Vulcan b1a conversion again - I'm not crazy

[Adam Poultney]

Well it's Vulcan time again! This time I'll be cutting one up to build a Vulcan B1a, a variant which has never been represented in a plastic, resin, vacuform or any other type of kit. If you want a B1a, you have to convert one and generally the starting point will have to be a Vulcan B2. The B1, which would be a much better starting point, is only slightly better represented by the incredibly rare Frog kit from 1958, the Lindberg prototype from a year later has straight wings so won't build a standard B1, much less a B1a. No resin, vacuform or other form of kit of any Mk1 vulcan has been made since, only a 1/72 conversion set. 

If you know your Vulcans, you'll know the last B1 was scrapped at Cosford in 1986 having been left outside to corrode for years (already in a bad way by the time the museum got hold of it), the only one which had a chance of surviving to today would probably have been XA903 which was flying until 1979 as a testbed, but no one was interested in preserving the full aircraft with the retirement in the B2 not far off. This makes researching the B1 enough to make an accurate model a bit of a pain, there are plenty of photographs around but weren't really taken with modellers in mind. 

I've had a Vulcan marked up for conversion for months, but just not gotten around to cutting the plastic. Even in this fairly small scale it's not an easy task and there's definitely a non-zero chance of this failing and ending up in the bin. This isn't my first B1a conversion, in fact it's the third one, and I've converted one in this scale to a very early B1 with the straight wing (most B1s had Phase 2 kinked wings, introduced from XA894, the sixth production, aircraft onwards and refitted to most early ones). I've made a set of wing templates to speed up the process of measuring out and marking the lines to cut.

 

Chop! Goodbye B2 wings. It's a crude, but effective process.

 

 

My three Mk.1s, notably absent is the standard B1, but I have two Frog kits which will fill that gap.

 

 

[DonH]

Yeah, you are crazy. But in a good way!

[Corsairfoxfouruncle]

Youre not crazy Adam, at least no more than anyone here. I just started my umpteenth Corsair build. 

[Adam Poultney]

7 hours ago, DonH said:

Yeah, you are crazy. But in a good way!

haha I hope it's in a good way

 

3 hours ago, Corsairfoxfouruncle said:

Youre not crazy Adam, at least no more than anyone here. I just started my umpteenth Corsair build. 

Best way to do modelling. I think 12,571 Corsairs is a much harder goal to achieve than 136 Vulcans though 

 

Some progress made yesterday. I filled all panel lines on the wings with plastic dissolved in glue. Once this has been sanded down, Mr Surfacer 1000 should do the rest.

 

After the first application of Mr Surfacer it's going well, but this will have to be sanded down and repeated a few times to get rid of the B2 panel lines completely.

 

 

 

[heloman1]

Interesting project, I follow if I may?

 

Colin

[Adam Poultney]

35 minutes ago, heloman1 said:

Interesting project, I follow if I may?

 

Colin

Of course, if you can put up the the ramblings of a madman 😂

 

 

[Adam Poultney]

There are two schemes I'm looking at doing. Firstly, XH481 in anti flash white. There's no markings that would be awkward in 1/200 scale on the tail and the one Sqn badge on the fuselage, which I won't have a correct decal for but in this scale I think I'll just use the 617 Sqn one from the kit 

 

Next scheme is XA895, the prototype for the B1a conversion. This was the only silver B1a, I suspect it retained the 48" underwing serials but I haven't seen any photos that would confirm this. I think the lettering above the fin flash says "Bomber Command Development Unit" in red. I'd need to print this myself. 

 

 

[Mancunian airman]

Always interesting work to watch from a Vulcan connoisseur . . . .

[Adam Poultney]

I forgot to mention that before I started covering this in plastic gloop, I sanded off almost every blister and air scoop on the underside; they were almost all B2 features. As the four air scoops under the engines were moulded in place (like on the GWH kit) instead of separate parts (like on the Trumpeter and Airfix kits), it made it quite awkward to remove these smoothly. 

 

The jetpipes also needed to be shortened for a B1. The kit ones represent the shorter and wider of the B2 jetpipes (for the Olympus 301), so it's not that bad of a starting point really. This is a crude approximation, but good enough for the scale. One side was done before taking this photo for comparison 

 

 

 

[Johnson]

Crazy, no of course not. As Dennis said above, 'no more than anyone else here'. But you clearly like a challenge!

 

Although I have yet to make one, I do love Vulcans. The first one I saw was as a boy, high above London, but low enough to make out the anti-flash white, a very unusual sight over SW London! Quite when I don't recall, sometime in the 1960s I think. Then in the early 1980s I was lucky enough to get a seat at the 'Goodbye to the Vulcan' display at RAF Waddington, which was awesome. We were seated in front of a hanger and several Vulcans approached from behind with engines on whisper so we couldn't see or hear them. As they were overhead, they applied full power and climbed. Made everyone jump, quite an entrance! And recently seeing XH558 flying at air displays. Such a great plane.

 

I'll follow along for the ride, and best wishes for the build Adam.

[Adam Poultney]

On 01/04/2021 at 13:10, Johnson said:

Crazy, no of course not. As Dennis said above, 'no more than anyone else here'. But you clearly like a challenge!

 

Although I have yet to make one, I do love Vulcans. The first one I saw was as a boy, high above London, but low enough to make out the anti-flash white, a very unusual sight over SW London! Quite when I don't recall, sometime in the 1960s I think. Then in the early 1980s I was lucky enough to get a seat at the 'Goodbye to the Vulcan' display at RAF Waddington, which was awesome. We were seated in front of a hanger and several Vulcans approached from behind with engines on whisper so we couldn't see or hear them. As they were overhead, they applied full power and climbed. Made everyone jump, quite an entrance! And recently seeing XH558 flying at air displays. Such a great plane.

 

I'll follow along for the ride, and best wishes for the build Adam.

Absolutely no point in modelling if it was all just Lego, sure I do like a kit that just falls together, but that would get boring after a while.

Wish I was around to see the original service life of the Vulcans, especially the B1s and B1as around in the 50s and 60s. I was born in 2003 (got to be one of the youngest cases of obsessive modeller syndrome!), so I've only ever seen XH558 flying. I'm lucky to be part of the final generation to see this amazing aircraft flying, and have many good memories of seeing XH558. 

Now I'm trying to go and see every one of the 19 surviving complete Vulcans. I think I'll have the 15 UK based examples done in the next couple of years. Only got XJ823, XL426, XM575, XM597 and XM655 to go of the UK ones, the four in North America might prove a little more difficult. 

 

 

[Adam Poultney]

I decided in the end to go with XA895, the silver B1a prototype. The intakes have been painted and assembled. In this scale, I decided that it's not worth narrowing the intakes as I think there's a good chance I'll mess it up beyond recovery. 

 

One of the most challenging parts of any B1 conversion where you're got using any sort of conversion set would be the landing gear. On some of my models, I avoided the issue by building them gear up. I decided that on this build, I'll give it a go. 1/200 Vulcan landing gear is tiny already, now I'm modding it! Crazy!

 

This is the normal, unmodified landing gear from a previous build

Modified B1a nose gear, much longer.

 

Modified B1a main gear, only half the wheels on for now. 

 

Apologies for the poor quality photos, difficult to photograph these small parts. 

Again, part of the B2 main gear, very different. A much stronger design, even though the B1 style looks much sturdier.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Adam Poultney]

Today the upper and lower halves were assembled, remembering to add nose weight unlike on my previous build of this kit where I had to rip off the canopy to get it in. This really is starting to look a lot like a B1a

 

Underside with the gear tacked in place to test the centre of gravity. You can adjust see I've started to look at scribing new control surfaces and marked where the pitot will go on one wing. Lots of filler will be needed to fix all the various introduced in the conversion process and the gaps that are in the kit anyway (of which there are quite a few)

The Phase 2 wing from above

 

Couldn't possibly do a Vulcan thread without comparing the wing types, so here's a comparison.

 

 

 

[Adam Poultney]

One of my FROG Vulcans which is1/96 scale. This is a regular standard B1 as compared to the B1a I'm building from the 1/200 kit. I really do like my Vulcan B1s

 

 

Due to the potential delicateness of the modified landing gear, I found a suitable stand to put this on if the gear breaks. Always worth having a plan B when you're doing a very extensive conversion like this

Today I've been doing quite a lot on the model, the leading edges have been smoothed out and the surfaces of the wings have been smoothed out with increasingly fine sandpaper. The cockpit received a plain black paintjob; there's not much point in putting too much detail inside as you can't see it anyway, on some of my builds I didn't even bother with the cockpit. 

Wingtip pitots were made from the air oil separator pipes that are spare now as these were introduced on the B2. The nose gear modifications already used part of one. These for now are blue tacked in place for photos.

Many of the slots for pitots and other things were also filled. The most troublesome one being the large gap under the fuselage I think that is possibly meant for a stand or something. There's not one included with the kit, so it might be for the prebuilt (diecast?) versions using the same moulds.

Underneath you can see by the blobs of Mr Surfacer that haven't been sanded down yet where I've filled in B2 details. I also added the ECM plate under the right side that was part of the ECM upgrade installed on the B1a. They were of course stop gap while the B2s were entering service, but even with the ECM upgrade didn't have the high altitude performance of the B2 and still had the non-cranked wing spar that meant blue steel wouldn't be as easy to fit to the B1s. However the B1 was apparently more nimble at low altitude than the B2, so I wonder what could have been if more powerful engines were put in (ignoring the obvious issue of fatigue).

I have found that on my B1as I've had to shorten the ECM plate otherwise it would overhang behind the shortened jetpipes. I don't know for certain but I suspect the B1a ECM plate was accurate shorter on the real thing. 

Real B1a - also look just how differently they weathered to the B2.

B2, this one has 2 ECM plates, about half of the Blue Steel Vulcans were fitted with a second. It's quite a dirty one, the Blue Steel looks much whiter than the rest of the aircraft's underside.

 

I love just how different these look. Must say I am tempted to grab another one of these from the stash and start a standard B1 to go with this. Only got three more of these stashed, need to get some more soon. Hopefully they get put back into production again.

 

[Adam Poultney]

It took me a while to figure out how to properly assemble this three piece crew hatch. The instructions aren't very clear and actually are plain wrong. They'd have you putting in the crew ladder facing the wrong way (from the back of the hatch to the front) and ignore the support parts. 
In the end what I did was attach the ladder in the correct position based on photos of the real thing, then cut the support part in half as it has been moulded at the same width as the ladder so won't fit. I then sloted the halves in place and temporarily attached the hatch to the Vulcan using a small amount of glue, which allowed me to position the supports correctly.
Of course this is all way too thick for the scale, but I don't mind that too much. It'll add something interesting to the model.

 

 

 

 

Canopy looks way too flat on this kit

 

 

The photos I took at the Midland Air Museum last year were quite useful

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Johnson]

43 minutes ago, Adam Poultney said:

Canopy looks way too flat on this kit

It does a bit. Can you do anything about it?

[Adam Poultney]

8 minutes ago, Johnson said:

It does a bit. Can you do anything about it?

Probably could but I'm not going to, I just want to get onto painting this soon. I need to draw a line somewhere otherwise I'll never finish the build 

[Adam Poultney]

One of the last details to add before painting was the two antenna that were fitted to the B1a. The one on the top of the fuselage uses an identical part to the B2 pitot tubes, the one on the bomb aimer's blister replaced the kit part which is a simplified version of a later antenna fitted to the B2, I cut down a B2 pitot to size, the same method I used on my less modified build of this kit in the 2020 Christmas Blitzbuild.

Apologies for the poor quality photos, such small parts are difficult to photograph properly.

 

 

 

At some point I had accidentally scratched the canopy and it happened to be on one of the areas which would be left clear. I remembered that other builds (including the conversion by RobVulcan that inspired this build) had painted canopies. A few months ago I repainted a Concorde in a what-if RAF transport scheme; certainly one of the more realistic what-ifs, at least compared to Bombcorde, still I will probably build a Bombcorde when the Airfix's ancient Concorde not quite prototype is finally reissued. Anyway, on that project I painted the canopy black as the original masking was somewhat poor. I quite like the look of that in 1/144, so I don't think it will look bad at all in 1/200, plus I quite like the look of Rob's 1/200 Vulcans which have painted canopies.

I applied a full coat of Mr Surfacer just to get rid of any other scratches and imperfections, which was sanded down before I primed the model in black.

 

So anyway, here's the black Vulcan. I wish they'd painted one like this, it looks so good. The Valiant B2 also really suited its black scheme.

 

 

I wanted to get Vallejo's dull aluminium to try for this, but it was unavailable. I went with Vallejo Steel instead. Silver Vulcans, and all silver V Bombers except the Valiant prototypes (WB210 was polished aluminium for its entire short life and WB215 started as polished aluminium by was later painted), were painted with high speed silver, an aluminium paint, not bare metal. They very quickly faded from a shiny but not very reflective silver to a duller shade. I think this looks ok so far.

 

 

[Adam Poultney]

Doh!

I forgot one modification....

I forgot to add this small air scoop (iirc it was something to do with cooling the build bomb bay), it wasn't on the B2, but all B1s had it. Bit of a pain now that I've painted the silver. Oh well, guess I'll probably be making some repairs to the paint soon.

 

 

 

[Adam Poultney]

The radome panels aren't quite right on the kit, I forgot to correct them, same as some of my other Vulcans built from this kit I'll simply paint the correct shape. It should be less noticeable on a silver B1 anyway as both panels were painted differently. The front panel was pretty much always black, but the rear panel looks like it varied from an off white to straight up black.

On this image you can see different shades. The nearest aircraft, which I have not been able to identify, XA893, 892, 889 and the further away Vulcan which I can't quite read the serial of have medium grey rear radome panels, XA891 has a very dark grey, and XA894 looks like it is all black. This must be one of very very few photographs of XA894 before its modifications, and also quite a rare shot of XA893.

This photo from earlier in the thread shows XA895 with a white rear radome panel.

 

 

XA895 looks like it has an off white one, one of the lightest I've seen on any silver Vulcan. 

 

 

 

With the radome painted, I painted details such as the black fin cap and the panel at the base of the tail, note that it is a different shape to the early version in the picture of the lined up Vulcans, XA895 would have been one of the first with this type which became the standard one.

 

 

 

 

I'd say this is pretty good next to an image of the real thing, ignoring the difference in colour and that the model is a B1 but the photo is a B1a.

 

 

I need to paint the dark patch behind one of the main wheel wells still. I'm having to guess at the underside based on pictures of other airframes because I cannot find any images of XA895 from below as a B1a, they were annoyingly unstandardised, so it makes it somewhat difficult.

 

 

 

[Johnson]

Very good in comparison to the Photos. And what an amazing underside shot of XA896!

[Adam Poultney]

1 hour ago, Johnson said:

Very good in comparison to the Photos. And what an amazing underside shot of XA896!

One of the best underside photos of a silver B1 ever taken I think! I just wish they were all this well photographed... it would make this a lot easier!

[Adam Poultney]

And now onto decals! I printed a few... just a few. I've got to print in full A4 sheets so I just fill the rest with stuff that might be useful at some point. If anyone wants 617 Sqn decals with correct colours and roundel sizes in 1:200, or 1:96 Vulcan prototype decals... well I have a lot going spare. 

 

Got the serials from a previous set of every vulcan 18" serial I made in 1:200 (imaginary internet points if anyone can see which one is missing). 

 

 

I can't print white so I'm using the roundels and fin flashes from the kit (also why I've not tried making decal sets for camo Vulcans). They're too small and the colours are off, but oh well. It'll have to do. I used tape to align where the roundels are supposed to go, in the absence of any panel lines on the wings.

 

 

I did something similar for the fuselage roundels.

 

 

And again for underwing serials. I don't know if these would have been on XA895; other B1as did not have these, but XA895 was the the only silver one and the prototype for the conversion. I like the underwing serials, and in absence of evidence to say otherwise, I'm assuming they were there.

The 48" underwing serials are pretty much the same size as 1:72 18" serials (the size used on the tail). 

 

 

Stencil decals on silver Vulcans (and I believe the other V Bombers as well) were red. Most of the kit ones are no good for this. Thankfully I'm building in 1:200 scale and earlier Vulcans look like they didn't have anything like as many warning labels plastered all over them as later ones, so I only needed to print the most obvious ones. 

There were a few red stencil markings under the nose that B1s and early B2s had that weren't on later Vulcans (I did them in black on my model of XH558 in the early B2 scheme, I didn't realise they're supposed to be red even I built that).

Once the last decals were on, I applied a coat of Vallejo matte varnish, I want this to be a dull silver, not too shiny, as much as I do like shiny V Bombers.

I can't take a good enough picture to show the quality of the print, but the words Bomber Command Development Unit are clearly legible.

 

 

And then I remembered to add this, had to be careful not to mask over the decal and accidentally ruin it.

 

 

And another side by side commission to one of my B2s to finish off today's update. I really should build a new camouflaged B2 model in this scale, my modelling skills have improved a lot since I built my previous one.

 

 

All that is left to do now is some light weathering

[Adam Poultney]

I forgot to mention, the landing gear was painted in silver. B1s seemed to be very inconsistent on landing gear colour. Some were gloss black like the B2s, some look like unpainted metal and yet more look like full aluminium paint, all with no apparent pattern as to what airframes had what colour gear. I don't know entirely why this was, but that doesn't matter for modelling purposes. In old black and white photos it can be difficult to tell sometimes if it's gloss black or just dirty silver, especially when the landing gear is in shadow, which is common given its position under the fuselage and large delta wings.

I did come across one photo said to be XA895 on delivery which clearly shows silver gear. This was before the B1a conversion, but that's what I'm going with.

Also the crew hatch was painted

 

[Johnson]

Looks excellent with the decals Adam.

 

Printing white is a problem. The only solution I've found, and not a very easy one, is to seal the ink with acrylic varnish, float it off and turn it over. Let it dry, paint the portion you want white with gloss white enamel paint. Let it dry, float it off and turn it over again to get some adhesive on and apply it. As I said - not easy! Works OK for small badges and nose art etc. If I need a few decals I print them at the top of the A4 sheet and simply cut off the portion I need (an inch say). The remainder of the decal sheet can be used again, and again...

 

Regards,