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


Alex

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On 4/4/2021 at 2:58 PM, Alex said:

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.

 

 

Having been involved in procuring injection moulding tooling for packaging over the past 20 years I can report from my experience -

 

Main production tooling, hardened steel, fully drilled for cooling etc is pretty expensive even buying for low cost countries ( I was paying around £50-80k for a toolset 10 years ago) , and often requires large capacity machines to run it to get the economies of scale required . You can get cheap going to China , but you run the risk of them copying your design , and yes I have examples in my own career of such tooling companies producing two sets of tools when one was ordered; with the view of "what do you think you can do about it ?"

 

You can however produce sample aluminium moulds for a fraction of the price (£4-5K ) which will last around 1000 impressions although the cooling will be very simplified . Typically they are used for prototyping , main tool development , market samples, filling trials etc . If I were looking at doing short run kits, it's the route I would go down . 

 

The end results will be comparable (ish), but your comments about heat are spot on:- they run hotter degrade quicker and whilst cleaning proper moulds can be done quite aggressively - sample moulds far less so , and therefore they will progressively "gunk up" the more they are used .

Edited by Panzerwomble
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9 minutes ago, Panzerwomble said:

 

Having been involved in procuring injection moulding tooling for packaging over the past 20 years I can report from my experience -

 

Main production tooling, hardened steel, fully drilled for cooling etc is pretty expensive even buying for low cost countries ( I was paying around £50-80k for a toolset 10 years ago) , and often requires large capacity machines to run it to get the economies of scale required . You can get cheap going to China , but you run the risk of them copying your design , and yes I have examples in my own career of such tooling companies producing two sets of tools when one was ordered; with the view of "what do you think you can do about it ?"

 

You can however produce sample aluminium moulds for a fraction of the price (£4-5K ) which will last around 1000 impressions although the cooling will be very simplified . Typically they are used for prototyping , main tool development , market samples, filling trials etc . If I were looking at doing short run kits, it's the route I would go down . 

 

The end results will be comparable (ish), but your comments about heat are spot on:- they run hotter degrade quicker and whilst cleaning proper moulds can be done quite aggressively - sample moulds far less so , and therefore they will progressively "gunk up" the more they are used .

Thanks for the information!  That makes a lot of sense and is probably the key thing that distinguishes these “short run” kits.  I guess that also means that you ought to buy new short run kits when they come out, before the aluminum tools start to degrade...

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1 minute ago, Alex said:

Thanks for the information!  That makes a lot of sense and is probably the key thing that distinguishes these “short run” kits.  I guess that also means that you ought to buy new short run kits when they come out, before the aluminum tools start to degrade...

 

I don't know for sure-  so this is my guess - short run makers get the tool, run it, and produce a thousand or so in a first run . If it sells then run it a second or third time or consider another cheap tool . So yes buying from an early run would be a good thing .

 

As explained to me years ago , every time you mounted and ran an aluminium tool you ran the risk of it breaking or warping , which is why the manufacturers only guaranteed such a low number of impressions . By comparison main tooling would do 500,000 impressions without any major dramas running week in week out . 

 

If you look at issues like flash on regular older kits/tools , it's all signs of the moulds eventually wearing out , even production ones. Add into that , the fact that tooling produced in the 1970's or 80's was mostly machined by hand not spark eroded ( giving raised vs sunken panel line for example) you can see how the detail levels have progressed over the past 40 years. :clap2: 

 

I could go on to explain how glass bottles physically "grow" over their life as a result of their tooling ....but that's probably enough packaging boredom for one day .  :P

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On 4/6/2021 at 12:36 PM, Panzerwomble said:

 

I don't know for sure-  so this is my guess - short run makers get the tool, run it, and produce a thousand or so in a first run . If it sells then run it a second or third time or consider another cheap tool . So yes buying from an early run would be a good thing .

 

 

So I have successfully used this rationale to talk myself into buying the (fairly new) Dora Wings Dewontine D500 kit... 

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A little bit of work on this model.  I assembled the wings (which was lots of work due to the need to thin the trailing edges, and I still haven't dealt with smoothing anything out).  One of them was noticeably kinked.

pnkZNXykj

 

However, some gentle heating with the heat gun followed by persuasion with clamps has got it straightened out.

pohGqb1fj

 

You can see in the top photo that the fit of wings to fuselage isn't terrible.  There's a small gap, and unfortunately that gap is on the upper surface if you set the wings with what looks like the correct dihedral.  I have an idea on how to possibly fix that.  I would really like them to fit well enough that I can install them after painting everything.

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On 4/3/2021 at 6:39 PM, aircommando130 said:

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

 

I do, too!  Don't imagine they ship to Texas, probably be soggy by the time it got here anyway. New Mexican food is the one thing I miss most about being there. Tex-Mex ain't the same.

 

Cheers,

Damian

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Got decals in the mail today from Nazca Decals (purveyors of every Latin American airliner scheme you can possibly imagine).

 

Unfortunately, they sent me the AeroPeru set for the B757-200:

pmTQcDBvj

 

Rather than the L-1011 Tristar set.  The guy was very apologetic when I emailed him, though, and said he'd send the right ones out ASAP.  Certainly they'll get here before I need them, at the rate this is progressing.  So, the only consequence is that now I'm going to have to order the brand-new 2021 new-tool Zvezda 757-200 kit as soon as it's released.  Bummer ;-)

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14 minutes ago, Alex said:

So, the only consequence is that now I'm going to have to order the brand-new 2021 new-tool Zvezda 757-200 kit as soon as it's released.  Bummer ;-)

I was relating this story to my wife (who was born in Ukraine, and thus as you’d expect speaks fluent Russian) over dinner.  She didn’t seem all that impressed by the prospect of a new-tool Zvezda kit and the likely excellentness of such a thing.  But I was informed that it’s properly pronounced “zvez-dA” with the emphasis on the final A.  So now I can stop saying it wrong ;-)

 

Zvezda means “star” in Russian, as you might guess from the company logo.

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1 hour ago, Alex said:

Zvezda means “star” in Russian, as you might guess from the company logo.

LOL, so technically I'm building a Star Star Destroyer.  I could say  something sarcastic here about Russian's having to be one star up on everyone else but I won't :D

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2 hours ago, Jennings Heilig said:

The true, correct Russian pronunciation of "Звезда" is difficult for most English speakers.  But the emphasis should in fact be on the last syllable.

Tell me about it.  It took me years to learn to pronounce my wife’s Russian nickname correctly - they have weird consonants that English has no easy analogs to.  I can pronounce French, Spanish (languages I have very limited ability in) and even Chinese (a language I don’t speak at all) words more accurately than I can Russian.

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Been chunking away at this one, but not really producing anything that’s going to show up well in a photo.  I have:

  • filled and cleaned up the seams on both wings, rescribed them, and then carefully scraped and filed the bases until they fit cleanly flush to the fuselage.  So it should be possible to paint them before attaching them.
  • assembled the engine nacelles, filled seams, smoothed them out, rescribed one of two.  Still need to fix the scribing on the second one and then fix the tabs that mount them to the wings, which totally don’t fit now.  Goal is to get them also to fit flush so I can paint them off of the wings.
  • finished smoothing out the fuselage seams and mostly completed rescribing the main part of it.  I still need to give the aft part of the fuselage a few more passes with sandpaper to get it fully blended in.

 The overall experience is that this is a *big* airplane in a short-run kit, so there’s just a lot of surface area to deal with getting up to grade.  But it is coming along with no major stumbling blocks; just lots of “proper modeling” to be done.  Once the nacelles and fuselage are done it’ll be time to shoot some primer and take stock.  Several more hours of work to be done before that, though.

 

In separate news, I got a copy of the Zvezda IL-86 kit in the mail today from a gent in Latvia.  And as interesting synchronicity, the Uzbekistan Airlines decals for said kit from AHS in Arizona at the same time.  So add that one to the queue.  Maybe soon.  I kind of feel like doing a lower-effort kit before diving back into the stack of elbow-grease-intensive short run ones.

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So after a LOT of fiddling, filling, scraping, and sanding, I've got everything ready to head to the paint booth.

pnBEYP7Zj

 

I superglued some handles onto things to help me hold them for painting.

 

I can't prime the fuselage yet because I want to use this:

pojHqFuEj

And it's way too windy for outdoor spraypainting today.  Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

 

Everything else went for an airbrushed coat of black Mr Surfacer 1500.  And surprisingly, the seams looks pretty darn good.

poO0L4vKj

poVrawBGj

pn0XNoB2j

 

You can't see them in those photos, but the leading edges are essentially perfect.  I think I've finally got the sequence down for dealing with these even in the case of short run kits like this that don't fit anywhere near ideally OOB:

 

1. Glue up wings with copious Tamiya liquid cement (not the extra-thin) and clamp the bejeezus out of them to really get the plastic fused.  Wait overnight.

2. Coarse sand (only) to get the contour right.

3. Flood the joints with medium CA - let it wick into any cracks and wet the roughened plastic surface left by the sandpaper.

4. Catalyze the CA with zip-kicker and immediately sand out with a medium-grit sanding stick. 

5. Paint the seam line with Mr Surfacer and let dry overnight

6. Sand out with fine and then super-fine grit.

7. Prime it and smile, because you have no extra work to do. 

 

I then went on to spray gloss black on the leading and trailing edges and the nacelles (not shown), and then Alclad 101 (plain aluminum):

pmqYQLnTj

 

I will wait a couple days and then mask off the parts that will remain "bare metal" so I can spray a "Corogard facsimile" in the middle.

 

This is the beginning of a probably too-ambitious scheme to reproduce the varied metal tones you see in photos of the engine nacelles:

poHl0k9Kj

 

I plan to use Matte Aluminum in the center section and then Steel with a little bit of Burnt Metal on the aft part, then Airframe Aluminum on the intake trim ring (which is notably shinier than anything else in photos).

 

Here's a start at the "scorched metal" look for the rearmost nozzle part of the engines:

pmoG6dtij

 

I'll probably use some black and possibly also brown pastel on these once the paint is fully cured.

 

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1 hour ago, Out2gtcha said:

That looks lovely!  Ive always like the Tri-star and DC-10s because of the 3rd engine in the tail.  Going to be a lovely looking model with the decals on!

Yeah it brings back memories.  DC-10s especially were common around airports when I was a kid.  Never see them anymore, obviously.

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