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


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Just now, Learstang said:

 

It's worse than you imagine, PC. I determined what kit that mystery piece of mine* came from. It came from a Lightning kit, but it was the Airfix kit! (Cue eerie music.)

 

Best Regards,

 

Jason

 

*It was the part for the upper starboard cannon port.

 

neilsmiles-monocle.gif

 

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3 hours ago, Procopius said:

quantum uncertainty mandates that a portion of all Sword Lightning parts must, at any time, be unlocateable.

Well, that sucks - I have a started one in the Drawer of Doom* that I was going to pick up when I get my model building area into a functional state again.

 

* The Drawer of Doom attracts fewer mildly sarcy comments as the contents cannot be seen 😉.

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A thoroughly enjoyable nine pages PC. Lovely work on the lightning, she’s looking rather splendid already. That metal part is ace and looks fantastic in situ. Making me want to build another. I’ll tag along for the rest of the ride if I may. Hope yer alien brain subsides sometime soon.

 

 Johnny

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So this morning, a furtive little shape burst into my room, left something on my nightstand, and flitted out with all the stealth a seven-year-old can muster, IE none. I retrieved what had been deposited, and blearily shambled downstairs to look over what Winston, in his indefinite wisdom, felt he needed to give to me at the merest hint of dawn.

 

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Our best linguists believe the first phrase may be "luck to you". 

 

Conversely, the night before, when I went up to bed, Win had stolen the remote control for Grant's LED strip, and left his brother sleeping fitfully in something out of one of the Hellraiser movies:

 

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Quite a thing to come upstairs to on an otherwise darkened floor soon after midnight last night, let me tell you.

 

In any case, after reading to Win tonight, I headed down to the grotto. My mother in law leaves early tomorrow morning, and so I wanted to get in some modelling time before I would be too tired to do anything. 

 

I opted to do the cable runs along either side of the fuselage. Sword leaves these off so you can do the F.1, which of course lacked them, all other marks having either long or short ones. The Red Top-capable marks have the long ones, and so our Firestreak-only F.2 has the short ones. Sword thoughtfully divides each side's run into three parts that bear no relation to the way the actual runs are divided up, but which do require you to trim an unspecified amount from the frontmost parts to make a short cable-run jet. 

 

Here the scale plans in the Daco book were hugely, hugely useful in helping me position and trim the parts as needed. If you're building more than one Sword Lightning (and I am, because I'm a fool), it's practically worth it just for all the ambiguity it clears up. 

 

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After getting the first one 2/3rds glued on, I saved the trimmed front piece to use as a guide for cutting the second one. At this instant, I head Mrs P yelling at one of our children and lurched to my feet and wobbled slowly upstairs, naturally sending my irreplaceable hand-shortened bit into the ether. By the time I got there, things were long resolved, and so I wobbled back down and began desperately hunting for the piece, which, amazingly, eventually turned up.

 

With both cable runs on, I decided to start placing the Quickboost resin intakes, originally intended for the Airfix F.2A, but as I understand it, the F.2A had identical intakes to the F.2, so Robert is my uncle*. Unfortunately, either the Airfix kit has recessed areas for the intakes, I failed to sand them down enough (almost impossible due to their diminutive size), or the intakes themselves are simply too damn big.

 

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They stand quite proud here, but as you can see from the Walkaround Thread on this forum, they don't seem very obtrusive:

 

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Not sure what to do about this...may have to pull them off and sand them down. One of the smaller intakes also vanished into transdimensional space, to become an Airfix part and reappear in Learstang's house. A second popped out of my nerveless fingers and somehow somersaulted safely into the little cup of 99% IPA I was using to remove the botched windscreen gloss. 

 

Then I masked off the spine and used some Mr Dissolved Putty to try and fix the slight seam. I also drilled out what I gather is the ram air intake in the fin: 

 

4604220322_d3ca537f91_4k.jpgEnglish Electric Lightning F6 Tail by Tony Hisgett, on Flickr

 

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The Sword part seems to have a little pipe sticking out, and I replicated this with some tubing, but further study of actual aircraft shows that this isn't a real thing, and I'll have to remove it or file it down. The real aperture also has much thinner walls than the kit version, so hrrrm.

 

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I think I've probably done enough damage for one night. Gonna have to mask the canopy soon. It's a double-sided mask with the vaguest of instructions, so that will be something to figure out as well. I think it may be to allow me to paint the canopy seals?

 

 

* I have something like...seven uncles, plus two step-uncles (one step-uncle is also an uncle, because his mother, my grandmother, married his wife's father, my stepgrandfather, not long after he and my aunt got married. I understand there was some frostiness at the latter wedding.

 

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Sorry, PC, I just had a butchers at the contents of my Airfix Lightning box, and no small intake piece was there. That particular wormhole must have closed up. Blasted unreliable things, quantum wormholes are. I'll keep an eye out, though.

 

Best Regards,

 

Jason

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12 hours ago, Procopius said:

 

See, and that's the problem. You upset the delicate cosmic balance -- quantum uncertainty mandates that a portion of all Sword Lightning parts must, at any time, be unlocateable. And I'm suffering the consequences!

 

Ah, but what you don't understand is that some enterprising modeller has invented the space-warp tunnel locator/retriever, and is quietly building their own Sword Lightning using other modellers bits that they 'lose'. They then put out 'Oh, it is only the Carpet Monster' and they know that all modellers will be saying 'ah, that is so'. Be very wary if a fuselage half or wing goes missing. At the moment, this fabulous new invention is the only way to procure a Sword Lightning. 

 

Ray

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3 hours ago, Procopius said:

They stand quite proud here, but as you can see from the Walkaround Thread on this forum, they don't seem very obtrusive:

They are its true unobtrusive to the nth degree, at least when the beast is trundling past emitting vast amounts of Avon flavoured ..sound..

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This was taken during my odyssey to Bruntingthorpe a few years back

 

Radome colours for your entertainment

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There's more

 

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I can see why some people give up and paint the damned things a flat green hue.

 

What a fabulous Christmas card, love to the max Edward.

 

And oh boy those bedroom lights...

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9 hours ago, Procopius said:

 

 

 

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Our best linguists believe the first phrase may be "luck to you".

 

 

What a priceless little momento. Both of our sprogs loved doodling, the youngest especially. Wilfred would spend hours drawing hundreds of tiny stickmen! I wish I knew where this one was, I made a point of keeping it. Made the fatal mistake of 'putting it somewhere safe', which equates to the closing scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark for me.


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tooth fairy by Mike, on Flickr

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2 hours ago, Quiet Mike said:

What a priceless little momento.

Indeed. My son is closing in on his 15th birthday, and these days I get kits and whiskey from him for birthdays etc., but I truly enjoyed his earlier "for daddy" drawings more. 

 

Oh well. At least I could watch " An American Werewolf in London" with him yesterday.

 

Cheers,

 

Andre

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2 hours ago, Hook said:

Oh well. At least I could watch " An American Werewolf in London" with him yesterday.

I saw that in the cinema when it was first released. I went with friends, two of whom came away with headaches afterwards. They were attempting a smooch when they both jolted at a jump scare and headbutted one another...

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2 hours ago, Steve Coombs said:

I saw that in the cinema when it was first released. I went with friends, two of whom came away with headaches afterwards. They were attempting a smooch when they both jolted at a jump scare and headbutted one another...

He is strangely unaffected by jump scares like the forest bed scene. 

 

It was really great watching him watch it for the first time. He observed right at the beginning how great the chemistry between Naughton and Dunne was, "Oh no, that guy's been killed! And they had such a great bond!".

 

Well, just wait, he'll be back... ;)

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11 hours ago, Hook said:

Oh well. At least I could watch " An American Werewolf in London" with him yesterday.

 

"A gun would be good!"

 

I'm very much looking forward to the day Win is old enough for Mystery Science Theater 3000. 

 

Mrs P has imposed an equal time rule on reading, so I have to read books Grant likes for the same amount of time that I read books Win likes. This has greatly curtailed the amount of reading that gets done, because Grant likes very simple books (he's five, after all), and it makes me want to die. 

 

The internet was down most of the day, and so I sat at my desk, waiting for it to come back, and reading through 1980s issues of Koku-Fan that I got for a steal at an auction a week or two ago. 

 

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Thanks to the magic of Google Translate on my phone, I can read pretty much any part of it I care to, a process that really might as well be magic, given how little I understand how it's possible. 

 

The 1980s will always be the height of aviation cool for me, when HUDs and terrain-following radar and variable-geometry wings and lo-vis camo comingled with jets from the 1950s, the last glorious gasp of hi-vis paint schemes, and bombs (and bombing techniques) left over from World War II, the time right before the time predicted in all those Bill Gunston books from Salamander and others, full of full-colour speculative drawings of those beautiful machines we might someday use to kill each other. The decade was full of terror for so many adults, with AIDS, recession, unemployment, the looming threat of superpower confrontation, and looking back on it, I recognize all of its grimy complexity, but at the time, I felt incredibly safe, a feeling that for me didn't survive my entry into the public school system and the discovery that I was, in fact, one of the weird kids. And so I'll forever have a fondness for the decade, unearned or not.

 

But right now we're headed back to 1965. (We'll see if I can stick to a plan at all, but my hope is that this is part 1 of a modelling trilogy, so our next stop, if I have any staying power -- I do not -- is 1977.)

 

Normally I paint the canopy on the model, but I've been noticing that this tends to cause the layers of paint on the mask to harden and flake off unevenly when the mask is removed, and additionally, the spine will require masking, and masking over masking can get dicey.. So this time I'm trying to do things differently.

 

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I also sanded down the intakes a little; there are a few more to add, which I'm saving until later or I forget.

 

I ultimately ended up using the kit part for the spine, as the Quickboost one was quite tall (and I broke it trying to sand it down). 

 

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Really cannot emphasize enough how helpful the DACO book has been in building this kit. 

 

I tested my way of making the jet pipes go in, and it works! 

 

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But the kit part, though less detailed and less nice, does fit better. Contemplating a bodge of the kit part plus the Reskit jet pipes, but not sure the game is worth the candle.

 

I added the tailplanes and closed some gaps with PPP, then said to heck with it, masked off the intake ring, and sprayed a base coat of Mr Primer Surfacer.

 

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I did some light rescribing, and fixed the ram air intake on the tail, and added PPP to fill in the gaps around the nosegear bay. Now I can start to hunt down the myriad imperfections and get them closer to where I want, and then probably paint the spine. 

 

 

 

 

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14 minutes ago, Procopius said:

I'm very much looking forward to the day Win is old enough for Mystery Science Theater 3000. 

 

I'm curious as to how that will turn out, a lot of it was pretty topical and you may end up spending as much time explaining who (for example) Strom Thurmond was as watching the programme :D 

 

Your Lightning's almost looking paint-ready B) And those exhausts are just a work of art 

 

Cheers,

 

Stew

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1 minute ago, Stew Dapple said:

 

I'm curious as to how that will turn out, a lot of it was pretty topical and you may end up spending as much time explaining who (for example) Strom Thurmond was as watching the programme :D 

I was actually just thinking about that! I had a (very) sheltered childhood, and so virtually every pop-cultural reference in the original run whooshed over my head, but I still enjoyed it. And if it isn't obvious by the appalling gaps in my knowledge and my lack of professionalism, I'm pretty much entirely the product of autodidacticism, and MST3K, no foolin', was a major impetus for me to learn about pop culture that had already largely vanished by the time I began to wonder about it*. The midwest of the 1980s and 1990s that so many of the in-jokes hearken back to was never as documented as the coasts (I like to think of cool as a giant arch, with one end terminating in Los Angeles and the other in New York -- god rot them both -- and only a few drippings fall from the center to land in Chicago), and so a lot of it took some doing. Fortunately, the internet, in lieu of curing cancer or ending famine, has got my back on this one: http://www.annotatedmst.com/

 

"Refueling is a beautiful, natural thing, and it's nothing to mock."

 

 

* In other words, I devoted massive amounts of my very finite potential to getting jokes made by Minnesotans about the cultural milieu of the 1980s and 1990s, with reference to their childhoods in the 1960s and 1970s, rather than towards becoming employable or a functioning contributing member of society. And I'll be forty in three months and it's too late now.

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22 hours ago, perdu said:

I can see why some people give up and paint the damned things a flat green hue.

I mix tan and green, and weather with pigments and washes. These should look grotty as hell. 

 

The Frightning is coming along great. Gotta love those KokuFans!

 

Cheers,

 

Andre

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On 12/7/2022 at 2:52 AM, perdu said:

I can see why some people give up and paint the damned things a flat green hue.

 

I was thinking of using a sponge with yellow on it, and/or some oils to replicate the effect. But I figure it won't be so pronounced on my bird, as they seem to have looked much less tired in 1965, when the aircraft were all less than five years old.

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With regards to the Intakes, the ones on the aircraft are more holes in the fuselage with a shaped metal plate to allow only a certain amount of air in at one time compared to the ones you have added which are completly seperate from the fuselage and outside any boundry layer air.

 

Gondor

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Hwoof! What a week. Winston got a mild fever, and as he does when he gets one, became incredibly disoriented and vomited all over the carpet while meandering to the toilet, which did not make him popular with anyone. As is usual with him, he immediately recovered after evicting all the Badness straight out of his mouth, and bedeviled his mother with questions while she tried to clean up the torrent of returned-to-sender peanut butter crackers that apparently he can have whenever he wants instead of the dinner I slaved to make. 

 

In any case, Grant's asthma was acting up, and it eventually became clear he had a cold, but for a while we thought he was just coughing and going to need to go to the ER. It's fun! Fun to be a parent. I love it. Very rewarding and I enjoy having two hours of free time a night, less if I like getting more than six hours of sleep. Terrific. 

 

Saturday night I crept downstairs to work on the Lightning and heard the neighbour kids clamouring, with increasing loudness, until I wondered if I needed to go out and make sure they were okay, when louder than any human voice I have ever heard in my entire life, I heard Mrs P scream at a window rattling volume "GRANT, SHUT THE ▮▮▮▮ UP!" Her voice teetered on the border between rage and madness, and so despite the fact that I was not 100% on running at that juncture, I hurtled upstairs. Apparently the noise I heard was not the neighbour kids, but Grant, who has inherited his mother's ability to project and my own family's ability to destroy someone psychologically. He was angry at Winston, who wanted him to be quiet, and so he began making more and more noise, until he was shout-singing loud enough to set off car alarms. Mrs P, a prisoner in our bedroom with our sleeping baby, reached deep inside herself for whatever her Masters in Early Childhood Education told her was the best course of action, and then dropped an F-Bomb that could melt titanium and which definitely sent Grant into a foetal position. I'm pretty sure astronauts heard her. Suffice it to say I did not get any more modelling done that night.

 

Anyway, tonight I made it down. I've done some sanding and resprayed over it with Mr Surfacer 1500 (which blends nicely with the remainder of the Mr Primer Surfacer 1000 coat). It needs more filling and sanding, but pleasure before business. I wanted to use my lovely tin of Colourcoats Oxford Blue to spray the fin and spine, and I did.

 

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I'll probably regret doing it in this order, but memories of stripping off all the Alclad when I masked the aircraft to do the spine later have been burned into my soul. Anyway, gotta dash, Mrs P wants to pump and I don't want her to swear at me and make my PC explode.

 

 

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