wonder:), but it was the closest thing I could find that sort if looked like desert runway concrete.

I will go over it and make some marks and oil spills, perhaps fade it,  to make it a bit more natural looking, but it should be pretty good as a diorama base

Edited by Eivind Lunde
Stupid mistake
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