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Fairey Rotodyne


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Good morning All, firstly a thank you to Jockney for allowing me to join the GB with this entry; the Airfix 1/72 Fairey Rotodyne.  The history of the aircraft and its eventual cancellation are fairly typical of the British aviation industry of the late fifties and early sixties, but I won't dwell on that here.  The Airfix mould originates from 1959 with all that entails including rivets everywhere, big sinkmarks, approximate fit of parts and moveable control surfaces and undercarriage.  It has no cabin interior and a brief thought about trying to scratch a representation of the instrumented interior of the prototype was quickly snuffed out; I lack the skills and patience.  So, what of the kit?

 

I picked up the Airfix Rotodyne and the Revell kit as part of a bundle a few years ago for not a lot of cash.  The Revell kit mould dates from 1961 and has far more detail including removeable panels and a complete interior, in the slightly odd scale of 1/78.  I have the 1996 reissue of the Airfix kit and the 2009 reissue of the Revell kit.  TheAairfix kit has no box and came in a ziplock plastic bag, though is complete and has decals and instructions.

 

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Side by side there is a noticeable difference in size, but the Revell kit had plenty of its own rivets.  I quite like Revell's boxing of other makers' models such as Matchbox and Hasegawa, but their own kits that I have experience of always seem to have loads of flash, poor fit and warped parts.  This one is no different, and is moulded in the good old fashioned favoourite of silver plastic.

 

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I may try my hand with the Revell kit, but I will start in with the Airfix offering first.  I am not sure how this was stored in its plastic bag, maybe in the sunshine somewhere, but the model's grey plastic has gone a not very fetching beige in places.  Fortunately it has not gone brittle.  The rivets will respnd well to a gentle sanding, but the sink marks that festoon the surface will require a little more work.

 

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First job.  On the upper surface of the wings is an intake, which in the original was the intake for the compressors that provided the high pressure air to the rotor tip 'jets' to spin the blades for take off and landing.  I set about thinning these with a dremel and a judicious scraping with a scalpel.  This made quite a difference to their appearance.

 

50092678918_5738a84bee_c.jpg20200708-TE intake by Dave Farrow, on Flickr

 

I am back to Mike Grant's tips from his 'Circuits and Bumps' series back in 2011 for this next one for making blanking pieces or bulkheads.  He used plasticene to make a plug inside a fuselage, then stuck it all in the freezer to harden a bit.  Once properly cold and quite stiff the plug was removed and sliced with a scalpel.  The sliced section was placed face down on to a piece of plasticard and paint sprayed around the edge to give a 'positive' of the shape, which could then be carefully cut out and filed/sanded to match the interior of the section to be filled.  My plugs for the main undercarriage bays weren't perfect, but they made making blanking plates really easy.

 

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I hadn't really thought about it until I started to put this together, but it's a big ole unit.  Rotor span if the prototype was in the region of 90 feet (27m for you modernists), which might not mean much until you have something to compare it to.  Next to the same scale Mi-24 Hind-D, which is no small beast itself, gives some appreciation of how big it really was.

 

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I have also remodelled the rotor mast so the rotor is both free to move and removeable and will add a photo or two in the next progress post.

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Absolutely delighted to see the Rotodyne join the GB, and I had completely forgotten Revell made a version as well as Airfix.

 

The best of luck with the build, you will hopefully inspire others to follow your lead and build this amazing aircraft rather than it languishing in the stash.

 

cheers Pat 

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On 11/07/2020 at 01:31, JOCKNEY said:

Absolutely delighted to see the Rotodyne join the GB, and I had completely forgotten Revell made a version as well as Airfix.

Frog made one too.

 

Despite its slightly odd scale, the Revell kit is by far the best.

 

Tommo.

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Good afternoon All, though I haven't posted for a few days I have been working on this in fits and starts.  Having said earlier that I wasn't going to do any sort of interior I have made a floor and a roof for the cabin.  The aft end isn't detailed as I intend the clamshell doors to be closed - although the fit is appalling and I am not sure how to make them look in any way tidy when I do that part of the model.  I made a card template for the floor which was then cut from plasticard and fettled to fit.  To stop it flexing I added some strengthening pieces underneath.  The gaps you can see are there so it fits over the mouldings for the locating pins.  These are actually very useful for setting the floor and the roof at just the right heights.  There is no mention of nose-weight in the instructions, and a quick dry assembly makes me think that it shouldn't be a tail-sitter, but there's no point in taking the chance.  The forward strengthening piece under the floor is actually a piece of lead sheet hammered flat and superglued in place.  The roof section was much more difficult to make as the mouldings on the interior of the fuselage are irregular (old moulds) and the roof section aligns with the recesses for the wing mounts.  After considerable fettling it is still not a great fit, but perfectly acceptable as any gaps won't be seen through the side windows.

 

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The Airfix mount for the rotor is a typical piece to be fitted to the rotor head like a prop spinner, and trapped between the fuselage halves when they are closed up.  A permanent fix, and not for me thank you.  I have added a piece of tube with a base which both centralises it and provides a bottom for the rotor head mount to sit on.  The rotor head mount is a piece of plastic rod fitted to the head with a piece of tube over it which then in turn fits quite snugly in to the tube in the fuselage pylon.

 

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With a little care I have the base of the rotor head spigot sitting on the base of the pylon tube and the rotor head just sitting on the pylon head; all in all just right.

 

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You may have noticed a cut-out in the front of the pylon in the photo above.  'What is that for' you mmay think.  Well...  The Rotodyne had a landing light mounted high in the pylon which is 'represented' on the model by an irregular rectangle of moulded rivets.  Airfix did much the same with the Nimrod, leaving out the landing lam in the nose of that model, but I added one to my Nimrod when I built it a few years ago, and decided to add the landing lamp to the Rotodyne.  The hole was carefully cut out ensuring that both sides of the fuselage matched and a base piece for munting the lamp added inside the pylon.  There is a small wedge of plastic to take the 3mm 'little lenses' errr... lens when it is ready to fit.

 

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The front canopy is actually very clear, and the cockpit should (scary word, 'should') be reasonably easy to add some simple details to in order to make it look less like an old kit.  The floor as moulded in the kit was a simple piece though, with lots of gaps at the front and sides which were very obvious.  Once again, not for me thank you.  I have added side and a front piece to the console, a front to the underfloor, and two side pieces fettled to fit the fuselage interior shape.  There are two odd little quarter circle cut-outs on the kit floor front corners that I have filled.  The real aircraft floor front rolls from the horizontal to the vertical and I have represented this by sanding a curve at the front of my assembly.  I say assembly as this is now made up of nine pieces instead of the kit's single piece.  There is still a lot to do in this area.

 

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Though I am removing most of the infamous Airfix rivets there are some areas where a rescribe won't go amiss, like the access doors on the pylon.  I am as good at rescribing as Giant Haystacks was at running marathons, but I'll give it a go as it isn't too complex on this model; I hope.  Let's see how it turns out.

 

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I keep promsing myself that my next build will be a modern and state of the art kit, and I keep coming back to these old classics.  Oh well...

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There is a certain satisfaction to be had from turning and old kit into a passable model even though it can be frustrating and feel like a chore at times during the build.  I’m sure your improvements will produce a really nice model.

 

AW

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Still going with the Rotodyne.  Lots of filler, sanding, more filler, more sanding.  Lots of prep work but not much to show for it unfortunately.  More to follow soon.

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I did promise a small update, so here goes.  The cockpit seats are just basic and fix to the cockpit floor by spigots in the middle.  LookIng at what could be seen in a couple of photos gave me an idea of the sort of frame the seats had so I have tried to add a representation after removing the spigots.  They still need a clean up but they should look OK once that is done and they're painted.

 

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The extension and dome on top of the rotor head is the control cover.  The swash plates must be mostly covered by this with the track rods coming from the swash plate extensions down to the bellcranks on the head, which then link to the blade pitch horns.  It looked short on the model and measuring from photos showed it needed about 1mm adding to the height.  A sliver of tube has been added and this needs tidying up.  I am not sure about adding the control linkages, that would be quite fiddly; we shall see.

 

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The fit of the engine nacelles to the wings was pretty poor, and has been commented on in at least one on-line build.  I did my best with lots of filing and sanding before committing to glue, but there is quite a bit of filler at the join between th trailing edges of the wings and the rear of the nacelles.  I still need to add more.  The join at the front has had quite a bit of sanding to remove a big step and try to fair in the sides to the wing leading edges.  The intake front is moulded with the front piece of the nacelle and is solid at the rear face.  I drilled and filed these out so the intake is now all hollow, which looks better, much better than just painting it black would have looked.

 

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The undercarriage doors are thick horrible lumps, which scale up to over six inches thick in most cases.  I am debating whether to try crash-moulding new thinner ones from plasticard.  Mike Grant has much to answer for!  The alternative is to try and sand them to a better thickness which could be tricky as some of them are curved.  For now I have filled the great big slots that are there to take the huge tabs on the kit doors.  The figure-8 mouldings inside the nacelles are for the main undercarriage legs to mount.  Pull the leg down to fold the uundercarriage up, swing the leg down and push it up to lock it in the landing position; very clever.  This was great for the 'toy' model of the 1950s or 60s but it does mean that the main legs have to be fitted when the nacelle halves are joined, and the modeller, who may be as clumsy as me, has to try not to break them through the rest of the build.  No chance.  By cutting away some of the lower part of the figure-8 I can slip the main undercarriage in to place at the end of the build, and secure it in the down position.

 

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Finally, the cabin challenge.  Airfix's kit has no interior at all, not even a floor.  I have mentioned I have made a floor and a roof, and that I wouldn't be making an interior.  Well.....  The windows are quite large so you may be able to see a bit inside the cabin, sooo...  I have tried to put in a representation of the instrumented interior fitted during test flying.  Some of the framework can be seen in some of the photos from the Farnborough Airshow that the Rotodyne attended as it is right up against the windows.  I found a couple of photos on the Web of the cabin which show the instrumented panels and the avionics rack.  The seating configurations were slightly different, and there were some different avionic box fits, but the panels and racks are the same.  I still have to add frames to the seats, and there are lots of 'boxes' to be made and fitted, but I think this (dry fit) is a reasonable start.

 

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Every single part has required clean-up, and getting things like the engine nacelles and the clamshell doors to somewhere like a close-ish fit has been a real challenge, but hopefully this will all come together in time.

 

 

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A cracking build so far. It is a kit that is over 60 years old now, so your work on it is making a huge difference. I keep getting my kit out and looking at it, but so far that is the limit of my work on it. I did get a good book about it though last Christmas. 

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  • 1 month later...

Wonderful work on a very challenging kit (I built one many moons ago, and about three years ago bought both kits in their boxes).

I have missed this one so far as these group builds do not appear or end up appearing in my default to go sections, which are WiPs and RfIs, and only came to it by chance following Adrian's entry.

As said, excellent work.!

 

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On 9/10/2020 at 11:08 PM, JOCKNEY said:

Hi @Natter

Have you had a chance to make any more progress with the Rotodyne since we last heard from you  ?

cheers Pat 

Hi Pat, I have suffered something of a motivational crisis with this one.  Everything needs some sort of work and it all got a bit frustrating so I 'banged out' and did some other builds.  I am back to it now and will post some pics with a proper update soon.

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Hi @Natter

I'm really sorry to hear that this kit has been the cause of your loss of modelling mojo.

Please accept my apologies for having encouraged you to build this one, its such an iconic aircraft. 

If it is going to prevent you from enjoying our hobby please send it straight to the shelf of shame, and get back to building what you enjoy.

Best wishes Pat

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