Mirage IIIO 1/32, Scratchbuild

[Putty Animal]

On 18/10/2021 at 16:44, Bandsaw Steve said:

Hang on. I spy a ‘like’ from @Vanroon in the post above and I happen to know that he lives in Victoria! 👮‍♀️🚨👮‍♀️🚨👮‍♀️

Look out.  You just got another one from me in the dreaded Vic too!

 

There’s been some sort of Freedom Day declared today, as we get past 70% vaccinations.  However I don’t think we’ll be declaring victory until I get my haircut, which is tentatively scheduled for the 1st of November.  Bloody hell it can’t come quick enough.  I feel like I need to wear a headband when I sit down to work in the man cave!

[Bandsaw Steve]

If metal then metal...

 

There are many modellers on this website with more skill than I.   One of them is @Steve D who champions the phrase 'If metal then metal'  this summarizes his belief that where-ever possible, a modeller should try to use prototypical material in the model.  So if the original part was made from metal then try to model in metal, if the original part was in wood then try to model in wood.  His results are spectacular; go and have a look here if you want to see what I'm talking about.

 

 

Another  truly world-class, modeller is @airscale . Airscale makes extensive and expert use of metal while scratchbuilding museum-quality, 1/18 scale aircraft. 

 

 

One of the skills he has mastered is the extensive use of aluminum lithoplate to skin his aircraft.

 

 

Despite my comparatively basic skills, I am inspired by these two experts and have decided to try skinning my Mirage with metal.

 

The major benefits that I'm hoping for are:

• A really smooth skin with absolutely no remnant trace of wood grain.
• A really robust skin that won't dent with handling.
• Sharp details, for example a nice sharp tip of the trailing edge of the tail. The current MDF tip is already becoming a little blunt due to handling.
• Sharp, clean, well-defined, uniform panel lines.

At this stage I have no intention of using the aluminum to represent a natural metal finish.  This jet will be painted, most likely in the standard RAAF green and grey camouflage.

 

Many years ago my dad gave me a sheet of used printer's aluminum lithoplate and I've used it for numerous modelling duties since but never for anything as ambitious as this.  

 

Let's start with the tail.  By careful measurement we transfer the shape of the tail onto the lithoplate - I also make an allowance for the curvature of the tail's surface by making the skin slightly longer than the actual tail so that the leading edges can 'wrap around' and meet on the front.

 

 

 

If you have a look at my Mig-15 project you will see that I was never completely confident with how to represent panel lines.  

But with lithoplate it's relatively straightforward. We just use a ruler and scalpel to scribe the lines directly onto the surface. An alternative method would be to make each individual panel and glue them on separately allowing the joins to form the panel lines. 

 

 

I tried both cyanoacrylate glue and Selly's powergrip glue.  Both are good, but the powergrip is a bit thicker and can go on bit lumpy. Each subtle change in the glue's thickness translates into a slight bulge or hollow in the lithoplate so now I'm favouring the cyanoacrylate.  I know Airscale uses 'impact glue' but I've never seen that here in Australia; perhaps it has a different name. I'll have a closer look next time I'm in a hardware shop.

 

The photos show a nice clean-looking process but in reality the glue went everywhere. Luckily it all cleans up with acetone with no problem. 

 

I didn't leave enough surplus aluminum at the front and rear of the tail and the wraparound was a bit short. Lesson learned. In this case I've just filled the gap with two part automotive bog filler.

 

 

Here I'm using a needle to mark a 'datum point' on the wing's underside. This will become one of several reference points that I can use to transfer the panel-line pattern from the plans to the lithoplate.

 

 

Digital calipers are very helpful for this kind of work - just ask @Putty Animal, he'll tell you.

 

 

Here's the outline of the largest panels on the underside. I'm going to treat this job like packing a suitcase. Get all the big bits in place first and then fit all the little stuff around the edges.

 

Here's a rectangular panel that will go on the ventral surface 

 

Since this piece has to wrap around the curved underbelly surface it must be  heat-annealed to kill all of it's springiness and rigidity.  Here I'm hitting it with a Creme-brule' butane burner.

 

Once the metal has cooled it can be shaped easily and can be made to fit its  contoured position very nicely.

 

Here are the other panels I've done today, still nothing on the topside.  

 

This is not expert work,  but it's not too bad either.  Got to start somewhere.

 

The acid test will be when I have to get the edges of different panels to actually meet up nicely, and when I have to deal with the compound curves in the fuselage. 😱

 

That's it for now folks.

 

Thanks for all of the interest shown,

Bandsaw Steve

 

 

 

[hendie]

Ambitious. I like it!

If I understand what is meant by "impact glue", I think it's also known as Contact adhesive.  Spread glue on both surfaces, wait til it goes tacky, then press together. Job done.

Evostick is a contact adhesive.

[Steve D]

Way to go Steve, we'll convert them yet 

 

Cheers

 

Steve

[621Andy]

This just gets more and more spectacular with each post😍

[Corsairfoxfouruncle]

In his best Darth Vader impression … “Most Impressive” ! 

[ArnoldAmbrose]

Gidday Steve, you keep introducing new ideas into the build process. You're much braver than me. Although I try to scratchbuild new parts for my models I tend to stick with my usual materials and trusted methods (madness included) to do so. As I said, you're braver than me. Good luck with it. Regards, Jeff.

[stevehnz]

I've had a wee catch up now, been browsing on the phone of late & the wee screen just doesn't cut it for the big jobs & this is a BIG job. Now seen on a decent sized monitor, it looks way impressive. 👍 

I'm a bit worried that I might have missed the bit where you described your toxin of choice while doing the belly reshaping. I'd quite like to try some, it seems like fun.

Steve.

[Bandsaw Steve]

24 minutes ago, stevehnz said:

I'm a bit worried that I might have missed the bit where you described your toxin of choice while doing the belly reshaping. I'd quite like to try some, it seems like fun.

 

Anything that pours into a hip flask and has “X% proof” stamped on the bottle. 🕵️‍ 🍾

[Bandsaw Steve]

Metal Mirage

 

I'm carrying on with skinning the Mirage with Metal.

 

Following on from the various experts on this site I'm using masking tape to exactly work out each shape before cutting.  Here's one of the two large triangular panels on the top of the wing. 

 

Here's the odd-shaped bit that will wrap around the leading edge of the wing…

 

and the resulting panel. Since this is printer's lithoplate there's the remnant  of an image of a woman's feet. Nothing racy I swear; I think it was from an old copy of NZ Woman's Weekly.

 

Since the lithoplate has to wrap around a fairly sharp leading edge, this sheet (which is 0.3mm thick) needs annealing before it will yield smoothly and easily to the bending rather than folding on a crease.  The heat was applied to the other side of the metal sheet but as you can see, to fully anneal this metal you need enough heat to cause the masking tape to smolder and bubble. 

 

On the topside of the wing at least it wraps around quite nicely and sands beautifully.

 

The underside however suffered from the 'wrapping around' process and due to my ham-fisted handling ended up a bit wrinkly.  I'm going to live with this though as I think these wrinkles will be much less apparent when painted.

 

here's the next panel on the leading edge, ready to go.

 

And another good result.  Take a look at the fine panel lines scribed onto the top of the wing surface, these are much better than I could have managed with wood and can be deepened easily, if need be, just by running an olfa cutter along them. Sweet! 🥳

 

On the underside we just continue filling in the gaps, working towards smaller and smaller bits...

 

As I said before, it's just like packing a suitcase; going from big bits to little bits.

 

I'm happy with the sharp edges that this method achieved. The edges of the undercarriage bay are now very 'crisp' and the wingtips are now sharp enough that I could easily cut myself on them.  I definitely could not have got such sharp and resilient edges with wood or plastic.

 

By this stage however my only sheet of lithoplate was getting very small. I was running out of the stuff, so I made some phone calls to some local printers and found one nearby who had a bunch of scrap lithoplate he was happy to give away.

 

I went around and picked up 25 sheets of A2 size waste like this one.  The only difference compared with my old sheet (above) is that this new stuff is only 0.15mm thick. This suits me fine as it's much more flexible than the 0.3mm thick stuff I had and I think it will go around most curves without annealing. Being thinner it's also less likely to end up making the final model look bulkier than it should.  I'm very happy with this.

 

I've started on the fuselage tonight.

 

A very similar process to the wings.

 

I've found that the 0.15mm thick plate can easily be cut with this paper guillotine to yield very straight cuts.

 

Here's how she's looking now. 

 

Note that the large grey blobs on the metal on the fuselage are bog filler.  There were one or two lumps either on the model's surface or in the glue that I used that transferred a lump onto the metal. When I went to sand out the lump I sanded right through the thin lithoplate and was left with a hole that had to be filled.

The lesson is to make sure that everything between the wood and the metal is as smooth as possible and that there is no debris or lumpy glue between the two surfaces.  It's perfectly fine to sand Lithoplate but you really only want to be shining up the surface, not trying to eliminate bumps and so-forth.

 

This is as far as I've got - but I'm fully committed now - the whole thing will have to be skinned.  Although the model will still be camouflaged this will definitely be a metal Mirage.

 

Best Regards,

Bandsaw Steve

 

 

[heloman1]

Steve, after all your bandsawing, which I was enjoying , now you are into tin bashing. I like the use of the thin ali sheet. I'm a collector of foil from whatever source. It makes great 'scabbed on' panels.

Hendie above beat me to telling you abut contact adhesive, it has good properties and comes under a myriad names.

Looking forward to the completion of your build.

 

Colin

[Brandy]

Beautiful, even if it isn't wood any more! This is really taking on the look of another masterpiece in the making.

 

Ian

[Gondor44]

Great work, is it just my eyes or is the fuselage above the wings a bit squarish?

 

Gondor

[Bandsaw Steve]

On 09/11/2021 at 01:43, Gondor44 said:

Great work, is it just my eyes or is the fuselage above the wings a bit squarish?

 

Gondor

 Yep it is! 😥

 

 I thought it wasn’t too bad until I put that sheet on and it does highlight it a bit. Being a bit ‘gash’ I was thinking once the whole thing’s skinned and camouflaged it won’t be too obvious, but now you’ve got me thinking maybe now is my last chance to strip off the first sheets of metal and round things off a bit more.

 

Thanks for your honest observation. It might just be the push I need to stop, back-up a bit and get this sorted.

 

👍
 

 

[Martian]

32 minutes ago, Bandsaw Steve said:

It might just be the push I need to stop, back-up a bit and get this sorted.

 

👍
 

 

I think you should Steve; otherwise it won't matter how much effort you put into the build, you will never be entirely happy with it.

 

Martian 👽

[hendie]

Honestly, I'd go for ripping it off and doing again.  You know a year down the line you'll wish you had.

And you'll get better with more practice!

Two wins for the price of one

[Gondor44]

38 minutes ago, Bandsaw Steve said:

 Yep it is! 😥

 

 I thought it wasn’t too bad until I put that sheet on and it does highlight it a bit. Being a bit ‘gash’ I’m thinking once the whole thing’s skinned and camouflaged it won’t be too obvious, but now you’ve got me thinking maybe now is my last chance to strip off the first sheets of metal and round things off a bit more.

 

Thanks for your honest observation. It might just be the push I need to stop, back-up a bit and get this sorted.

 

👍
 

 

It;s just the section above the wing, not as if it's the whole fuselage which I am sure could end up with it in the bin. Way too easy to end up with it the way it is at the moment and I am sure you will easily fix it 👍

 

Gondor

[Marklo]

53 minutes ago, Bandsaw Steve said:

and camouflaged it won’t be too obvious

If you’re anyway like me, you  will look at that mirage everyday and all you will see is the gimped fuselage  But then again I keep getting accused of being. bIt OCD at times.

 

 

 

 

[SteveMc]

Not just a fine woodworker but a fine metalworker as well. Fantastic skills Steve. 

[Bandsaw Steve]

Yeah - OK. You lot have convinced me!

 

I’ll have another crack at rounding off the fuselage a bit more. 😖

[k5054nz]

That was a fantastic post Steve, working with litho is another of those dark arts I wouldn't mind dabbling in at some point.

 

That said, am I the only one who sees a piece of overcooked naan in this photo?!  

12 hours ago, Bandsaw Steve said:

 

Edited November 9, 2021 by k5054nz

[Vanroon]

2 hours ago, k5054nz said:

>snip<

That said, am I the only one who sees a piece of overcooked naan in this photo?!  

 

No you aren't, tho' I was thinking of the underside of an egg. 

G

[Bandsaw Steve]

4 hours ago, k5054nz said:

That was a fantastic post Steve, working with litho is another of those dark arts I wouldn't mind dabbling in at some point.

 

Be warned. It’s extremely difficult, it involves:

 

1. Cutting out shapes with scissors.

 

2. Sticking them on with glue.

 

I reckon you can hack it though.

[ArnoldAmbrose]

THAT complicated? 😲           Seriously, I think you'll be happier with doing the extra rounding of the fuselage (I nearly said 'hull'), now that you know. You've gone to so much trouble with authenticity, such as wing droop, that you'd not be happy otherwise. Good luck with it. Regards, Jeff.

[Bandsaw Steve]

7 hours ago, Vanroon said:

No you aren't, tho' I was thinking of the underside of an egg. 

G

In fact it the resembles the underside of anything I cook.