Eduard 1/48 Lightning (converted to T.5) + Airfix 1/48 Lightning F6 Dual build

[Nik W]

Evening all!

A while back I picked up Eduard's re-boxing of the old Airfix Lightning and was excitedly looking forward to all the various goodies Eduard cram into their boxes. Having built a couple of these the first time they came out, and remembering what a dream of a kit they were at the time (admittedly through the eyes of a 12 year old boy) I hoped this would be more of the same and the kit would fall together.

Sadly though on inspection of the fuselage halves, it turned out they were badly warped at the intake end of the fuselage. Where they should be round and meet making a nice circular intake shape, they were badly flattened out, and as a result had actually pinched in the forward fuselage beneath the cockpit area.

After several attempts to heat and reshape the fuselage, but with no success I decided to give up and the kit was put to the back of the stash. I had picked up a set of model alliance decals for another Lightning I had in the stash, on which was the pink tailed Akrotiri Station Flight aircraft. You can probably guess where this is going from here....

Add into the mix one CMK T4/5 conversion set and a razor saw and off we go!!

After a little filing and sanding down, not too bad a fit.

A little splayed out at the front end, but nothing a liberal application of cyano glue and brute force won't fix!

One important lesson I've learned already with this one though, pay attention to where you make those cuts... Not a total disaster by any means, but through carelessness I've made a bit more work for myself.

Lastly the internal detail was painted in an appropriate dark grey (a very old tin of Humbrol 67 I think) washed with tamiya smoke, then drybrushed with lighter greys and small amounts of silver to pick up the detail. Stil needs a matt coat to make the contrasts seem a bit less stark, but altogether not looking that bad so far.

So far I've been impressed with the ease at which I've been able to mate the resin front ends to the fuselage halves, which only needed three cuts with the razor saw and some filing to get the edge to match up with the new spine and wider fuselage. Definitely the ideal first conversion kit for someone looking to have a stab at this kind of thing!

Thanks for stopping by folks!

Edited July 14, 2011 by Nik W

[Dads203]

Nice start

If you dip the resin nose parts in very warm water it softens the resin

so it can be fettled back into shape, It should help you join everything up

a lot easier.

HTH

Dan

[atdb27]

Hi Nik,

Which finish are you going to do?

I was on 11 Sqdn & LTF back in the late 70's

I did XS417 of LTF in NMF.

But my next could be XS458 Grey over NMF or

XS452 Dk Green over NMF (Similar to RAFG)

or XS452 as Sqdn hack in Akrotiri The Pink Flamingo.

Choices, Choices

Adrian

[Nik W]

Hi Nik,

Which finish are you going to do?

I was on 11 Sqdn & LTF back in the late 70's

I did XS417 of LTF in NMF.

But my next could be XS458 Grey over NMF or

XS452 Dk Green over NMF (Similar to RAFG)

or XS452 as Sqdn hack in Akrotiri The Pink Flamingo.

Choices, Choices

Adrian

Hi Adrian!

So many choices aren't there? Probably one of the worst things about building Lightnings!

My initial thoughts had been to go for XS452 in the Akrotiri pink flamingo markings, just because its an unusual scheme that you don't see done all that often. But now that you've put ideas in my head about a LTF a/c in NMF I'm very tempted by that. You don't happen to have any pics of that said scheme do you?

Having been on Lightnings you might even be able to answer a question I've got relating to the positioning of the Red Top pylons on the T5. Were these just in exactly the same place as all the other marks of Lightning? The resin nose conversion doesn't have these moulded in, and there aren't many pictures showing this kind of detail up close so as to get a reference from other panel lines, and if I'm going to start drilling holes in the resin, it would be nice if I got them in the right place! Save myself some uneccessary work repairing any wrong holes!

Nice start

If you dip the resin nose parts in very warm water it softens the resin

so it can be fettled back into shape, It should help you join everything up

a lot easier.

HTH

Dan

Thanks for the tip about softening the resin in warm water Dan! That should make things meet up a little better when I come to joining the fuselage halves together!

Nik

[Fmk.6john]

Nik,

Missile pylons were in the same place on all marks of Lightning, only the missile shoe (the part that attatches the missile to the pylon) differed between the Red Top and Firestreak.

HTH

JB.

[Nik W]

Nik,

Missile pylons were in the same place on all marks of Lightning, only the missile shoe (the part that attatches the missile to the pylon) differed between the Red Top and Firestreak.

HTH

JB.

John,

Superb! Thanks for the help chief, should hopefully save me from making a hash of it and drilling some unnecessary holes. Thanks for the quick response!

Nik

[Uncle Uncool]

Sadly though on inspection of the fuselage halves, it turned out they were badly warped at the intake end of the fuselage. Where they should be round and meet making a nice circular intake shape, they were badly flattened out, and as a result had actually pinched in the forward fuselage beneath the cockpit area.

After several attempts to heat and reshape the fuselage, but with no success I decided to give up and the kit was put to the back of the stash. I had picked up a set of model alliance decals for another Lightning I had in the stash, on which was the pink tailed Akrotiri Station Flight aircraft. You can probably guess where this is going from here....

Hi there, Nikki!

Too bad 'bout that warpage of the right fuselage half... If ya're not thinkin' 'bout contactin' Eduard's customer service department (does it exist?), for a replacement, one fix that's worked awesome for thru' the years is copyin' the shape in the opposite fuselage outline in that area with a contour gauge in order to fashion some "ribs" to be placed turned round on the outer circumference of the warped right fuselage. Then ya fasten those ribs over the warped area with the right fuselage laid on a flat surface - such as a tile or glass - straightenin' the warpage against the flat surface. I've used epoxy to glue the ribs over a tile, but if the pressure needed to straighten the warpage ain't too much, ya might use some tape as well.

Once ya've got everythin' attached to the tile or glass, ya dip it in hot water not hot enough as to melt the styrene, aye? Normally, when ya peep at those tiny bubbles gatherin' at the bottom of the pan or pot, that means water's hot enough; the temperature won't melt the styrene. Take the pan or the pot off the cooker 'n' dip the warpage for some 10 seconds, fish it out 'n' run some cold water over it. Check the warpage freein' the fuselage off the flat surface 'n' repeat the process if necessary. Though the whole process might sound tiresome 'n' thorny, it's a technique which has straightened many serious warpages for me. It usually takes one single dip to work the warpage successfully if the whole fuselage is attached firmly against the flat surface.

Hope it helps. Me's gonna be watchin' yer progress on this thread.

Cheers, Nik

Unc²

[jimbuna]

Coming along nicely...an interesting build.

[Nik W]

Just a small update today, one of those days where I seemed to do an awful lot but for very little to actually show for it.

After looking at a pile of cockpit reference pictures I decided that I wasn't happy with the colour which was too dark, so a quick rummage in the toolbox turned up a lighter, more accurate (or at least I think so anyway) shade of grey for the cockpit interior, which after some detail painting and drybrushing looks not too bad. Most of it will be hidden behind the ejector seats anyway, but I know I've painted it!

Next on the agenda was the instrument panel. CMK do a rather nice etched panel with a clear film of dials to go on the back. I'm not sure this is totally accurate (it looks a little more like a T4 panel to me) but as long as it gives the right overall impression I can live with it! Might do a little scratch building to create the fairly prominent radar scopes and make it look a little less 'two-dimensional' but thats a project for another day.

Lastly for tonight was a little surgery on the intake trunking for it to receive CMK's replacement radar bullet.

The bottom trunking is the original kit part (courtesy of the F.6 I've got going at the same time! ) and the part above shows the modified trunking, all this took was the removing of the moulded in part of the nose undercarriage bay.

This next pic shows the difference between the orginal kit parts (bottom) and the modified parts to take the resin bits.

The resin radar bullet required a bit of remodelling to the top in order for it to match up to the contours of the intake trunking, whereas the original kit parts required only a small amount of sanding to fit nearly perfectly. Although the improvement in detail in the u/c bay of the resin parts is probably negligible, I think the added weight in the front end will probably be a good idea to stop the beast sitting on its tail!

Thanks for stopping by folks!

Nik

[tonyberrington]

Hope it goes well.

I've got a couple of the Airfix kits in my stash, and if I remember correctly, at least two resin conversions for the trainers. I'd planned on doing the Akrotiri Station Flight aircraft too.

So I'll be watching with interest.

Regards

Tony

[AnonymousAA72]

Hi Adrian!

So many choices aren't there? Probably one of the worst things about building Lightnings!

My initial thoughts had been to go for XS452 in the Akrotiri pink flamingo markings, just because its an unusual scheme that you don't see done all that often.

Nik

Coming along v.nicely Nik. If you're doing '452, note that the pink on the roundel bars in CMK's decal sheet is too dark. They have it as the same shade as the Flamingo - whereas it should be the lighter shade of the fin. This is an ex-56Sqn machine, they left it at Akrotiri when they disbanded and returned to Blighty to reform on Phantoms. Thats most likely why there's a small pale blue surround to the bars. The red and white chequerboards would have simoly been overpainted. Don't forget the white spine -that was to keep the equipment below cooler.

I started building this kit some years ago and found the resin warped to b*gg*ry! You've done a good job on your's - I resorted to slapping Milliput all over the place on mine!

Edited May 27, 2011 by Bill Clark

[Nik W]

Evening all!

Little while since my last update on this, mainly due to having to help my girlfriend move into a new flat and also because of a week or so of having no inspiration to model at all.

But progress has been made, slowly but surely.

First up, thanks to John for his advice regarding the positioning of the missile pylons. Based on some scale drawings I found in the back of a Lightning datafile book I've got (typical I'd only find out I had the info all along AFTER I'd asked the question though) these were drilled out and filed to shape to accept the kit pylons. They're a little rough and ready, but the holes are completely hidden once the pylons are in place.

The next and most time consuming part was modifying the wings to accept the CMK resin undercarriage bays.

Before

After

Started this off by snipping off the undercarriage bay walls with some sprue snippers then scraping what I couldn't cut off with the flat end of an old modelling file. Fitting these required serious amounts of plastic to be shaved out of the roof of the wing and some very heavy thinning of the bottom half of the wing so that the two halves join up fairly neatly. Rather than spend what could've been weeks scraping with files, scratching with scalpels and then sanding the appropriate thickness, I took a fairly bold step in order to move things along and attacked the roof of the wing with the dremel with a sanding bit attached. This shifted the plastic way quicker than I could ever have done the other way, and with a small amount of tidy up has produced some pretty good results.

The wings are a little 'bulgy' because I couldn't thin the plastic any further without going straight through or the resin parts without risking losing the undercarriage bay ceiling, but its not too noticeable unless you look at the wings head on.

Lastly for this fairly picture heavy update was the cable ducting on the side of the T5. Because the Eduard kit is based on the F1/F1a/F2, this doesn't come moulded on like the F6/F2a kit, and so a small problem appears after fitting the main ducting.

The ducting comes in two parts (big long bit, and shorter front parts to create accurate early Mk cable ducting) but because of the common parts between the sprues for all marks of Lightning, also provided are the longer front ducting parts needed to make a T5.

Because these longer parts are meant to be used on the F6/F2a kit (which has moulded on 'big long bits' - technical term there.... ) when you add these to the front of the 'big long bits' they come far too far forward along the fuselage by about 1.5cm.

The drawing above shows the correct length for the cable ducting, so a small bit of surgery gives us this...

Blu-tacked on and looking much better in length!

Lastly a comparison shot, just to show the difference in length between the unmodified (top) parts, and corrected (bottom parts)

So as you can see, slow but steady progress! Hopefully get some more major work done on it over the next few days now that I've recovered a bit of the urge to do some modelling!

Coming along v.nicely Nik. If you're doing '452, note that the pink on the roundel bars in CMK's decal sheet is too dark. They have it as the same shade as the Flamingo - whereas it should be the lighter shade of the fin. This is an ex-56Sqn machine, they left it at Akrotiri when they disbanded and returned to Blighty to reform on Phantoms. Thats most likely why there's a small pale blue surround to the bars. The red and white chequerboards would have simoly been overpainted. Don't forget the white spine -that was to keep the equipment below cooler.

I started building this kit some years ago and found the resin warped to b*gg*ry! You've done a good job on your's - I resorted to slapping Milliput all over the place on mine!

Bill, thanks for the tip about the CMK decals, I hadn't noticed that, but thankfully I've got the same markings on a Model Alliance sheet which has the roundel bars the correct pink colour. So you've saved me a potential headache there!

Thanks for stopping by folks!

[Calum]

Interesting project. Looking forward to seeing mroe

[Nik W]

Afternoon all!

Progress on the T.5 has stalled a little, but only because I've had another project on the go at the same time....

ANOTHER LIGHTNING!!!

Progress on this one has been a bit quicker overall, mainly due to the fact that I've not had to saw the front end off this one. Bits added to this include the Flightpath photo-etch set (although only bits of it, because as beautifully detailed as the parts are, some of them are seriously out of scale), and Eduard etched cockpit bits out of the F1a/F2 kit, which with a small bit of adaptation now look like the F6 cockpit.

I suppose I might as well admit that I'm only posting this because I've reached the stage where I get to play with the Alclad paints (undoubtedly my favourite part of any natural metal build) and I'm particularly pleased with my efforts so far!

The main purpose of this spray session was to lay down several base shades over particular panels, which I'll mask off before giving the whole aircraft the glossy black primer for the high shine finish, in order to give my Lightning some variation in the shades of natural metal. So the three colours used were Aluminium, Duraluminium and Magnesium. Which explains why my Lightning looks a bit patchy at the minute!

While ploughing through reference pictures, a common feature I noticed was that the belly fuel tank on the F6 was usually much more dull than the rest of the natural metal, so starting with a basecoat of aluminium the rear half of the fuel tank was then sprayed in lines around the circumference of the tank with duraluminium and magnesium to generate the dirty, worn look that these fuel tanks had. This was covered with a very light coat of aluminium to blend it all together, and I must say I'm pretty pleased with the results!

I apologise for the quality of some of these photos, the lighting conditions weren't great, and I was in a bit of a rush to take them, I can assure you it looks MUCH better in real life!

Thanks for stopping by folks!

[Calum]

Nice work. I agree about Alclad. it's great stuff to play with

[Nik W]

Nice work. I agree about Alclad. it's great stuff to play with

Thanks Calum! Credit where credits due though, I saw your F2a build, in particular the natural metal undersides, and thought 'Oooh I like that!' So armed with your build pics and some reference material that's where I took the inspiration for the belly tank.

Nik

[Nik W]

Since my F.6 was in grave danger of hijacking my own build thread for the T.5 I thought it probably best to do a bit of renaming.

So as you can see this shall now be a dual Lightning build, the T.5 and the F.6... nothing like cutting my work out for me eh?

Good progress over the past couple of days on the F.6, the panels I'd sprayed with the various shades of aluminium, duraluminium and magnesium were masked off prior to the gloss black primer, which after a couple of coats of Klear and some polishing with micromesh, I had a nice smooth, glossy surface on which to spray some alclad.

Colours used here were Stainless steel (which I think gives a slightly better colour than the Airframe aluminium which seems a little too bright to me) for the main body, and although its not obvious in the pictures, some Airframe aluminium was sprayed onto the nose ring to give it the brighter metal appearance seen on NMF lightnings.

Couple of general shots to show off the nice shiny finish!

What it should look like when its done. Leuchars TFF from Model Alliance's BAC Lightning Part 2 chose this one because its a bit out of the ordinary, as its not a scheme you see modelled very often, and its nice to be able to build something I can associate directly with somewhere I've been plenty of times!

Now that I've got the natural metal finish sorted, next step should be applying the decals I think.

Question time though, what is people's experience with applying a clear coat over the highly polished alclad to seal in decals prior to weathering? And weathering over alclad for that matter as well? I've heard the klear can affect the finish, but having never tried this before I was hoping to get an idea of what the best approach might be?

Thanks for stopping by folks!

[jimbuna]

Looking great.

[Nik W]

Evening All!

After a break of what seems like a rather long time, thought it was about time I put up some progress on the Lightning build. A touch of the old lazy bar-steward syndrome crept in with regards to updating, but mainly because there are only so many shots of stencils being added to a Lightning that you can put up before someone dies of boredom.

So here's the F6 of the Leuchars TFF all decaled up, decals are a mix of the Model Alliance set for the roundels, serials and TFF markings, and the stencils are a combo of the appropriate ones taken from the Barracudecals stencil sheet and Airfix's own stencils from the box.

Oh, before anyone says anything, I realise that I've missed off the white spine panel, that was one of those 'DOH!' moments, but it'll be getting masked up and sprayed as soon as I can get round to it!

While all that's been going on, I made a stab at the undercarriage doors as well. The kit parts are pretty basic, so to these I added the absolutely delightful photo-etch bits from the Flightpath set. It's a shame you can't buy the undercarriage detailing parts individually because I would honestly recommend these for any Lightning build as they are very easy to use (much more so than the resin replacement wheel wells I used on the T5) and add a fantastic amount of detail to what is sadly the poorest area of this kit.

Below shows a before and after shot of the kit u/c door and the door with the Fligtpath etch added.

Finished after a coat of alclad aluminium and some oil washing to make them a bit more 'used' looking.

Thankfully not much left to do to this now, mainly attach all the fiddly little bits, the ventral fins and paint up and fit the ejector seat!

Then I can get my bum back in gear and crash on with the T5!

Thanks for stopping by folks!

Nik

[Daniel]

Nice thread, hope you can keep the T5 updated, as this is my next big build.

Dan

[Nik W]

Evening all!

Another update today, this time a little more work done on the T5. After a recent visit to Bruntingthorpe and some incredible luck a situation arose where I managed to get access to Dave Thomas's Sea Vixen, Jet Provost, Victor cockpit and Lightning T5 cockpit, so camera to the ready I was able to get some smashing detail shots of the interiors of all of them.

Armed with these shots I set about adding little bits and pieces to the cockpit so that I can finally satisfy my urge to make this as accurate as my modelling skills allow and get the fuselage closed up.

The biggest difference I noticed between the CMK cockpit panel and the real thing was the lack of the fairly prominent radar scopes on either side of the cockpit, and the Mach bar at the centre of the panel.

Compare the panel above to the real thing below,

Since I plan to have the canopy open (to be fair even with it closed you'd be able to see these) I set about adding some scopes and their rubber covers.

I realise they're probably a little oversized, but they look not too bad with a lick of paint

The mach bar comes from the instrument dials sheet provided in the Flightpath set, which as beautifully detailed as it may be, is way out in terms of size to allow it to actually fit into the cockpit of a single seat Lightning without some hefty surgery to both the etched instrument panel and the kit itself, which is a real pity.

I did try to add some of the enormous amount of switches you can see on the instrument panel, but my modelling skills combined with some rather chunky finger tips and the inability to manipulate tweezers and pieces of fuse wire that small very well sunk this plan fairly sharpish. If anyone has any tips for adding switches and the like I would appreciate it greatly!

Next up was the area behind the seats. CMK have done a fairly good job of the rear cockpit bulkhead, but since I plan to have the canopy open, there are some fairly prominent 'bits and pieces' back there that will be noticeably absent.

The rear bulkhead as it comes in the box...

And the real deal...

So armed with more plasticard, fuse wire and brass rod, I got busy making the area behind the seats look that little bit more busy...

Not a massive amount of work done today, but at least I'm making progress with this again now that the F6 is nearing completion.

That's all for tonight, hopefully get a fairly larger bit of work done on this again tomorrow!

Thanks for stopping by folks!

[jimbuna]

Looking great....keep it up.

[Nik W]

Evening folks!

Fairly significant progress on the T.5 again today, although it didn't go without a fight!

Decided to take the plunge and fit the cockpit and intake trunking, however this was where the first of my issues would arise. The cockpit tub is about 2-3mm too wide for the resin fuselage halves, and having thinned these down already I really didn't want to shave anything off the sides of the cockpit tub in case I got myself into a situation where the ejector seats wouldn't fit in. But all wasn't lost, as in those immortal words 'I had a cunning plan!'

To try and get round this, I decided to add a couple of plasticard shims to the bottom halves of the fuselage to act as spacers.

This worked fairly well, and allowed me to fit the cockpit tub in snugly without having to shave any more from the insides of the fuselage or the cockpit tub itself. However, as Newton said, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction... In adding the plasticard shims to the bottom of the fuselage I widened the whole front end, which when I glued the bottom of the fuselage together (I glued it all in separate stages) the top of the fuselage didn't come close to meeting...

Planning 1 - Nik 0

So more plasticard shims needed adding, this time to the top of the fuselage.

Then of course once the top had been done, the front of the lower half of the fuselage now wouldn't meet between the rear edge of the intake ring and the front edge of the nose undercarriage bay...

Planning 2 - Nik 0

So you guessed it, more plasticard shims and brute force this time!

The moral of this story is definitely plan ahead. I don't actually think this was anything to do with the kit or the conversion parts, more my lack of skill/forethought, but it's a lesson learned I guess, and hopefully somebody else building a two seat Lightning will be able to learn from my mistakes!

However, after all that battling and some fairly heavy duty filing and sanding (not a drop of filler used up to this stage though, so I must've done something right!), everything looked reasonably ok considering the cock-ups I made along the way.

Next up was attaching the spine panel, in one of my earlier posts, I mentioned that sloppy marking out and cutting left me a bit of a gap between the rear of the resin replacement spine panel and the kit spine, so since I was having so much luck with plasticard shims, the spine got the same treatment and Hey Presto! Problem solved!

As you can see, theres a bit of a difference in heights between the resin spine panel and the kit spine, so in order to get round this I slapped on a bit of Medium cyano glue, which I then sanded and filed until both sides matched. Next up was a coat of primer to pick up on any blemishes I hadn't noticed, and surprisingly there weren't an awful lot!

Despite all my cock ups, I seem to have managed to rescue myself from going too badly wrong thanks to good old plasticard!

Next on the agenda is scribing all the panels missing from the resin parts, and adding the appropriate rivet detail - and after looking at the plans, there is a lot to be done!

Apologies for the picture heavy update guys, but hopefully my cock-ups here will help others building this avoid doing the same.

Regards,

Nik

[Uncle Uncool]

T5's comin' along very noice...!!! Congratulations, Nik.

Nik! Shim addition between the resin forward fuselage halves looks like 2mm in width, approx; how is it possible that ya didn't have to widen the kit's styrene aft fuselage as well...? Also; how did ya do in order that the intake ring would fit too? Was it yer good luck, mate...? Is the ring made of resin or is it white metal?

Cheers,

Unc²

[Nik W]

T5's comin' along very noice...!!! Congratulations, Nik.

Nik! Shim addition between the resin forward fuselage halves looks like 2mm in width, approx; how is it possible that ya didn't have to widen the kit's styrene aft fuselage as well...? Also; how did ya do in order that the intake ring would fit too? Was it yer good luck, mate...? Is the ring made of resin or is it white metal?

Cheers,

Unc²

Morning Unc²!

Thanks for the kind words bud, nice to know somebody is paying attention to what I'm doing here!

Yeah the shims were a bit of an odd one, you're right in saying they're roughly 2mm in width (just under I think), but as well as widening the front end of the fuselage to fit the cockpit tub in the addition of these actually resolved another issue with the resin. In order to fit the resin parts, it obviously requires some fairly sizeable surgery to the kit fuselage halves as well as grinding a section down inside the kit fuselage halves to accept the resin nose. I forgot to take a pic, but Bill Clark's T5 build shows what I mean, so if he's looking, thanks Bill!

http://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.p...mp;hl=lightning

I couldn't get a pic to work, but if you look at post #3 the third pic from the bottom shows the area that needs ground down so that the fuselage halves will accept the resin replacements and sit flush with the kit parts.

I'm not sure if it was something I did wrong, but when I had the two resin parts attached to the rear fuselage halves (as accurately as I could) they wouldn't meet at the bottom, so the shims did the job of plugging the gap as well as widening the fuselage to take the cockpit tub.

As for the nose ring, it was all part of my cunning plan!

If I hadn't had the issues with the bottom halves of the fuselage (and then as a result the top halves) meeting, the nose ring would've been far too big for the front end, so in adding all these shims it's actually given me a damn near perfect fit! Just lucky really I guess!

Cheers bud,

Nik