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The true old times are dead (1/72 92 Squadron Lightning F.2)


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1 minute ago, Steve Coombs said:

Ha! I dug my Sword F3 kit out of the stash, where it has lingered in recent years.

Taking a look inside the box, it has two, repeat, two photoetch frets with the cockpit stuff.

Your need is greater than mine, so pm me with what you want - the spare fret or the kit with two frets - the choice is yours.

No money will change hands for this. If you feel the need, contribute to a charity of your choice. Or keep things closer to home and buy the family a tub of ice cream or something (probably not at this time of year; teach the boys about deferred pleasures).

 

Steve, that's so generous of you! As I've already applied the kit etch to the cockpit to make an F.2, I would probably want the F.3 kit in its entirety (limited run kit double build!), but...are you sure? Can I at least pay you postage or remind you that I'm human garbage before you irrevocably commit yourself to this (incredibly kind) course of action?

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  • Procopius changed the title to The true old times are dead (1/72 92 Squadron Lightning F.2)

While we're all speaking of wives, I must have drawn the lucky straw. I know I joke about it sometimes, but she has never hassled me about any of my hobbies. For the last show I went to (in October) I asked her to withdraw some cash for me in case I saw something I liked. Her response was "is $250 enough?"

 

I think I'll keep her (50th anniversary next year...)     :)

 

Cheers,

Bill

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6 hours ago, Navy Bird said:

While we're all speaking of wives, I must have drawn the lucky straw. I know I joke about it sometimes, but she has never hassled me about any of my hobbies. For the last show I went to (in October) I asked her to withdraw some cash for me in case I saw something I liked. Her response was "is $250 enough?"

 

Mrs P has hassled me about my hobbies, but only because in times of incredible stress, I can achieve levels of feckless irresponsibility that would ordinarily only qualify me for high office*. 

 

Anyway, today we finally replaced Winston's much-abused nightstand, which he's had since the beginning of his "jump on things until they break" phase up to now, long after he'd jumped it well beyond Cat. 5. Winston has a strong emotional attachment to things as he are; he has not yet learned my cunning trick of loving history, so everything and everyone you've ever loved was dead before you were born. Consequently, it was very difficult to persuade him to part with it. Winston is, however, a remarkable product of our triumph over the Soviet Union, in that he can be bought, and would very much like to be. So for the paltry sum of $50 for enough fibre-optic lights for him and his brother, he was induced to accept a $21 nightstand. (Like Czar Nicholas II, the prior nightstand met a sordid and furtive end to ensure no wandering Cossacks could effect a rescue.) 

 

PXL_20221129_001021761

 

We are not too poor for a bedframe. I just got tired of hunting for the TV remote under his, and so confiscated it until such time as discarded fruit is unlikely to be stored under it until ol' dad investigates the incredible scentsation wafting down the hall. 

 

It comes with a remote, and Winston used the surplus adhesive-backed cord clips to make a sort of docking station for it:

 

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Grant was also quite pleased with his:

 

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Having left two of the three bedrooms on the second floor resembling the world's messiest raves, and having read a chapter of The Book of Three to Win, I made my escape down to the grotto. 

 

First I glued the engine facing into the fuselage, ignoring the very vague instructions and using the TLAR method. 

PXL_20221129_030935404

 

 

 

Reasoning you all might try to make me add the eight little intake guide vanes if I left it at that, I decided it was time to close up the fuselage.

 

I'd given up on the idea of using the backing plate for the engines in toto, owing to the radically different plastic thickness of the Airfix kit it was designed for compared to that of the Sword. When the time comes I have a plan for that. Maybe not a good one, but a plan nonetheless. What is it? It's...it's a secret.

 

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The intake ring/radar bullet/nose gear well are all effectively a subassembly, with little for them to find purchase on. I did my best, and began.

 

I ended up opting for a small shim under the nose:

 

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More shimming will be needed to fair the gear bay in, I reckon.

 

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Sort of...handsomely now...HANDsomely...

 

I proceeded very slowly, using Tamiya Quick-Setting Extra Thin glue over short stretches and taping the kit together to bond. Sword plastic, as you know, is hard and shiny, with little give, so I had to be careful not to pop open any seams as I went. The intake bullet was trapped, unglued, in place (a slight advantage of the metal intake ring) and wiggled until I could more or less live with it.

 

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It became apparent to me that the wings were not level with each other, and so I resorted to a method known in technical circles as "ugga-duggaing it", and very carefully employed brute force in a strategic fashion to bring them more or less level. Perils of limited-run midwing jets.

 

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I sanded the absolute hell out of the insides of the rear fuselage, and can now just barely scoot the Reskit engine bit into place. 

 

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Will need to fair that in later, once the engines are installed.

 

Oh yeah, somewhere along the line, I added the tail, too.

 

Here's where I left off. 

 

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The wisdom of not installing the seat or joystick was fully proven tonight, as I needed to do a lot of taping around the cockpit area. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Occasionally, I fantasize about moving to the UK and becoming an MP (really!), secure in the knowledge that thanks to Chips Channon, I wouldn't even be the worst American -- Chicagoan, even! -- to so serve. But alas, I am unelectable, lacking charisma, poise, and the ability to not fidget in public. On the other hand, my constitutional inability to make friends or make myself liked might reassure the voting public there'd be nobody for me to give backhanders to. And presumably, if you're prime minister, you can afford as many Airfix 1/24 Spitfires as you could want. 

 

 

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Coming on well, and really beginning to look the part. 

Been Christmas shopping for Mrs T etc this morning. One small parcel (light weight, pen and tea towel) and three Christmas cards cost £16.50 to post to the USA. Nothing to do with anything being discussed, just wanted to get my annoyance with Royal Mail off my chest. 

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6 hours ago, jackroadkill said:

You're not Jacob Rees Mogg, are you?

 

I changed a diaper this morning, and I can enter consecrated ground, if that answers your question.

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2 hours ago, Procopius said:

 

I changed a diaper this morning, and I can enter consecrated ground, if that answers your question.

 

That's a relief - I'd have had to unfollow this thread in protest if the above wasn't the case.

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4 hours ago, Procopius said:

I changed a diaper this morning

Now that is a skill I may have forgotten with a bit of luck, not that the prospect of being a grandfather currently seems very likely. Joe is sort of looking for love, but is wary as has been hurt. Whoever takes Ellie on is going to be a brave soul. 

 

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Wow, what an awful night I had last night. 

 

It began ordinarily enough: I made dinner (pierogis, salad, and carrots), which the boys refused to eat in preference to peanut butter graham crackers, which their mother inexplicably promised them five minutes before they got home. Then Mrs P took the baby up, and I made the boys decaffeinated tea, because they wanted to try tea, and Win told me how he was learning about Telemachus at school, and I recited my favourite stanza of Sappho for him*, all of which makes me sound hideously pretentious, but I assure you it was all very organic and as normal-seeming as things get around here. Then Grant came over and jokingly hit me in the stomach, and I playfully flipped him over my knee, only I'm a moron and I forgot that while Winston is a wiry, muscular little person, Grant has no bones to speak of, and instead of rolling backwards safely off my knee and into my other arm, he flopped sideways and smashed the back of his head on the open door of the dishwasher. I knew it was going to be bad the moment he rolled sideways, and I was shouting "OH NO" even before he hit. I immediately picked him up to calm him down, and the worst fear of any parent was realised: the back of his head was slick with blood, and my hand was now covered with it. I ordinarily faint at the sight of copious amounts of blood (having fainted in the ER when Mrs P fractured her skull while we were dating and she was merely Ms. Beautiful But Weird Redhead, and then again while trying to clean up after a scalpel blade that slipped and went through both sides of my right index finger), and I felt my knees go weak and staggered, but I managed to keep it together enough to go upstairs. I didn't have the presence of mind to apply pressure to staunch the bleeding, because I had no idea how badly he was hurt and was seized by the paralytic terror that it might have gone through his skull somehow -- I do not keep calm in a crisis, it seems. I rinsed the back of his head off, then Mrs P came and applied a towel, and it soon clotted. With our insurance through my work, in this, the best healthcare system in the world, it would have been $300 to go to the ER, which we simply can't afford right now, but fortunately Mrs P is friends with an ER doctor, who she texted photos of the injury -- a v-shaped cut that matches the shape of the dishwasher door's edge almost precisely -- and who reassured us it was okay. Everyone except Mrs P, who is wholly unaffected by such things after over a decade teaching small children, was quite shaken up. I went to bed at 9.30, shortly after the boys. 

 

There's nothing worse than accidentally causing pain to one of your own children.

 

He'll probably have an interesting scar, but he should be fine, and it's under his hairline, and by the time he's balding, I'll be long dead, so at least there's that.

 

 

 

 

 

* Some say a cavalry corps,
some infantry, some, again,
will maintain that the swift oars
 
of our fleet are the finest
sight on dark earth; but I say
that whatever one loves, is.

 

-- "To an army wife, in Sardis"

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Glad to see the wee fella is OK.

Don't worry about accidents like this happening.

When my son was much younger he was so prone to cuts, breaks and concussions that he was on first name terms with the A&E consultant at St. Johns.

There was one time when I was coming in from the back shift and he ran across the living room in front of me tripped over my foot and flew headlong into the skirting board.

A head wound, blood everywhere but the worst bit was when he walked into the room with the consultant.

"Oh Ruairidh, What have you done now?" said Mr. Freelander.

"It's OK" replied the boy, "My Dad was just playing football with my head"

Cue me expecting a visit from Social Services.

 

Stuff happens, you just do your best to try and cover the risks.

 

 

Cheers,

Alistair

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Lots of tiny capillaries etc. in your head. Even the smallest cut or gash will bleed like crazy. I can't tell you how many times I thought I killed all of my kids in similar circumstances. Now that I'm old I figure if I can't see any grey stuff or a bone sticking out, they're OK. Give 'em an iPad and a cookie. It's funny, every time my grandson gets a boo-boo. I ask if a bone is sticking out. I've said it so much that he now tells me without asking - I don't see any bone Grandpa!     :drunk:

 

Cheers,

Bill

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6 hours ago, perdu said:

Kids are designed to have cuts, knocks and occasional batterings.

 

I fractured an arm on 2 seperate occasions at school.  Left and right for symmetry.   After the second episode my mum marched me back to school to see the headmaster.  To apologise for all the inconvenience I’d caused.  Robust parenting.

 

 

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So the 30th was WSC's birthday, so I figured I ought to do some modelling. First, though, the real triumph of the day, a Winstonmas miracle, if you will. 

 

As I mentioned, I've been reading The Book of Three, which is a piece of juvenile literature written in the mid-1960s by an American; it's clearly, as all fantasy novels since 1937 are, a reaction, one way or another, to Tolkein, though it is, despite borrowing, often wildly out of context, names ripped from the pages of Welsh mythology (rather cruel of the author, as I have to read this aloud), distinctly American, and it probably bears a closer resemblance to, say, the Belgariad novels (also later American works) than Lieutenant Tolkein's work. Which is okay, because the pacing of the lattermost leaves something to be desired. In any case, we read three chapters tonight, and Winston was so desirous of reading more that he seized the book, opened it himself, and haltingly, laboriously, began to read it to himself. You cannot know how long I have waited for this moment, and how often I feared that it would never come. I know that's ridiculous, but he's fought me so hard on this, and to have him actually want to read a book... My Winston is the most frustrating person I have ever known -- in which respect, by all accounts, he is very like his namesake -- but he is also my gift to the future.

 

 

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Anyway, on to the frustrating bit, and then I have to go to bed. I did some general clean-up work on the Lightning tonight, with the plan of knocking off at 11ish or so. I added the lower blanking panels for the guns, which required much sanding to fit properly.

 

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I then added the port upper gunport, which, it turns out, would not fit in its place even without the aftermarket intake ring, having a deep ventral protrusion effected by the gun trough which needed sanding down. (I guess I could have cut out more of the nose to accommodate it, but I...didn't. Not sure why now. It's late. Anyhow, the fit was not amazing:

 

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But, at least it was done. It was now 11:06 PM. I glanced at my watch, thought, "I should go to bed." But then I thought "but everything I do now is one less thing to do later." So I decided to do the starboard gunport. 

 

As I was sanding and filing it down, it slipped from my fingers, was briefly trapped betwixt my meaty thighs, and then, when I stood up, it vanished, forever. I searched the grotto for nearly two hours. No joy. It was unreal. After long deliberation, I realized:

 

1. I had just lost a critical part from the only Sword F.1/F2 kit, now OOP, in my possession. 

2. The nearest potential replacement was several thousand miles away.

3. Lightning F.6s did not have upper nose gun ports.

4. Lightning F.2As did, though.

5. I have three Airfix Lightning F.6s.

6. I bet they don't need their upper gun ports.

7. And even if plastic had sentience and wanted to stop me, the kits couldn't, because they don't have arms, and I have a cruelly sharp scalpel.

 

The part required some sanding, but less than the original Sword port, and honestly, it looks and fits better. I just wish I'd not glued the Sword one in on the other side, so I could use both Airfix parts.

 

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Bed now.

 

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I am sorry that Grant was injured, amazingly enough our two survived childhood with only one major scrape when Ellie dislocated her shoulder when she was about two, apparently her shoulder joint was quiet loose, but not a fun experience. I was at work when it happened and went straight to A&E where Mrs T had taken her. I could find where Ellie was by following her screams and crying. 

As Bill pointed out, the head has a copious blood supply, which means that although it bleeds  a lot, it also heals quickly. Good save on the Lightning. 

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1 hour ago, Procopius said:

2. The nearest potential replacement was several thousand miles away.

When I read that bit I was about to dash into the hobby room and check out the moulding and casting supplies ......... but you seem to have it sorted 👏

 

I'm also not certain that some perfectly replicated resin casts of those Sword gun ports would have helped 😂

 

Very glad indeed to hear that Grant is ok. As you may imagine, having repeated similar experiences multiple times over with my clan, I did indeed feel your angst. 

 

T.

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10 hours ago, Terry1954 said:

 

When I read that bit I was about to dash into the hobby room and check out the moulding and casting supplies ......... but you seem to have it sorted 

 

Teeeeechnically, you could have just sent me the original, since the Lightning F.3 in Flying Pepperming From Hell guise does not have any gunports, the RAF being extremely bullish on Red Top's all-aspect capability (as long as Johnny Russian courteously kept above Mach 1.7 and it was a clear sky). But I truly do regret not just using the Airfix ones from the outset, they're far superior.

 

10 hours ago, Terry1954 said:

Very glad indeed to hear that Grant is ok. As you may imagine, having repeated similar experiences multiple times over with my clan, I did indeed feel your angst. 

 

I feel like with as many children as you have, the odds were strongly against them all being uninjured at any given moment. I still can't even imagine, three is more than enough for me. 

 

11 hours ago, Mr T said:

I am sorry that Grant was injured, amazingly enough our two survived childhood with only one major scrape when Ellie dislocated her shoulder when she was about two, apparently her shoulder joint was quiet loose, but not a fun experience. I was at work when it happened and went straight to A&E where Mrs T had taken her. I could find where Ellie was by following her screams and crying. 

 

Always terrifying, though the extortionate up-front cost of going to the ER here, even with insurance, adds an extra frisson to the proceedings as we try and hold off for as long as possible before going to avoid the expense.

 

12 hours ago, Fritag said:

 

I fractured an arm on 2 seperate occasions at school.  Left and right for symmetry.   After the second episode my mum marched me back to school to see the headmaster.  To apologise for all the inconvenience I’d caused.  Robust parenting.

 

 

 

Fritag: Mum of Iron, arms of clay.

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