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ICM 1/32 Gloster Gladiator (Belgian Air Force) and Gloster Sea Gladiator (Hal Far Fighter Flight, Malta)


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10 hours ago, Stew Dapple said:

 

Like the one illustrated in "No Place for Beginners" with the diamond markings on the upper wing? That would be a beauty B) 

Cheers,

 

            Stew

Yes that is the one Stew,.... cheers mate. I`ve always liked that scheme and have aleady done it in 1/48th! 

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19 hours ago, bigbadbadge said:

... For me I would drill separately as I would no doubt not get the drill perpendicular to the parts !!!

Good luck with your drilling.

Chris

 

Thanks Chris, in the end I heeded your words and drilled them separately :) 

 

So this is the thing that was making me anxious:

 

DSCN1867.jpg

 

It's just a cheap hobby-type drill from Lidl. I usually hand-drill with a pin vice, but the .3mm drill bits I bought have a large... I'm wanting to say "shank"? Anyway they don't fit in a pin vice, so that dictated that I was going to have to use the electric drill for the first time since I bought it a couple of years ago :D Well I knew it would come in handy one day. It has a variable speed setting ranging from "Ooh that's quite fast isn't it?" to "You know that's going to go straight through your finger, don't you?" or so it seems if you are more accustomed to the sedate pace of drilling by hand.

 

Anyway I gave it a go:

 

DSCN1869.jpg

 

The aft hole is supposed to be slightly more inboard than the forward one (honest!) just perhaps not as much as mine is. Still, that will have to do, I can't keep poking holes in the parts until I find perfection or I may end up rigging what appears to be a piece of Swiss Cheese. Being easily confused by nature, I marked the port and starboard upper and lower parts, I probably wouldn't have bothered if I was only building one kit but the potential for glueing two uppers or two lowers together justified the effort of 30-odd seconds with a marker pen:

 

DSCN1872.jpg

 

I also drilled the holes in the tailfin. Must remember to tidy the seam on that R/T prong...

 

DSCN1876.jpg

 

... and before long I had a set of stabilisers; the Gladiator's tailplanes really are a lovely shape:

 

DSCN1878.jpg

 

Some of the rigging on the Gladiator just sort of disappears directly into a hole with the fixing mechanism obviously internal to the wing, but in other places and on the tail in particular there are tensioners or connectors of some sort. I'll be replicating these with these:

 

DSCN1879.jpg

 

I periodically order a batch of these from Bob's Buckles, but clearly suffer from memory failure from time to time as I have ended up with 150 of them. Still, at least I should have sufficient for my needs. They're just little eyelets and you could probably make your own with very thin copper wire twisted round a very thin rod, but why would you do that when Bob will do it for you in quantity at such a reasonable price? :) They also come in handy for attachments for R/T wires etc.

 

As I mentioned above, some of the rigging just vanishes into a hole in the wing - see the fourth photo down here. It's quite a big hole, which leaves a modeller with a small dilemma: do you go for a scale-size hole and have it look like you did a bit of a shonky job in your drilling, or do a smaller neater hole that leaves you happier with the appearance aesthetically? I think I have to go with the latter :D 

 

Cheers,

 

Stew

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Great update Stew

Crikey I was nervous reading that when I saw the electric mini drill, but you have done well  phew!!!

Mate you can never have enough eyelets and Tubes from Bob's Buckles  they are great and I have quite a few in stock too.

I was looking at the photos and wonder if it might be best replicated by glueing the thread directly into the holes and sliding a tube to meet the surface its mounted to and glueing those there .  Obviously it is just a suggestion and the way I may do mine  . This is your model and you should do what suits you best fella.

Great drilling and those tail feathers do look a wonderful shape.

Chris

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Thanks Chris, Alistair :) 

 

I spent my modelling time over the weekend drilling holes, as a result of which my workbench now resembles what (in my mind, not in reality) I imagine the Wings Department at Gloster's Hucclecoats factory must have looked like:

 

DSCN1881.jpg

 

I found that I could use the .3mm drill bits by hand, so it turns out the electric drill set was a waste of money after all :lol: The plastic is pretty good for drilling, the mouldings aren't thick and it worked perfectly well. I did go for a larger drill bit for the holes in the upper and lower wings where the bracing wires go (the ones that form the 'X' between the wings in a head-on view):

 

DSCN1884.jpg

 

My reasoning for this was that the diagonal bracing wires are slightly thicker than the incidence wires on the cabane and between the struts (the ones that form an 'X' in a side view) and during an earlier discussion with Chris @bigbadbadge he had mentioned using knitting-in elastic. I had a root through my 'potentially useful stuff' box and found a rather ancient spool of the very same stuff; it's thicker than the Infini thread which I had planned on using. I read somewhere that rigging at 1/32 scale should measure out at 0.15mm and the largest Infini thread I have is 0.12mm (in fairness it is designed for rigging ships of a much smaller scale) so would look a little undernourished, but I will use it for the incidence wires. To avoid a dogleg in the wires where they join the wings, I angled the drilled holes so that the wire doesn't enter the wings perpendicularly, and this I thought best not to try with the 0.3mm drill bits as I broke several of them just by drilling vertically and didn't have a whole lot of faith that they would be up to the task of drilling through the extra plastic needed to drill in at an angle. 

 

I have four holes to drill in one of the top wings for the cabane strut wires, then I can start on the 16 holes required on the struts, at the 'boots' where the incidence wires are connected. Still, it is as well to get these things out of the way before rather than trying to do them after assembly and once it is done, it is done :) 

 

Finally, a moment's silence please for the drill bits that didn't make it so far; three dropped on the floor (and how, with the weight at the back end, did each end point-first?) and three due to my ham-fisted flexing of the bit while drilling:

 

DSCN1886.jpg

 

More drilling awaits; hopefully after that things will move more quickly :D 

 

Cheers,

 

Stew

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So you’re not going to make the bracing wires in tiny section then? 😋

There was a Rapide on the UK airshow circuit many years ago which whistled when it flew because the bracing wires were not quite lined up with the airflow.

Good work with the holes.

 

John

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51 minutes ago, Biggles87 said:

So you’re not going to make the bracing wires in tiny section then?

 

It crossed my mind John; I let it keep crossing until it went out the other side :lol: 

 

Cheers,

 

Stew

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This is good, the rigging part of biplanes means that I have zero biplanes in my display cabinets as I am ham fisted enough when it comes to aerial wires but you are making me think that it is doable.

 

Cheers

 

Dennis

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Great update Stew and thanksfor the mention, I also get through a number of 0.3 drill bits too. I sometimes use the 0.4 ones as a lot stronger and it is still easily filled with the glue.

Great work and at least that bit is out of the way  now. 

Chris

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They are coming along very nicely! You are certainly taking advantage of 1/32 to add lots of great detail.

 

I work my way through a fair number of 0.2mm bits too. The good news is when you go back to 0.5mm, it feels so easy. But the holes look massive. Mind you, if you're using 0.3 mm drills in 1/32 and I model in 1/72, then my drill sizes should be... - er no, not going to happen!

 

Regards,

Adrian

 

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Nice job so far. I have two Roden 1/48 glads in the stash that I’m itching to look   at. But no I have far too many GB commits to start anything other than a group build kit. ( Skyhawk gets started on Saturday :) )

 

I use those bits too and I find in general it’s more accurate to just use them on their own, they are very brittle and break easily but they’re also ridiculously cheap.  I have a similar rotary tool but I use an extension with it I’ve also bought a chick for it as I find collets annoying. I do use the rotary tool for drilling but it’s very useful for grinding out large areas.

 

 

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18 hours ago, AdrianMF said:

in 1/72, then my drill sizes should be... - er no, not going to happen!

 

Nano-drills? I can't even envision a 0.2mm drill bit, I imagine it would snap just from me looking at it :D 

 

16 hours ago, Brandy said:

For 0.3mm drill bits that fit a pin vice, google jobber drill bits. I use those and haven't broken one in yonks.

 

I've got a few sets of those Ian, but I was able to break them with very little apparent effort; as GregB's strapline goes: "Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool" and my natural talent has been honed by years of practice :lol: 

 

I had already ordered a set of ten 0.3mm collared bits as I had a minor panic-attack on finding my original set only had two survivors; as @Marklo notes, they are cheap, but so am I and it does pain me deep inside each time I break one :) 

 

I de-sprued the various struts and decanted them to a compartented box:

 

DSCN1890.jpg

 

For the two kits only four compartments are needed, Starboard Forward, Starboard Rear, Port Forward and Port Rear, you can put the wing struts and cabane struts in the same compartments as you really aren't likely to mix them up. The port forward strut on each kit is different, one having the original two-prong pitot and the other having the later single-prong version. Again, you aren't likely to mix those up as it's a pretty obvious difference. I've currently cleaned up, but not drilled, the starboard forward ones, hence the empty compartment.

 

As a break from seam-cleaning and drilling, I made up the Watts prop unit for the Belgian Gladiator (one of the parts had come off the sprue and I thought I'd glue it now rather than find it had gone missing later):

 

DSCN1892.jpg

 

Sorry for the blurry. It's made up of three parts and I can see why; it's a chunky unit and moulding it as a single piece would mean party time for sinkmarks. I didn't find the fit of the side parts of the hub a brilliant fit, but it did occur to me that I might be the variable in the equation and although it needed a bit of filling and tidying at the joins the end result is a lovely sinuous shape. Shame all the hub detail will be hidden under a rounded cap :) 

 

Cheers,

 

Stew

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I've finished drilling the wings and struts, mostly anyway, apart from the linkages between the upper and lower ailerons, the spacings of which have been driving me spare since Wednesday, and which were too complex for my poor brain to handle on a work day, so I left them for the weekend and instead assembled the wheels and undercarriage legs:

 

DSCN1894.jpg

 

If, when you are attaching the landing gear struts, the fit seems decidedly weird, you will be fitting them the wrong way round. Or trying to, anyway, I don't think they actually would fit the wrong way round :) 

 

Cheers,

 

Stew

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Thanks John, Chris, to be honest I think you could only fit the landing gear wrong deliberately, as it clearly doesn't fit the wrong way and given the fit of everything else in the kit - so far at least - that would be enough to tip you off that you were doing something wrong :) 

 

My workbench generally starts off tidy and becomes more chaotic as the build progresses, but you know how they say a tidy workspace is evidence of a tidy mind? Well I wanted to see if it worked the other way round: would a tidy mind follow if the workspace was kept tidy? (Spoiler alert: NO.) I think I might have figured out the issue with the aileron connectors ; you need to measure the spacing back from the rear strut, not forward from the trailing edge of the ailerons or each side of the aileron hinge line - I think that's it anyway, we'll see when it's all together :) 

 

I got a bit adrift between progress and pictures over the weekend, but all the work I did was on the Belgian Gladiator; the lower wing was attached and only required a very little fairing in at the rear join. The fit of the parts is good enough that I will spray the upper halves of the wings separately here are the parts ready for the Aluminium undersides:

 

DSCN1899.jpg

 

The Belgian Gladiators strutwork is all black, with the 'boots' either in Alluminium (at the top) or Khaki (at the bottoms):

 

DSCN1897.jpg

 

... and once the Aluminium was sprayed, the upper surfaces were masked ready for a coat of Khaki:

 

DSCN1901.jpg

 

Annoyingly my spray booth extractor which had been suffering a 'fit of the vapours' for some time chose the weekend to shuffle off this electrical coil completely. I can go ahead without it, still a bit chilly to be opening the windows for spray-painting to be honest but needs must until a replacement arrives :D 

 

Cheers, 

 

Stew

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Thanks Chris, I managed to source a similar model relatively cheaply, alleged delivery date is Saturday but a disconcerting lack of emails confirming this so far... oh well, maybe the seller is just one of those tactiturn sorts... :D 

 

Meanwhile: Everything's Gone Green(ish brown):

 

DSCN1903.jpg

 

I really like that colour. I appreciate I'm never likely to be confronted by the colour of the original aircraft but it looks feasible to me and I would quite happily use it for PC10 as well -  maybe not brand-new just-applied PC10, but for an aircraft that's been out in the fields and meadows for six months, sure :) 

 

Cheers,

 

Stew

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I'm very late to the party, sorry, missed the memo! Liking what I'm seeing so far and also not liking what I'm seeing so far because up to now I have somehow managed to avoid raiding the stock room to have one of these beauties for myself but my resistance is weakening with every new post from you on progress!

Please warn me before you start your CR.42 so I have time to forget my BM password or else the stock room will be getting another unsolicited visit :)

 

Duncan B

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