Special Hobby 1/72 Boulton Paul Sea Balliol T21

[danielwood5]

Welcome aboard everyone, this will be my choice for the GB, Special Hobby's 1/72 Boulton Paul Sea Balliol T21.

 

Obligatory box shot;

 

I picked this kit up second hand on a whim from the LHS but it's been sat in the stash for quite a while now. It's a mixed media kit with the styrene enhanced by photo etch and resin parts and I'm quite new to photo etch (used it once) ands I've never used resin before so I figured this GB would give me the push I needed to give it a go. 

Here's some sprue shots to whet the appetite;

Nice and clear canopy;

 

Here's the resin parts, one of the control columns has snapped off at some point but the missing bit is still in the bag so I'll try and repair that when I fit it.

 

Here's the etch parts, I've read that the harnesses are over scale so I may not us them but I'll see how it comes together.

 

Finally we have the decals;

 

I'm really looking forward to getting started on this one, I'm not sure what paint scheme I'm going to go for yet, maybe the one from the box art as that looks quite colourful but I'll see what I fancy when the time comes.

I've read through the build threads on here and have picked up some tips and some minor errors that can be corrected along the way but if anyone has any advice for this kit then I'm happy to hear it, the same goes for any general advice on using resin parts, I've read various tips and tricks but I'm always open to sensible advice for beginners!

Thanks for looking in.

[rob85]

A fine choice! Good to have you along.

 

Rob

[PeterB]

Interesting choice indeed. I wonder if this was the last "new" design to use the RR Merlin, though I believe it was originally intended to fit a Mamba turboprop engine. I also believe it was the last production aircraft designed and built by Boulton & Paul, as the P111 and P120 were both delta wing research aircraft.

 

I will watch this with great interest.

 

Cheers

 

Pete 

[zebra]

Nice choice! The Sea Balliol is one of the aircraft that really stands out in my memory of my first visit to Cosford, getting on for 40 years ago. Looking forward to this.

[mackem01]

Nice entry.......I hope you do the box top scheme - "go gaudy or go home!" As the saying goes.

[reini]

Gotta admit - never heard of this plane. But looks like a fun kit

 

Resin is quite nice to work with, just remember it's somewhat brittle and the dust is not good for you! So a mask and/or wet sanding is advised.

[danielwood5]

On 2/13/2020 at 9:13 PM, rob85 said:

A fine choice! Good to have you along.

 

Rob

Thanks! It's good to be back and post some updates on here. 

On 2/14/2020 at 9:52 PM, PeterB said:

Interesting choice indeed. I wonder if this was the last "new" design to use the RR Merlin, though I believe it was originally intended to fit a Mamba turboprop engine. I also believe it was the last production aircraft designed and built by Boulton & Paul, as the P111 and P120 were both delta wing research aircraft.

 

I will watch this with great interest.

 

Cheers

 

Pete 

It's not an aircraft I knew anything about until I started on this kit but I believe you're right on all accounts (thanks to my limited online research trying to find some decent interior photos). 

On 2/15/2020 at 8:43 PM, zebra said:

Nice choice! The Sea Balliol is one of the aircraft that really stands out in my memory of my first visit to Cosford, getting on for 40 years ago. Looking forward to this.

It's not an aircraft I'm too familiar with but I'm glad it's brought back memoris for you.

On 2/18/2020 at 5:40 PM, mackem01 said:

Nice entry.......I hope you do the box top scheme - "go gaudy or go home!" As the saying goes.

I more than likely will but, well, yellow! Such a horrific shade to get decent coverage with.

On 2/18/2020 at 5:49 PM, reini said:

Gotta admit - never heard of this plane. But looks like a fun kit

 

Resin is quite nice to work with, just remember it's somewhat brittle and the dust is not good for you! So a mask and/or wet sanding is advised.

I'd never heard of it either and just grabbed the kit second hand, the box art was tempting me and I must admit it's quite a cool looking little aircraft, one of those that looks like it was probably good fun to fly.

[danielwood5]

Apologies all for the delay in any updates on this thread. I'll jump right in and won't mention anything going on in the outside world other than to say that I hope you and your families are all as well as can be.

 

Anyway, I've made a decent start on this one and am finding it challenging and satisfying in equal measure. So far I've put the main parts of the cockpit together, here's a few photos with the styrene, P.E.and resin built up;

 

It looks pretty good I think and I managed to only lose one of the tiny levers from the control console which is pretty good going for me!

I also painted up the instrument panel, this is a bit of a strange one as the kit has a styrene back, a clear film with the dials printed on and a P.E. front face. Weirdly though the film dials are all just black circles with no detail printed on them at all so I've got no idea what the point of them is. I just ignored the film, stuck the P.E. down and broke out my finest (as in thinnest, not best!) paint brush and went to work. Here's a slightly blurry photo of the results;

 

 

The colours and dials are all probably rather spurious as I couldn't find and decent interior photos of this aircraft but I'm more than willing to live with that. Humbrol gloss varnish was used to simulate the glass in the dials.

 

I put a layer of Halfords rattle can primer over the cockpit parts and then sprayed them with Vallejo RLM 66, the interior is flat black but as the RLM66 is a very dark grey I prefer to use it as it isn't as stark in this smaller scale. The instructions for this kit don't give any painting instructions for the interior at all so I used what few photos I could find on the internet, other builds online and my imagination to fill in the blanks. I can't remember what colours I used apart from Vallejo Rust for the seats, speaking of which, they were removed from their casts and stuck down at this point. I painted everything up and then added the P.E. harnesses, they're massively over scale so I trimmed them down a bit to get them to fit and look OK. The finished effect looks pretty good to my eyes if not massively scale accurate, I painted them once they were glued and shaped to fit. I didn't bother doing a wash in the cockpit area but just did a bit of light dry brushing to bring out the details and add a little bit of wear and tear.

 

 

That rear bulkhead wasn't the easiest to fit in place but after some fettling I got it to sit in place. The positioning of the cockpit parts is all rather vague so there was plenty of dry fitting of all the parts and the cockpit halves, I eventually sorted the positioning of everything and glued it all down permanently, I used a bit of fret to give the instrument panel something to sit against and give a bit more of a positive fit.

 

 

Here's a shot showing the instrument panel in place.

 

The control column that was broken in the box has come loose again here but I've still got it and will put it back in place when it's safe to do so.

That's where I'm up to at this point but I'm hoping to get a bit of time over the next week to get a bit further down the linen with this one.

 

[Andwil]

Nice work on the instrument panel.  The odd film provided doesn’t surprise me, nor the vague instructions.  Be prepared to do a lot of fettling.

 

AW

[danielwood5]

I've just realised that I should probably give an update as to where I'm up to with this kit. It feels like it's been a fight every step of the way and that progress has been incredibly slow, however, I am now at the decal stage so things are moving forwards at least.

I closed the fuselage up easily enough by gluing the two halves in small sections doing my best to make sure there were no steps. There were obviously some seams that needed sanding but overall it went ok, the bottom of the fuselage was worse than the top and needed a bit more work to remove the seam, which is a shame as there was a lot of nice detail lost. I tried to keep as much as possible and rescribed what was lost in my rather shaky amateurish way.

 

 As you can see I also added the inside portions of the wings. These went on well and had a really good fit.

 

 

I painted up the resin radiator and glued that into place under the chin. The fairing around it wasn't the easiest to get to fit but after a fair bit of sanding and dry fitting I managed to get a pretty good fit in the end (which I don't have any pictures of).

 

 

The outer wing went on next and this is where I went a little 'off piste'. There is a resin insert that goes in the ends of the inner and outer wing halves of the wing so that the aircraft can be modelled with the wings folded, I elected not to use this as it looked like it would be a nightmare to get it in place and I suspected that getting everything to line up properly would be nigh on impossible. Instead I added plasticard tabs to the top and bottom of the inboard wing to give me something to attach the outer part to.

 

 

I then glued the lower outer wing in place and once dry added the upper portion. This worked ok on the port wing as the fit was excellent but there was a large gap on the starboard that I had to fill. I also used tiny pieces of plastic strip to fill the rectangular holes of the hinge on the top of the wing. These would have been filled by the resin inserts had I used them.

 

 

I also painted the silver behind the cockpit where it will be covered by the canopy. I next attached the horizontal stabilisers which required a fair bit of filler and added the small pieces of P.E. around the tail area. There is meant to be another piece of P.E. here, a small plate that stops the arrestor hook from hitting the underside of the aircraft but this pinged off somewhere never to be seen again.

 

 

Next up was the canopy which has a notoriously poor fit. The rear of the canopy sits proud of the rear fuselage if it's just put into place so to get round this I clamped in place using my Berna clamps and used Tamiya Extra Thin to glue it down. I used a Peewit masking set for this to save a lot of time.

 

 

An inelegant solution but it did work so I'm OK with that, although the sides of the canopy overhang the sides of the fuselage a little (a lot!).

 

 

After giving the half completed model a good wash I gave it a layer of Halfords rattle can white primer. I used white as I had decided to do this kit in the markings shown on the front of the box and wanted a good base for the yellow and orange sections. I tried painting the interior of the chin fairing using Humbrol paints, I gave it a coat of 18 Orange Gloss and then went over it with 209 Fluorescent Fire Orange. This didn't work out very well as it became obvious that it would take a LOT of coats to get decent coverage and I have yet to master spraying Humbrol enamels through my airbrush. I decided to take the plunge and splashed out on this acrylic set from Hataka as I have a fairly large collection of RAF trainers in the stash (11 1/32 Revell Hawks and counting!) so I knew I would get plenty of use out of the colours provided.

 

 

I painted the yellow areas first and then masked them up and got the orange down. The Hataka paints behaved perfectly and gave a lovely smooth finish, the orange required a multiple of thin coats as you'd expect but the rather subtle panel line detail wasn't lost at all. 

 

 

I masked this up and then sprayed on the silver, this coat wasn't nearly as nice as the other colours though and dried with a rather 'bitty' finish as can be vaguely seen in this picture.

 

 

It's probably more to do with my relative inexperience with the airbrush than the paint I suspect, it maybe something as simple as I should have shook the bottle to mix it more than I did. I gave it a bit of a rub down and it looks OK now though.

 

 

After touching up a little over spray I've given it a gloss coat in preparation for the decals which I'm hoping will go on over the next day or two. Annoyingly the silver paint has shown that there is a rather prominent seam on the bottom of the fuselage that wasn't obvious under the white primer, as I said at the start of this post though, this kit seems to have been fighting me every step of the way so I'm just going to live with it.

 

Hopefully there'll be a decalled update in this thread in the next day or two. thanks for looking in.

 

[danielwood5]

The decals are now on and settled in place, although, as has been typical of this build so far it wasn't without it's difficulties.

 

The decals are EXTREMELY thin, I can't see any carrier film on them at all. I used MicroSet at first when placing them but using this made them instantly soften up and settle in place really quickly. I got rid of the MicroSet and just used water and that made them slightly more manageable. Unfortunately, as they were so thein it meant they're not very opaque and the roundels were particularly useless in this regard with the orange on the wings showing through the white of the roundel almost completely. I did away with the kit roundels and replaced them with spares from some Airfix Gnat sets and these worked much better.

 

 

I don't think the decals are particularly great to be honest, the type on the 'Royal Navy' on the side of the aircraft looks a bit chunky to me with a not very uniform spacing between the letters, the smaller stencils don't actually say anything legible either, they just have squiggly lines to denote text.

The serials on the lower wing were difficult to get in place too as they are quite large but extremely fragile. The one on the port wing was particularly tricky where it goes over the hole for the light, it got a bit screwed up here and i had to remove half of the number '8' and replace it with half of a '3' I cut off one of the spare decals for a different colour scheme.

 

 

There are also four decals for the propeller blades which are just a white dot over a white line, one of them broke up when I placed it so I painted this one on instead.

 

 

I didn't like how it looked with these dots on the blades so after looking at the pictures of the walkaround on here (which has been invaluable for this build) I added a bit of paint to give them a bot of life.

 

 

This looks better to me and I'm quite pleased with how they came out.

 

Now there's just the final assembly and I'm almost ready to call this one done.

 

[danielwood5]

I'm at the stage now where I'm finally ready to call this one done and put it on the shelf.

All the remaining parts have been added and a bit of final paint touch ups have done, particularly on the wingtip lights. Speaking of the lights, the wingtip ones were a perfect fit and went on easily enough, the mid wing spotlights were a different matter though and required a fair bit of fettling to get anywhere close to an acceptable fit.

There were a couple of last pieces of P.E. that needed applying, the first of which is a pair of windscreen wipers that are no bigger than an eyelash, predictably one of them disappeared without trace almost instantly so I left them both off unfortunately.

The second pieces of P.E were a pair of aerials that sit on the top and bottom of the fuselage, however, although they're shown in the instructions they don't appear on the paint guides for the aircraft or on the box art. They weren't shown on any photos of the Sea Balliol I could find either so I left them off.

I found the following photo online of the exact aircraft I was modelling and used that as a guide for the final finishing of the model.

https://www.airliners.net/photo/UK-Navy/Boulton-Paul-P-108-Sea-Balliol-T21/1641296/L

With all the painting done and everything sealed I did a very, very small amount of weathering to get a similar finish to the aircraft shown. It looks like the photo was taken at an airshow so it's very clean which made the final weathering very easy!

 

 

Overall, I have to say that this kit turned into a bit of a chore but I am really pleased with the finished result. It's a handsome little aircraft and looks particularly good in this bright colour scheme, in a lot of ways I think this kit deserved someone with better modelling skills than me. This was my first short run kit and the first time using resin parts though so it was definitely a learning experience for me, I do feel slightly more confident about tackling the Special Hobby Fulmar I have in the stash though so that's good.

I would definitely recommend this kit to anyone who fancies building something a bit different and I can also highly recommend the Peewit masks, they fit perfectly and saved a huge amount of time with all the glazing on this kit. The Hataka paints I used were also excellent, I can't speak on the authenticity of the shades but they went down easily and the colours look really nice and crisp without obscuring any of the very fine panel line details, the orange is particularly bright and rich.

I'll post some more of the finished pics in the gallery thread and thank you all for dropping in.

[rob85]

That’s a cracking little build, really like the paint work and finish you have achieved!

 

Rob

 

 

[Grey Beema]

Well done for finishing you did a really good job.

 

I have build many SH kits - all in Braille scale, they all want to fight you at least once during a build....

 

Great job well done..

 

[zebra]

Very nice! Brings back memories of the one at Cosford - really need to go back there some time.

[exdraken]

Looks more than great!

[CliffB]

I'm afraid I completely missed this build Daniel, but the result is excellent.  Congratulations!

 

Cheers