1/48th HpH concorde

[Guest Uncle Fester]

I bought this kit last Christmas and it's in the stash awaiting my retirement years.  (1/1 scale plastic sailboats take precedence right now). 

 

Eric is already taking up the mantle of Jedi Master on how to assemble this thing.  (no mind tricks, please)

 

In my experience with John Vojtech, he was tops!  My first model came with a badly cracked aft fuselage and I found out later that many of the Concordes he had ordered were also broken.  Eric's rendition appeared much better packaged and secured.  John did make it all right in the end but he's on the hook for the broken ones as I also found out that niether the international shipper nor the USPS would pay the insurance claim. 

 

So he has some broken ones he doesn't know what to do with.  Fiberglass is repairable but it's not easy and takes some patience. 

 

But what a great kit!  HpH did their homework on it..the varied wing cambers are accurately reproduced and, as Eric has said, the surface detail is magnificent. 

 

And it's big, alright.  1/48 is a significantly large model. The Concorde is only about 30 feet shorter than a 747-100/200/400, etc. 

 

Just want to wish you good luck, Eric...We're all counting on you.  (With apologies to Leslie Nielsen)

[ericg]

Thanks for the nice comments guys.

 

The kit is nice, but there are a few problems with it that I am working through and hopefully this build will make others builds easier through my fixes. Already I can see that the nose is going to have to be significantly re-worked but more on that later.

 

I had read of others having the fuselage cracked and to be honest I was quite worried that somehow mine would be the same but was glad when it wasn't. It got me wondering though as to how they would be cracked and if there was evidence of the boxes being crushed?

 

Eric.

[JamesHatch]

Awesome model. I was a little put off by the seemingly little that needed to be done, but from your model, that interpretation was wrong. It's a serious project. Looking forward to seeing that scheme applied

[Sharkmouth]

Following with interest as I saw these flying while in New York and Barbados with an example in a museum in each place!  I posted a walk around photo set of the one on display at the Intrepid Sea Air & Space Museum.  If you think it may be of use, let me know to post the link.

 

Regards,

[Guest Peterpools]

Eric

Following with great interest as this is a once in a lifetime build. Some mighty fine detective work on the wheels and intakes.

Keep 'em coming

Peter

[LSP_Ron]

Thanks guys and I am glad that the project is getting some interest.

 

I left my workshop for a break and came back to find my 4 year old boy had slipped in and was flying this around the room making jet noises..... gotta love it!

 

 

 

 

 

That made my day to be honest, used to do the same thing to my dad at that age. He'd build when I was in bed, I'd be so excited to see what he had done in the morning and not once did he ever not let me hold his work.

 

Keep it up

 

Ron

[ericg]

Great stuff Ron. I am encouraging him to spend some time with me in the workshop and he is having lots of fun.

 

Onto the intakes. These require a little bit of work as the forward corners of the resin parts I think have been slightly short cast. They should be very sharp, as well as the forward bottom lip.

 

I superglued a small scrap of resin onto each corner

 

 

Here you can see the difference between the intake as supplied in the kit and the modified intake(right side)notice how all edges are now sharp.

 

 

I feel one of the biggest issue with the kit is the nose. I first noticed it when I pulled the model out of the box. The nose was squashed in and made the model look a bit like a `lame duck' rather than a supersonic beast. I thought that the resin nose included with the kit might have fixed the error but it is the same.

 

Here is the resin nose. Doesn't look too bad, but something just doesn't look right. It certainly doesn't have the character of the real thing, that's for sure.

 

 

Closer examination reveals that it is slightly concave from end to end. Not good.

 

\

 

Lets have a quick look at how it looks compared to a pic of the real thing (yeah I know its open to interpretation, but trust me here)

 

 

I just have to fix the nose, it will bug me too much if I leave it. I guess I shouldn't really have to be modifying a kit which cost me roughly the price of 3 Tamiya Mosquito's, but thats just the way it is.

 

I have piled on about a quarter of a tube of Plasto body filler and will let it cure for a few days and then sand it to shape. Compared to the fiber glass nose, there is already a big improvement in its semi smoothed state. I might even make a copy of the remastered nose and cast it in resin so that is it made of the one material instead of resin/filler.

 

Edited September 21, 2015 by ericg

[ericg]

Here are the nicely scribed windows.

 

 

Now lets start getting serious with this model and start taking it apart!

 

First the windows, I used a small drill bit in my cordless Dremel to cut rather than chain drill each part out.

 

 

I then used a whiteboard marker to colour in the engraved line so that it was easier to see.

 

 

Lets take the nose off whilst we are there.

 

 

I tidied up everything with a file.

 

\

 

Despite the instructions showing some neatly pre-cut clear parts in the parts breakdown, The kit is provided with a collection of rough cut clear parts to play with. Should be fun!

 

 

Hopefully this:

 

 

Will one day look like this (without the flag and open windows)

 

[Simmo.b]

Steaming ahead!!look forward to seeing her in person

[dodgem37]

Nice work so far.  Concave.

 

Sincerely,

Mark

[Wurzacher]

Wow! I would have felt the sweat when doing the first cut to get the nose of this expensive kit...

But you are doing great with this one! A pleasure to follow you on this build!

[ericg]

Thanks Mark, edited to say concave rather than convex.

 

Eric.

[ericg]

Whilst I was perusing the instructions I came across a little hand symbol next to the pitot tube where they show it being fitted to the nose. I thought that it must have meant metal part. Upon inspecting the symbol legend at the start of the instructions, I almost choked on the nice Belgian chocolate that HpH provide in these kits when I saw that the hand symbol means `scratchbuild'. Now, I will scratch build stuff till the cows come home and usually find myself making parts for most of the kits that have passed over my bench. The thing is, this is a damned expensive kit that has left me still unable to bring myself to view my bank account balance, lest I find myself once again under my desk in the feotal position, mumbling about crappy Trumpeter kits! C'mon Hph, pull your finger out guys! there is alot lacking in this kit that I feel should be there. More of that to come.

 

Anyway, I hunted around and came up with a very likely candidate for a pitot tube being one from the excellent Master model range. The Tornado unit in 48th being almost an exact replica of one according to the reference pics that I was viewing online.

 

 

Here it is, fitted to the now modified nose.

 

 

I also got a few years supply of primer, clear coat and white spray cans, which should be just the ticket to painting this beast when I ordered the pitot tube.

 

 

I have started to assemble the cockpit by fitting the floor and rear bulkhead. Now I am not sure how the person who did the test assembly on the prototype of the model fitted these pieces into the fuselage, nor could I work out the way the instructions directed a series of twists and turns to get them in there. One thing is for sure, and that is that neither the rear bulkhead or the floor do not fit into the fuselage through the opened nose of the model. I had my great mate Brent over who acted as a second set of eyes on the problem and he came up with a solution of cutting copies of each part from thin plastic card that would allow each part to be bent as it passed through the opening. Great idea!

 

After retrieving the bulkhead from the rear of the model by shaking it back out through the front one too many times, I needed to devise an even more devious plan. Using the plastic copy, I cut that part in half and worked out what could be done using the original part, and some lateral thinking did the rest.

 

The first date was almost a disaster! It just wont fit!

 

 

Lets go a bit easier on the opening with something a bit more flexible

 

 

Here is the fix. Cut the rear bulkhead into two pieces, just below the shelf that the floor sits on. Shave the rear corners off the floor where they will be covered by cockpit parts.

 

 

Fill the fuselage with expanding foam just behind where the rear bulkhead will sit (to stop it from falling back into the fuselage when you are trying to fit it.)

 

 

Fit the two parts together once inside the fuselage

 

 

Fit the floor and once glued, I used some more expanding foam under the floor to give it more support.

 

[Simmo.b]

Hph should beg Eric to allow this wip to be put on a cd and included with every kit!!

I saw her in person today and she sure is a challenging build, many will buy one but I think few will drag it off the shelf, kudos Eric for beating her into submission!

[ericg]

Onto the clear parts. As I wish to have my model with the clear parts fitted and not painted black, I had to get moving on cutting and fitting the clear parts supplied with the kit. As mentioned before the clear parts were represented in the instructions and in the parts key as nicely shaped parts and one could be led to believe that this job would be fairly easy. What is supplied in the kit however is two rather crude clear plastic shapes and it is up to the modeller to cut the parts to fit the kit.

 

Here is the front windscreen. Notice the rather complicated shape that it has to fit into.

 

 

And here is the same part fitted into place. I cut out the shape fairly close with scissors and then sanded and trimmed the part until it fitted into place. A fairly risky operation but I didn't have to use the spare, so I was pretty happy. There will be alot of masking in this area to provide the window frames, to ulitmately provide square shaped glass.

 

 

Same deal with the visor. The visor that can be seen in the photo below was much larger and has been trimmed. I taped it tightly to the nose/fuselage combo and then marked out the rough shape with a black texta

 

 

Same process as before, trim,sand,trim,sand etc etc.... came up quite nicely.

 

 

Nose down

 

 

More soon.

 

Eric.