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Lockheed L-1011 Tristar "Aeroperu" [1:144 Eastern Express] - RFI


Alex

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This is the plastic you get.

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Interestingly the fuselage halves were off their sprues (and the sprues gone) despite this being a new (still shrinkwrapped) kit.  The plastic is quite hard and brittle - the polar opposite of the soft plastic that anyone who'e done a Special Hobby kit would be familiar with.  It should file and sand fine, but carving or scraping with a blade isn't going to be terribly useful.

 

Surface detail is abundant and reasonably fine, although a step below the standard that Zvezda has set for 1:144.  There's also plenty of flash.

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Smaller parts are crisper, though still not flash-free.

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The instructions are pretty straightforward.

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The supplied scheme is for Delta, but why would I want to do a boring mainstream American carrier when Airline Hobby Supply has SO many interesting obscure ones?  And why am I spending so much time on their website?

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Unlike Zvezda, they have not gone nuts with stencil decals :-( which is too bad.  They do supply a cockpit window decal, however.  There's a clear plastic windscreen piece in the kit, but since there are no molded-in fuselage windows I'm going to paint over the cockpit and go full decals on this one.

 

I'm planning to do this aircraft:

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One of two Tristars operated by the since-deceased AeroPeru between 1978 and 1985.

 

The fuselage halves will require some truing-up to join well.  And you are on your own to devise some locating tabs to make sure they glue up in good alignment.

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This is what an initial fit looked like

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My solution was to lay a sheet of sandpaper on a flat reference surface (in this case the embarrassingly rusty top of my tablesaw) and slide the fuselage halves over it.  They have a bit of warp (just a bit) to them, so it's vital to press them down flat *before* sanding...

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Just a couple minutes work to get this

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The separate tail section fits on pretty well after just a bit of trimming flash.

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The instructions advise you to join the main fuselage to tail for each half before bringing the halves together.  But I'm a little bit paranoid about the possibility of creating a slight vertical misalignment, so I may do it the other way.  Either way, I'm off to add some DIY locating tabs to the fuselage halves now.

 

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9 minutes ago, aircommando130 said:

The L-1011 was such a great looking airplane....built by Lockheed!

 

 

I think Lockheed had built a bunch of great-looking planes!

 

P-38

SR-71

F-22

 

All good ones IMO!

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I most certainly look forward to more, as the L-1011 is my favorite airliner of all time. As to the many possibilities, yes there are abundant, very attractive schemes. I tend to really like Saudi, Royal Jordanian and Delta the most, Air Canada, TWA, Gulf Air and a few others greatly appeal to me too though.

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3 hours ago, Alex said:

 

I think Lockheed had built a bunch of great-looking planes!

 

P-38

SR-71

F-22

 

All good ones IMO!

 

 

My dad flew F-104's and I crewed the C-5A/B, C-130E, MC-130P, MC-130H and worked/flew for Lockheed for 13 years.

So I'm kinda partial to Lockheed products... Great start by the way!

 

Cheers...Ron

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1 hour ago, aircommando130 said:

 

 

 

 

My dad flew F-104's and I crewed the C-5A/B, C-130E, MC-130P, MC-130H and worked/flew for Lockheed for 13 years.

So I'm kinda partial to Lockheed products... Great start by the way!

 

Cheers...Ron

Thanks Ron!  Also great to hear from a New Mexican.  My dad lives just north of you in Albuquerque.  Did you do your aircrew work at Kirtland?

 

Alex (UNM Lobo, grew up in Los Alamos, still missing NM after 30 years away)

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Oh wow! Yep retired at Kirtland...got hired at Lockheed at Kirtland teaching MC-130P then I swapped over to MC-130H

loadmaster training. Those are long gone from here so now I'm over at the 415th SOS as a mission scheduler for the MC/HC-130J.

Fun still hangin out with the fella's...some I trained in the Shadow/Talon II. I bet you miss a good Blake's green chili burger! 

 

Cheers..Ron

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Interestingly enough, both my sister and brother-in-law worked at the Lockheed plant in Burbank. I didn't find out until years later that they were both building L-1011s at the time. I could have easily gotten a tour, but wasn't interested at the time, and didn't know (or realize) that the L-1011s were rolling off the line while I was there.

 

I did get a tour of the Georgia plant though, and brand new C-5As were rolling off the line at that time. I was in total awe, to say the least.

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12 hours ago, aircommando130 said:

 I bet you miss a good Blake's green chili burger! 

 

Cheers..Ron

You have no idea.  I make sure to get one every time I visit.

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13 hours ago, LSP_K2 said:

Interestingly enough, both my sister and brother-in-law worked at the Lockheed plant in Burbank. I didn't find out until years later that they were both building L-1011s at the time. I could have easily gotten a tour, but wasn't interested at the time, and didn't know (or realize) that the L-1011s were rolling off the line while I was there.

 

I did get a tour of the Georgia plant though, and brand new C-5As were rolling off the line at that time. I was in total awe, to say the least.

I was a loadmaster on new "A" model C-5's at Travis AFB. I thought the old girl looked really good in the white/gray paint with the big black radome.

Picked up several brand new "B" models at the factory before I  went over to the C-130. 

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Like a lot of short-run kits, some of the moldings have a lot of garbage in the panel lines.  I'm not sure what causes this - perhaps insufficient mold-release agent?  Perhaps trying to pop the pieces free of the dies while the plastic is still too hot?  At any rate, it's here and there on this kit; this half of the tail is probably the worst.  I'll likely end up going over all the panel lines on the entire kit with a scriber to clean them up a bit.

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One key to making life easier later with inexactly-molded pieces is to go heavy on the cement and clamp comprehensively.  The halves of this engine nozzle didn't abut perfectly smoothly, but it's a small part, so instead of trying to sand the interface flat, I just clamped the heck out of it.  The result was pretty good - minimal cleanup required.

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It's going to take quite a bit of work to get good trailing edges on the wings.  This photo shows how much I've rasped away already from the top piece, and there's more to go.

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Same deal on the horizontal stabilizers, but they're smaller, and simpler in that they don't have anti-shock bodies molded in to the lower half.  I've gotten this one done - rasp down the insides, glue and clamp like heck, fill small remaining gaps with CA, rescribe panel lines, sand.  I still have another one to go through that whole sequence on.  But the final product is going to look OK.

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The stabilizer fits the tail section cleanly enough (now that I've made the locator slot the right size) that I'll be able to install it post-paint.  That's a big win since it will be entirely aluminum and corogard finished, and abutting a painted fuselage.

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I am holding out hope, probably in vain, that the wings will be similarly close.  I'd love to be able to paint them fully before installation and avoid wrestling with taping that interface multiple times while painting.

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While my interlocking tabs inside the fuselage made for a really solid connection, they didn't completely line up the seams because the plastic was of different thickness on the two sides.  Note for the future - measure and adjust this first!  So, plenty of filing and sanding later, I was ready to join the main fuselage to the rear section.

 

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I had to trim away a fair amount of material from the inside of the main fuselage to get the forward locating strip on the tail section to slip inside.  But at least it had that feature rather than being a straight butt joint.  As should be obvious from the comparison to clamp/tablesaw, this is a big airplane.  You can also see that the rear section is slightly larger than the main fuselage, so there's a step to be smoothed out.

 

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I'm making headway on that, but I need to get a coat of Mr Surfacer on here pretty soon.  It's hard to tell how much more I need to do on that engine intake because of the mix of opaque plastic and translucent CA at the join line.  I *think* it's pretty close, but...

 

Looking at online photos of these planes has re-emphasized for me how little you can really see the panel divisions on actual aircraft, especially on the vertical tail.  They are way too prominent the way they're done here.  So I'm going to be pretty aggressive in doing an overall final sand-out before Mr Surfacer.  I don't intend to remove them entirely (too much work) but if they get toned down substantially, that's fine.  

Edited by Alex
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