SJPONeill

Are whiffers OK? Have some ideas for a couple of stash queens but no worries if topics must be real life...

It would have to be the Mirage III for me - far more history and options...

Great build, Tomek...and great to see another paper model over here... For those who may think they 'could never build a paper model', it's no different than starting out in plastic - if you rushed out to buy one of Tigger's ID Models rereleases or a recent Trumpeter/Academy/Tamiya etc 1/32 aircraft as your first model, you will probably have issues...paper models are no different...start small/simple and work up from there - if there is one key difference it may be that it is easy to (legally) find free paper models that allow to to make as many mistakes as you like so long as your printer can keep producing parts...

I haven't been building 'large' for most of the year and so have just drifted in and out of LSP from time to time so I am absolutely gutted to hear of Larry Hawkins' passing. He was his example of what could be done with a vacform that encouraged a muggins modeller like me to give that form of modelling a go. We corresponded a few times in the early 2000s and I was always happy to toss spare 1/32 parts his way for the the 'spare parts yard' that he ran. Larry's passing is a real loss to this community...RIP...

Wow!! Been away for a while and just stumbled across this great news!!! It's so good to see these 'old friends' coming back again...I'll have to pull finger and finish the ones I have already in order to indulge again...

Sorry, Brian...took a little longer to get organised...lots of work on at the moment but as these show she is finally starting to look a little more like a Vulcan... A view of the reconstructed top of the fuselage where the join between the fuselage and the wing is still not nearly as pronpunced as it should be but is close enough for government work... ...and the two fuselage halves sitting together after the mating surfaces were sanded flush and the step cut into the lower fuselage to match up the nose sections... I pulled out my Airfix 1/72 Vulcan and even a cursory look shows just how over-bulbous the nose is so some surgery will be needed here: the Airfix nose is positively delicate and graceful compared to this...

Sanding, sanding, sanding to reshape the fuselage/wing shoulder continues...I too it out to add another layer of grey spray primer to help track progress...one of my grand-daughters piped up 'Look! Poppa building a plane...'...I figure that if a three year old can recognise the upper half of a wingless Vulcan fuselage as 'a plane', I must be getting something right, so will persevere...the shoulder section is starting to take shape now so soon I should be able to move onto the next stage...tweaking the nose so that it doesn't look like it came off WC Fields... No pix, sorry, batteries died last night...will get some more when I am on the road next week...

Yep, me again...have been spending far more time away from home than planned - the trip to Brussels and Singapore was much appreciated though from a modelling perspective - and have had little opportunity to do domestic jobs like lawn mowing let alone modelling...but caught up on both this last weekend: lawns are now conquered but the Vulcan remains an ongoing TIC...another hour or two of sanding in the sun to refine the spine/shoulder area... Foaming the interior of the fuselage have proved its worth as the whole upper fuselage part is now way more stand when working on it and doesn't flex and distort when being worked (sanded)...pretty sure that all my other big vac kist will get the same treatment from now on as a quick and easy means of reinforcing the interior of large parts. The next Scale Model Expo in NZ is August 2011 that sets my timeline to have this thing completed...once I get back to a zero point on the upper fuselage, the rest of the development/build should progress a lot quicker as the shape itself is relatively simple and, as above, I've already decided NOT to do any more corrections to the kit as delivered...except possibly some refinement of the nose shape which is too bulbous...

Well, that went well...now that the renovations are over, obviously I'm not allowed to sand in the house anymore and it has been bucketing with rain the last few days, so I wasn't too sure if I would get any work done on the Vulcan this weekend. As it turned out we had a beautiful Sunday afternoon in which I planted three apple trees, de-dogdoodoo-ed the lawn and spent an hour or so sanding the Vulcan's spine...I'm very impressed that my homemade filler (styrene scrap dissolved in plastic cement) worked very well on the smaller gaps: not only does it have the same consistency as the vac plastic but it welds to it really well with no chances of chipping like some of the other fillers... The shoulder area is now more defined that it was (pix to follow once I've finished this area) but still along way from the real thing but it'll be closer enough for me as to make it accurate would mean close to building the whole fuselage from scratch...I've learned my lessons from this little diversion over the spine and have no intention of attempting any other great revisions from what's in the box from this point on - other than any other changes necessary to take it back to a B.1 (unkinked)....

No...I haven't given up although it has been tempting!! I've picked up a job working away from home during the week and the Vulcan is just a little big to take with me in the car...ski season here is our busy season with the Lodge and the Chalet so my weekends have been coming under the heading of 'otherwise committed' for the past two months but, touch wood, things have plateaused and I'll be able to start working on big Bird again this weekend...

I spent all last week in civilisation and still forgot to get another tube of plastic filler for the finer gap filling around the spine - I was even in a Toyworld for an hour or so killing time before I could pick up the dogs from their motels...!! I conducted a small experiment in the lab dissolving small bits of scrap plastic in Tamiya glue as a DIY filler - this seems to have worked OK but is rather stringy and needs to cure overnight. It does fill fine gaps very well and sands OK too which were the key 'must-haves' for the experiment. Still, I am planning on being back in town for another chat with Hawkeye UAV on Thursday and will get some more real filler then... In the meantime, I have filled all the remaining gaps from the surgery around the spine and just need to finish off the final sanding before checking it under a revealing layer of spray primer... The upper fuselage half has been a lot easier to handle since being foam and is much much easier to sand now that there is some even support underneath the surface...certainly on a model this size, the foaming option is a far better one than adding an internal structure of formers that would still allow some degree of flex in the surface...I'm not sure it is just my Vulcan or others are the same but there are a lot of small blemishes in the surface that need to be sanded smooth, especially considering the proposed silver finish... I spent a good chunk of last night wading through my RAF Review collection for any article (preferably illustrated) on the B.1 - out of a stack about 18 inches high I found precisely 2 articles, one of which was incomplete and unillustrated, but the other had this beautiful shot of Rory Falk rolling XA890 before they started doing all sorts of horrible things to the Vulcan wings...

Here's the fuselage upper and lower halves foamed - i always forget just how much this stuff expands!! and after trimming off the excess with the latest addition to the modelling tool box... It's started to snow and this Vulcan is in the garage - I'm too woosy tonight to go outside to the garage to take an update pic of the refilled and sanded fuselage/wing shoulder area...will do that tomorrow when it is (hopefully) warmer...

Wouldn't you know it?? Took an update pic...just in time for the camera batteries to die!!! Have spent most of the my modelling item this week shaping and sanding the fuselage spine to a 'three foot' representation of the original - to make it accurate would essentially involve building a new fuselage section from scratch and I want to save that effort for something else... Now that winter is settling in I had to spray foam some insulation in around one of the window in the lounge and used the remainder to fill both halves of the Vulcan fuselage. This will make it much more sturdier as I continue to work on it and it will be easy enough to hollow the foam out of the cockpit and bomb bay areas when I get to that point... Am off to the big city tomorrow for re-enlistment med checks and will get some more batteries (and some more foam - think I will need it) and will have some more picture sup over the weekend...

My keyboard batteries died last night before I could finish the last post.... This is my first attempt at placing formers to correct the shape of the Vulcan's spine...I found very quickly that this leads to the slippery path of simply rebuilding the whole fuselage from scratch as the spine is just so wrong as is the way it blends into the forward fuselage. The Vulcan fuselage from the mid=point of the bomb bay to the forward bulkhead of the crew compartment is essentially a simple cylinder and not the slab-sided chunk in the kit...The kit simply does not capture the beautiful subtlety of the Vulcan's curves...imagine Julia Roberts recreated by a chainsaw artist: looks kinda the same but... I've since ripped these formers out and following DV's lead, am using new formers based on the extant spine to rebuild the concave area where I removed the wing/fuselage join shoulder... I'm on the road today, heading down to Massey University to hear COL Martin Dransfield talk about his recent deployment to Afghanistan but will have more pictures and progress over the weekend...

It's all starting to come back now...why this beast has just spent 18 months on the timeout box in the garage.. This problem is that the wing fuselage join is blended more like a B-2 than the quite distinct junction on the actual aircraft...the area shown in red, on the kit is not nearly as acute as it should be In my first attempt to remove the similarly inaccurate shoulder above the intakes, I sanded too much and ended up with a concave and not convex area. The more filler I poured in the less I was able to get the shape right - it was almost back to the garage for another 18 months but it was raining outside so I postponed the trip to the garage til tomorrow and experimented some more... Rectification attempt #1 saw me use templates from the Dec 84 SMI plans to shape the fuselage spine to closer to the real thing but to do this I might as well have build the section from scratch as the inaccurate base of the spine is too wide and the templates sat too high. Not really wanting a hunchback Vulcan, I've now ripped them out and, following in DV's footsteps from his build at Britmodeller, have used a contour gauge to produce new templates from the kit fuselage to correct the shoulder area above the intakes as much as the molding will allow without doing it all from scratch...

Nothing really to show visually today...found some two part plastic putty in the garage that seems to work really well - so well that I could have saved my last tube of Tamiya putty for finer work. This stuff sticks really well to other plastic, well vac plastic for sure and shapes really well to. I think it is quite old as I don't remember buying it so it might have been here when we arrived six years ago... I did have a bit of a whoopsy last night that has set me back away in the filling and shaping of the wing fillet...the second layer of putty I added last night hadn't gone off by this morning so I had to scrape it all out. It seems the problem is that the hardener for the putty has congealed and what you need for the stuff to set is the gooier stuff that needs to be squeezed out of the bottle and not just the watery fluid that comes out when you tip it - there is a vast difference in hardening effect: whereas last nights had hardly begun to cure, the replacement layer this morning went off as I was shaping it...like, one second it was nice and pliable, the next it was like rock... As I hadn't scraped off the excess, I'm now slowly sanding through the solid mass...the good news is that when it sets it sets like rock all the way through and responds well to 120 grit sandpaper...hope to have the new shape fillets complete and on display here by tomorrow night...

Just like the very very very early AC-47 from ModelCard...being attacked by Japanese fighters!! Edit: found an image of the 'WW2' AC-47

There's a new large scale B-17 in the paper model works (hopefully for 2010 release) but not sure which banner it may be released under...never noticed the Do-335 on the GPM B-17G cover before...

@ Graham, thanks for that link to DV's build - I was starting to worry that I might be the only one building this beast after Lee stopped his updates... @ Out2gtcha, yes....hmmm...haven't really thought that one through yet...have plenty of space in the house but there are, shall we say, domestic issues with the display of large models in the living areas...

Plastic has been cut!! I made up a couple of mirror image templates based on Lee White's pictures of his work in this area and removed the errant shoulder where the wing fuses into the fuselage above the intakes. I used the same templates to make two plates (about 5mm broader in all directions) to back the resulting hole and provide a backing for the filler. I opted to used proper plastic filler as the epoxy filler I normally use for larger filling jobs does not stick very well to plastic and I am very aware of just how flexible the fuselage is at the moment - don't want the new shoulder cracking or popping out further along in the build. This sucked up a tube of Tamiya putty just like that: the scale of this thing is quite incredible and I had to use my DIY plastering spatula as I had nothing in my modelling tool box big enough for the size of the gap. I'd also forgotten - being used to filling only small gaps for a few years - just how much this solvent based filler shrinks while curing so will be off to the hardware store on my next trip into civilisation to find some Bondo or equivalent for the rest of it... I'll need to add at least a couple more layers of filler before the new shape is even close to what it should be and I can start sanding it to the final shape...

Noting the paper nature of the model takes nothing away from it...if anything it just adds an order of magnitude to the Wow! factor...whatever the medium we work in, there are always 'natures' of some sort but it the end we usually manage to pass the duck test i.e. if it walks like one, quacks like one and does other stuff like one, there it probably is one - and your model is very much a PBJ-1... I'm on dial-up here and keep losing the text box as each pic trickles through - each new image just inspires me to down tools and do some more modelling...

Got to build it yet...don't forget that this beast has just emerged from eighteen months in the modelling 'time out' box after my first crack at it...so afr all I've really done is a bunch of research, assembled plans, references etc and removing the vac and resin parts from their backing... I have to say I'd probably prefer a top of the line vacform like the Echelon Lightning or the 1/48 Dynavector kits over the injected equivalents from the likes for Tamigawa...sitting out of the deck on a nice day, sanding down parts is quite relaxing and once you have all the parts prepared, it's really just like a limited run injection model without alignment pins or screeds of detail parts - except, of course, for the aforementioned Echelon and Dynavector kits... I think it's quite sad that the large scale vac kit market has pretty well dried up except for Roberts Combat Models - so many of those models have yet to be done in injected form e.g. Wyvern, E-2C, Vulcan, B-58, etc that ID Models churned out in the 80s and early 90s...

Right then, it's going to be one of the first Vulcans with the straight wing, most likely XA892...much like this shot of XA899 after it has been retrofitted with the kinked wing... The first surgeries will be to a. correct the shoulder join where the wing meets the fuselage just aft of the intakes which is too blended; and b. to remove this ugly growth on the tail in favour of the far more aesthetic non-ECM tail cone. The shaded areas indicate what needs to go...

Hi Mike Good to see your awesome build posted here... Simon

Hi Lee Did you finish this build - just re-invigorating my build now but had hoped to cheat and follow in your path... Simon