Yellow wings ! Valom's 1/72 Northrop BT-1

[Giorgio N]

Now some here may know that I'm quite a big fan of naval aircraft, so it is not surprising that in the end I could not resist entering this GB !

It just took me a while to decide the subject: for a reason or the other I had decided that I wanted to build something different ! So this meant no Tomcat or Phantom and even Harriers would have been too "common". So I checked my stash and the various builds... and realised that many of the more "obscure" subjects were being built in this same GB ! That is not a bad thing at all, it actually makes me very happy to see so many diverse subjects in a group build. It just meant that I had to dig even deeped in the stash and out came this: the Valom 1/72 Northrop BT-1 !

 

Now what is a BT-1.. the type was developed by Northrop in 1935 as a dive bomber for the US Navy. it was a low wing monoplane with a crew of two armed with a couple of machine guns and a single bomb under the fuselage. It was not a huge success, mainly because of poor handling characteristics. It would have probably been a completely forgotten type had the Navy not requested an improved variant, initially known as BT-2... that later became the very well known and successful Douglas SBD Dauntless !

 

So here we have the dad of the better known Dauntless, available in short run plastic form from Valom.

As often with my builds, no box, sorry about that ! I had the kit stored in its original bag, with some parts detached from the sprue. Here's what was in the bag:

 

 

 

One single sprue in grey plastic offers the main parts, The plastic is not bad, not too hard and not too soft. Surface detail is reproduced with recessed lines, a bit too deep and wide but we must keep in mind that this is one of Valom's first kits.

In plastic are also offered a canopy and a landing light. These clear parts are quite thick but pretty clear. The canopy is also offered as a vacuformed part for those who want to cut the various sections open. Personally I will probably just use the plastic canopy, looks good enough to me and seems to fit decently.

Cockpit parts, engine and a few other parts are offered in resin. The cockpit looks quite good... but more on this later... a lot more !

Two photo-etched frets complete the kit. One of them is only devoted to the perforated flaps/airbrakes while the other includes seatbelts, levers, instrument panels, and a few details for the rear machine gun.

Speaking of maching guns, this is a very nice resin part and should look even better with the added PE detail... however showing the Browning would mean cutting the canopy open and I'd prefer to complete the model with the canopy closed.

The decal sheet is quite nice, but I forgot to take pictures of this... anyway, includes decals for two aircraft from the days when USN types were very colurful: aluminum paint all over with yellow upper wings, tail in squadron colour and bands over the cowling, on the wings and around the fuselage in the section colour.

As the model will be painted in aluminum, I will have to work a lot to get a good surface finish. From a first dry-fit the parts seem to be fitting decently... but this is stll decently for a short run form a few years ago, definitely no tamigawa fit expected here !

[rob85]

Don’t see many of these built, this should be a great addition to the GB.

 

Rob

[Giorgio N]

Folks, I have to apologise ! For some reason I had started building the kit and even took pictures but had forgotten to add new posts to this thread...

Time to do something about it ! Starting, as usual, with the cockpit.

This is mostly composed by resin parts, with a few PE additions and only a couple of plastic pieces. The cockpit looks nice but I believe that it is not completely accurate. I will not bother correcting the accuracy issues here, however I would suggest anyone who wants to look around for references. There is a book in the Naval Fighters series, I've not seen it but I'm sure it would be a a great reference to have at hand.

I had a couple of problems with the cockpit: one was that the floor was warped. As this is a single very thin resin part, it is not unexpected. The matter was sorted by gluing the floor onto a thick plastic roid with a squarish section.

The second problem took longer to sort: the position of everything is very, very vague ! It took me a while to understand where the various parts are better placed and the fact that the cockpit is unaccurate made the matter more complicated. In the end I decided to go with the locations that looked more plausible to me compared to pictures and here's the result:

 

 

 

Notice how I have not glued the rear seat in place. I'd rather do this at the end, as the rear seat carries the rear machin gun rings and I prefer to glue this in place when the fuselage halves are closed.

The whole cockpit area was painted in aluminum. This is the colour used on USN types of the era and the few pictures I've found of the BT-cockpit seem to confirm that the colour is right. Besides, Valom's instructions also suggest aluminum...

[Giorgio N]

With paint in the cockpit drying, I dedicated some time to the engine. Valom have represented the Twin Wasp Junior engine of the BT-1 with two resin parts. Detail is quite good but the casting quality is not great. There also is a big chunk of excess resin between two cylinders but fortunately is on the rear star, so not visible.

With some painting however the result is decent enough, more so as the engine will be mostly hidden in a tight-fitting cowling

 

 

[Giorgio N]

And with the cockpit paint dry, it was time to glue this into one of the fuselage halves. And it was not a pleasant experience ! As said before, the location of everything is quite vague and I struggled a bit to find where the parts had to be glued. Still, in the end I managed to get something that should look decent enough like this:

 

 

Now I should get into some more detail, if only to help anyone who is planning a build of this same kit. I believe that the cockpit position suggested by Valom is not correct in height and the cockpit floor should sit lower. To allow for this I glued a plastic L section rod in place as a support (hidden by the cockpit in the picture). With these in place it was then possible to "slide the cockpit to what I felt was the right place. At least the pilot seat seems to be correct... as the rear seat will not be added until the fuselage is closed, its position is not a problem at this stage.

I glued short sections of the same rod to support the shelf behind the pilot seat. This will be glued in place only after the fuselage is closed. Without such supports, it was very difficult to get the shelf to stay in place. The wider support area of the L section rod also allows for more adjustments of the location of the shelf.

Gluing the instrument panel also required some care as there's no location marked on the fuselage halves. Not uncommon in short run kits of course.

Edited March 30, 2020 by Giorgio N

[Giorgio N]

Some more progress ! That as said before, it's progress of the last couple of weeks really.

Yesterday last post saw the cockpit glued inside one of the fuselage halves, I should add here that this was done while keeping the fuselage closed with tape as I wanted to get the cockpit perfectly straight and the only way to do it was with the fuselage closed. I was hoping to be able to insert the cockpit from the front of the fuselage after gluing the halves together but it was not possible. The technique used to glue the cockpit was the one I always use for large resin parts: first I used some two-component epoxy to glue the part to the support and then I liberally added silicone sealant. In this way there's no chance for the cockpit to detach, even in case the model falls on the floor by accident.

 

The following step was of course closing the fuselage ! And here's the result:

 

 

Couple of things, good and bad ! The good thing is that fit was not too bad. It is still a short run kit but I feared much worse. Of course I had to claen the inner edges a bit and there were a couple of ejection stubs on the tail, but once everything was cleaned the parts mated decently.

The bad thing is that the seat detached while trying to keep everything togther... oh well, at least it's not damaged so it should be relatively easy to put it back in place

 

Here's a view from the bottom that shows a couple things:

 

 

The big plastic sprue section I used to straighten the cockpit floor is very noticeable. It was really necessary and helped a lot in keeping the floor straight. The amount of silicone I used is also well in evidence !

Less visiible is the work done on the intake. This does not have a roof, or better there is a part that is supposed to represent part of the roof but it was not easy to get it to fit. It was easier to build a roof from plasticard and blend this in. The kit supplies a nice PE part for the intake filter, unfortunately however this fell victim to the carper monster, so I simply made a real wall and painted this blac,k.

Another visible problem is the wear on the cockpit floor when ween from th etop. This was the result of the continuous handling needed to find the right location for the cockpit in the fuselage. I will touch everything up just before adding the rear seat.

[Giorgio N]

While I was waiting for the fuselage glue to set, I took some time to work on the wings. Valom split these in 5 parts. Sounds complicated but really it is quite a clever design and fit would be good... if this was not a short run kit !

The trailing edges required a lot of sanding to bring them to a decent thickness Then there was the matter of getting the outer parts under the fairings present where the dihedral changes. It took some work to get everything aligned properly but in the end I made it. Kind of...

 

 

 

Getting all parts properly aligned needed time and patience. Oh well, we are modellers right ? So we should be used to time and patience.. really I was expecting worse but this is still a short-run kit ! I may have repeated these words a few times by now but it's worth keeping this in mind. Take your time, check and check again, adjust the parts where needed and then when dryfitting the fuselage to the wings things may end looking better than expected:

 

[Giorgio N]

Time to show what the model looks like today !

In the previous post I had the fuselage and wings complete and ready to be mated. When the time came to glue these parts together I found that fit on the upper surfaces was pretty good, the lower surfaces however were a very different story. The main culprit was the rear of the central wing section, that protruded from the fuselage by something like 6-7 mm. Not good ! To try and get the part to fit I had to bend the part by a lot and even then this didn't fit very well, as shown below:

 

 

You can see in the picture above the signs of where I had to bend the plastic. Hopefully these will disappear after painting. The step was sorted with a lot of sanding, at least I didn't need much filler though.

Upper surfaces were much better

 

 

[Giorgio N]

And this the latest picture !

With the fuselage fit issues sorted, I could focus on adding some more bits, starting from the cowling. The cowling is in two parts and fortunately fit here was decent. I still had to sand the joints a bit and this meant rescribing some of the flaps line but I was happy enough. The engine fits nicely into the cowling however the round bulkhead to which the engine is attached gave me several problems. As it is, this bulkhead fits nicely into the rear end of the cowling and if the parts are attached this way everything can be glued onto the frton fuselage. However in this way the engine protrudes too much from the cowling at the front. Ideally the bulkhead should fit inside the fuselage, flush with the very front section. Problem is that the bulkhead is round while the front section features cutouts for the exhaust pipes. So I had to chop plastic here and there from the bulkhead and at that point this tended to fall inside the fuselage... to the rescue comes more plastic rod to build an inner lip onto which I could fit the bulkhead.

It was then time to glue the tailplanes. These fortunately did not give problems, however as they are only butt-joined I decided to pin them in place using a metal rod. Butt-joined tailplanes have a bad habit of being knocked out while handling the model, reason why I always reinforce such joints with metal pins. Actually I've even replaed the plastic attachment points with metal pins in a number of mainstream kits in the past, as some tend to be quite fragile.

With the addition of an air intake on the left side, I am now at this point:

 

 

The fuselage is still missing a few bits, like the tailwheel and hook. Another missing part is the fairing for the right MG but this is better glued in place after the canopy, so now the plan is to put all seats into the cockpit, add the shelf between the two seats and then glue the canopy. I have alredy checked the canopy for fit and shaved some plastic from the fuselage halves, hopefully things will fit fine

[Giorgio N]

All cockpit bits are now in their place ! I'm not sure that everything is in the right place, as the instructions don't always fit with the size of the parts and I had to check the few pictures I found to understand where everything is supposed to be... in any case the final result may not be 100% realistic but at least looks convincing.

And here's a closer view of the cockpit:

 

My initial plan was to leave the rear MG off but then decided to place it in the stowed position.

At this point I could dry-fit the canopy...

 

Not too bad I'd say. I considered drilling a hole for the telescopit sight but in the end decided against it... I'll only glue in place the outer part after the model is painted.

One thing that I haven't shown is that I have also glued in place the fairings under the wings that contain the landing gear. Unfortunately they were both a very bad fit and I'll have to do some more work on these before I can prime the model

 

 

[Giorgio N]

Quick update... I've not given up on the model ! I've actually worked quite hard to put some details in place, most important the airbrakes.

Valom supplies a great set of PE airbrakes. The sheet also includes two parts for the inner part of the airbrake bays but these are for some reason not mentioned in the instructions.. anyway, since I'll be posing the aibrakes closed, I may simply omit them. I'm posing them closed as all pictures seem to show fully closed airbrakes when the aircraft is on the ground. I've also seen a picture showing these open and there would be quite some work to do to add all the opening linkages.

Sorting the wings to accept the airbrakes however was not easy, particularly on the top. I'm also struggling in keeping them glued in place... guess I should glue the lower parts first. Anyway this is what these lower parts will look like when glued in place:

 

 

Inner faces seem to be in aluminum in the picture I have, so this is what I'll paint them.

Speaking of parts, I seem to have lost the tailwheel.. not good ! Hopefully it will turn up somewhere on the table, if not I'll have to scratchbuild one. Should not be too difficult but I'd really prefer to find the original part

[rob85]

Sorry I seem to have missed so much of this build! Your doing a great job of wrestling this kit into submission, really is taking shape.

 

great work.

 

Rob

[Giorgio N]

Wrestling may not have been the right word for the build so far, but sure is the right one for the flaps... they were a nightmare ! Not much because of the kit design, but because I struggled to keep them in place. I tried CA, epoxy, UV curing resin, even proper resin. And nothing, they always came off at the first hint of movement.

Finally I managed to glue them in place using some epoxy designed to glue steel and other metal... What also helped was the addition of a couple of small plastic lips on the side, that gave some more contact surface.

Unfortunately I could not locate the tailwheel, must have fallen victim to the carpet monster. I'll have to scratchbuild a replacement and this is the reason why I managed to get a coat of primer on the top surfaces but none on the lower yet

 

 

[DaveyGair]

Great job on this kit. I often wonder why I put myself doing kits of this type but the results can be more rewarding!

 

 

Davey.

[Giorgio N]

Folks, sorry for not being more present in this thread, I've had a few very busy weeks and the hobby has suffered as a result.

At least I managed to put some paint on the BT-1.... yellow is unfortunately quite a difficult colour to apply as covers very little. In any case I managed to get something decent enough. I'm not sure if the yellow I used is right for the colour used on these US Navy types, however looks similar enouh when compared to pictures. Maybe it could be a bit more orange but I'm using the paints I have at the moment.

I have similar reservations for the red, for some reason it looks a bit too dark. Guess I'll only know when all the colours are on the model. The blue is the worst, as I don't seem to have anything that comes close. I will probably have to use a mix and the colour visible on the cowling is a first test for such a mix. Doesn't look too bad...

 

 

I've yet to decide how to apply the blue stripes... I may paint the aluminum fuselage and lower wings first and then mask and spray the blue, but I may also add the blue first on the wings and around the fuselage and then mask and spray the aluminum paint as last coat.

Oh, and have you noticed that one of the flaps section has detached.... again !!!!

[CliffB]

It's certainly very colourful Giorgio and sure will look the part will decals and a varnish coat applied. 

 

Cheers

[rob85]

Very colourful, and very nice paint work!

 

Rob

[825]

Great work Giorgio. I feel your frustrations with the etch flaps. They look great but it's maddening when they keep falling off. I've found using PVA or even canopy glue like Krystal Kleer sometimes works quite well. The flexible nature of the glue means that knocks doesn't always result in breakage. Good luck with whatever you decide. It's looking good and the hard work you've put into it is obvious. 

[RidgeRunner]

Hi Giorgio!

 

I am sorry but I didn't see this before as I dont regularly look at the GBs. She certainly will be colourful! Getting yellow right is as art and you have it. :). Be sure that I'll now follow this to the end (RFI).

 

Martin

[JOCKNEY]

Hi Giorgio

 

Did you ever get a chance to finish this one ?

 

It was looking the business when we last heard from you.

 

 Cheers Pat