The antique BoB Revell Spitfire Mk.I

[Troy Molitor]

Unbelievable.  The Gustav wheel bulges on an early Mk-Spit.  I love it! 

[Greif8]

8 hours ago, thierry laurent said:

I did my best but I'm not fully satisfied. However, it was a chicken and egg problem. I had to scribe the rivets before adding the part but doing so prevented relying on Surfacer and additional sanding to meld them better. 

 

Scribing is not my strong suit so I cheat and use HGW rivets.

 

Ernest

[nmayhew]

wow 

hard core stuff Thierry!

i confess this is exactly the sort of modelling i try to avoid because i am rubbish at it

can't wait to see more

thanks for sharing

Nick

[thierry laurent]

Thanks guys!

 

I'm probably nuts but I love doing that.

 

Yesterday, I forgot publishing pictures of some other wing corrections.

 

The MG chute holes edges must be refined but this is a quite classical work. However, what is not that common is the fact there is a noticeable gap between the ailerons and the wings and is even less common is the fact the gaps are not similar on both wings! So, I added plastic shims, sanded them, extended the panel lines and added rivets. The goal is to fill most of the gap. Only a hair thick one should stay.

 

This is the lower wing:

 

 

And here's the other wing:

 

 

And here you have the upper sides:

 

 

Here you can see that I also added the aileron hinges covers. I had to re-do it several times because those damned tiny parts always disappeared.

This was linked to the fact the wing trailing edge is VERY thin. So, Finally I used CA glue and sanded them in situ. At last, this worked!

 

Another quite inconsistent feature is the fact that if some trailing edge areas are very thin others are too thick. So, this also asked for a little bit of work:

 

The shapes of the ailerons arms/hinges was also modified. Otherwise the ailerons could not be correctly positionned.

 

 

[thierry laurent]

And the last thing for today: correcting the MG holes location. Initially I did not see it but they are not correctly located. This is actually quite easy to see as soon as you have a look at the MG doors on the upper wings. Fortunately, as Revell molded the patches protecting them over the wing leading edge, it was just a matter of sanding them and drilling/filing the holes where they should be.

 

 

Here's the lower wing. You can see the alignment with the chute doors:

 

 

And last, you can somewhat see here the alignment with the doors:

 

 

This is a quite basic change but I really hate seeing MG holes not correctly aligned on a kit! The major challenge is taking care of the heigth as all of them are not centered on the wing seam. So, you must use good pictures of the front of the wing to locate accurately the center of each hole. The holes closer to the wing tip are higher in comparison with the seam between the wing halves.

 

We will go on with other wing corrections and detailing.

 

 

[thierry laurent]

Another thing I did not mention: the round holes for the main LG wells are not fully... round! So, I used fine sandpaper sticked on an aluminium cylinder normally used to roll photoetched parts. It has a slightly smaller diameter and was perfect to restore a better round profile. This just asks for some minutes to correct the issue.

 

This kit is a nice canvas but it is only that. I would never consider building it OOTB. For people willing to build quickly the recent release is a far better choice even if the surface detail treatment is less accurate!

[Gazzas]

Nice fixes, Thierry!

Edited June 26, 2020 by Gazzas

[Phantom2]

Hi Thierry!

 

I have re-read the whole tread, from page 1, ...wow, what a splendid job you are doing! 

 

Cheers!

 

Stefan

 

 

Edited June 26, 2020 by Phantom2

[Chek]

One minor thing to note Thierry, is that due to the thinning of the outer wing the outer gun port rides higher up the leading edge than the inner ones. 

Below is the best photo I could find showing it.

 

 

[thierry laurent]

Thanks. This is what I tried to explain in my post but a picture is always better than ten thousand words!

[thierry laurent]

Hi again,

 

As promised, we will have a look at the main landing gear wells. The kit has some nice strengtheners with rivet strips molded on the rear side of the upper wing BUT it has no bay walls, just a void between both wing halves. Ouch! This is plain stupid as they could have added easily a round part to close the well without impacting the toyish moving landing gear feature. I checked various options including fully stratchbuild wells but was a little bit bored by the effort required to recreate them as the sloped sides are not that easy to recreate and again I had to make two mirrored parts...

 

So, I checked in my huge row of Spit kit boxes and found the Aires set intended to details the Revell Mk.IX. Fortunately, it quickly appeared that the resin parts could be quite easily used in combination with the old kit. Nonetheless, late wells had totally different strenghteners. They had a U cross-section whereas initial ones had an inverted T one. This annoyed me noticeably. Moreover, there was as well this concave bean-shaped recess corresponding to the wing bulge. Not that easy but I built a plan.

 

As I had decided to use the resin wells, I sanded the strengtheners out of the wings lower side. Then, I removed the strengtheners out of the resin parts with Trumpeter scrapers and fiberglass pens. Then, I made one bean-shaped hole in one of the well. Last, I put the other one over it to copy the perimeter of the hole:

 

 

I was then able to open a similar one in the second well. As you can see both are very similar:

 

 

Now, we will have a look at the new strenghteners.

[thierry laurent]

I tried to make the strengtheners with thin Slater's plastic strips. This didn't work beacuse as soon as I tried to add the rivets, the parts were distorted because the plastic was too thin. So, I choose another approach. I glued the upper part of the strenghtener (a thin strip) on a very thin sheet of plastic, then I use a riveting wheel to add the rivet line against each side of the strip. And, finally, I cut the strenghteners cautiously out of the sheet. This time it worked as I hoped! Note you have to be very careful to make parallel cuts and keep a constant width.

 

 

It was now just a matter of cutting them at the correct length and glue them. To measure them, I simply took the well dimensions on the external side (I simply removed two times the thickness of the resin wall out of the diameter). I was quite surprised glueing them was actually a Shaolin monk exercise as they did everything possible to avoid being glued where I wanted to put them...

 

Finally it worked more or less but the fact I had to use CA glue was not helping! They're a little bit too large and too thick (partly because of the glue) but I had no better strip in my large assortment of Slater's and Evergreen strips. And I'm fully convinced the result will be far better than the stock parts.

 

 

The last detail is the addition of the small identification plates in the wells. Pictures showed different configurations. The most common one show the plates fixed in the middle of the well ceiling. However, as I already have that one (used by Eduard), I wanted to replicate a less common one. As some planes showed a row of plates fixed along a strengthener, I choose that one. I initially tried to build them out of aluminium tape but was not really liking the result. So, I remade them out of very thin polystyrene sheet (coming from a strawberry vacformed dish!) and glued them with Gator glue. They are indeed so small and ligth I was afraid of a mess because of the CA glue use. At least, that way, I could reposition them correctly.

 

 

This ends most of the work on the wells. I still have to assess if I will carve a little bit the "bean" in the upper wing when all the wing parts will be assembled but this is clearly for a later step and I'm already satisfied by the result!

 

Another (major) step is going out of the tweak list! The radiator and oil cooler plus the gull wing issue are among the next problems to solve.

 

 

[thierry laurent]

And a final picture to show the part in the wing:

 

[dodgem37]

Good show, Thierry.

 

Sincerely,

Mark

[crobinsonh]

Lovely work - this is going to look very impressive when finished. Now come on Airfix get the re-tooled 1/24th Spitfire I/II out for Xmas.