Welsh Models 757 Iron Maiden

[LSP_Kevin]

As mentioned in my Minicraft 757 build thread, I've started sizing up the Welsh Models kit of the same aircraft to see if it could serve as a platform for the Iron Maiden decals I bought that don't fit the Minicraft kit. It got to the point where it seemed sensible just to start the thing, and build it alongside the Minicraft kit - though quite a distance behind!

 

Anyway, for those of you who aren't aware Welsh Models is most well-known for its vacform airliner kits, though even as early as this 757 kit, they were including parts from other materials.

 

 

As you can see from the writing on the box, this one includes injection-moulded parts, but also a bag of white metal parts. In fact, the only vacform parts are the two fuselage halves and their interior bulkheads:

 

 

The instructions are a simple folded sheet, with little in the way of actual instructional material:

 

 

 

The front of the sheet has a template for a main wing spar, but I suspect this might be a holdover from an earlier incarnation of the kit that had vacform wings, as the injection-moulded wings in this one are solid, with not allowance made for a spar. Still, the angles provided will be useful!

 

A set of decals for a Caledonian livery are provided, and they appear to be professionally screen-printed. Not sure how they'd hold up in actual use, though, but I'm planning to use the Babibi Ed Force One decals anyway:

 

I've scanned and resized the tail decals to suit the Welsh tail, and a test print is looking very promising indeed. I'll snap a photo of the test piece in place once I've freed the fuselage halves from their backing sheet.

 

All that said, I haven't actually cut any plastic yet, so I guess I can't say I've officially started until that happens.

 

Stay tuned!

 

Kev

[LSP_Kevin]

Oh, and for those who don't realise, our very own Derek Bradshaw mastered several (many?) of the early Welsh Models kits, though I'm not sure if this is one of his. I do have some that are, though!

 

Kev

[Derek B]

29 minutes ago, LSP_Kevin said:

Oh, and for those who don't realise, our very own Derek Bradshaw mastered several (many?) of the early Welsh Models kits, though I'm not sure if this is one of his. I do have some that are, though!

 

Kev

 

Hi Kev,

 

This build will be a great compliment to your Minicraft  build as well as a very useful tutorial for those who wish to see how a multi-media kit is assembled. Yes, I did make quite a few master patterns for Welsh Models (I cannot recall all of them now unless I see them, but my last one - after many years of not making any for them - was last year, a 1/144 scale fully detailed full resin Avro Lincoln kit pattern). You are right, this B757 is not one of my patterns, but is still an iconic Boeing design (to my mind, it sort of combines the 'Classic' Boeing airliners with the more modern ones in a single design).

 

Derek

[LSP_Kevin]

Thanks, Derek. Let's take a closer look at the kit. As I noted earlier, only the fuselage and associated bulkheads are in vacformed plastic, and I've already cut them out:

 

 

 

I have a few other Welsh Models vac airliner kits in the stash, and spent some time last year preparing a few of them for assembly. This one has by far the thinnest plastic of the bunch, so hopefully those bulkheads fit properly!

 

The wings, tailplanes, and engine bodies are all in short-run injection-moulded plastic:

 

 

As you can see, I was wrong about my assumption that the wings were solid. They are in fact in the traditional upper and lower halves. Still no room for a spar, though!

 

The sprue gates are gigantic, and will require the gentle application of some Gunze Mr. Chainsaw:

 

 

The parts look suspiciously like modified Minicraft kit parts, but my impression was that this kit pre-dated that one. So, who know?

 

The landing gear and engine fronts are in white metal, and are agricultural at best:

 

 

Since there are no step-by-step instructions in this kit, building it will really become a decision-making process. For example, the cabin windows on the fuselage are depicted as shallow depressions, which are not very convincing at all:

 

 

So right there I have to decide how I'm going to tackle that, and at what point in the build.

 

Same goes for the main wheel bays in the wings, which are similar depressions barely a millimetre deep:

 

 

The obvious thing to do here is to cut them out, but that would throw the height of the landing gear off, leading to more work to do! So while it's a simple kit with very few parts, there's some real challenges ahead, no doubt. To be completely honest, I'm not even sure where to go from here!

 

Kev

[chrish]

Aaahhh…. nothing like seeing a fellow masochist heading into a 4 star headache!

There’s some next level work coming for you here, not that you can’t handle it and there’s always a good feeling beating a stubborn kit into compliance…it will assimilate, resistance is futile.

[LSP_Kevin]

Thanks, Chris. The next task is actually pretty simple: clean up the vac parts, ready for assembly. It'll take a bit of fettling to get the bulkheads to fit cleanly - assuming they actually fit at all! And then it's straight into problem-solving mode. My initial idea for dealing with the sunken windows was to cut the complete strip out from the fuselage and replace it with plain styrene, but the vac plastic is much thinner than I was expecting, and probably too much so for that approach. I'm thinking "sprue goo" might actually be the best approach here, even though I'm generally not a fan of it.

 

Kev

[chrish]

Tamiya putty? A drop of thin superglue in each window??

ooooorrrr a drop of gloss dark blue in each one to simulate the windows?

just thinking out loud

[LSP_Kevin]

6 minutes ago, chrish said:

Tamiya putty? A drop of thin superglue in each window??

ooooorrrr a drop of gloss dark blue in each one to simulate the windows?

just thinking out loud

 

There are lots of options, but the sprue goo would have the best chance of eliminating any differential sanding, and potential ghost outlines. But with window decals going over the top of them, those things may not be noticeable anyway.

 

Kev

[Derek B]

5 hours ago, LSP_Kevin said:

 

There are lots of options, but the sprue goo would have the best chance of eliminating any differential sanding, and potential ghost outlines. But with window decals going over the top of them, those things may not be noticeable anyway.

 

Kev

 

I'd be a bit cautious with that approach Kev. It may work well with normal injection moulded plastic because the plastic wall thickness is much thicker, but as vacforms are thin, you may run into longer term softening issues. For me, good old CA and talc (or JB Weld) should word well, with a fine surface filler after for any air holes.

 

As for bulkheads, they generally 'touch where they fit' due to two things - the vacform process and having to largely 'guess' the internal fuselage shape and size at the pattern making size...something of a dark art here! If the bulkhead fits in the right place, sand and test fit it constantly to obtain the best fit. If it does not, move it to another spot where it does, and, finally, if it doesn't, make a new one from plastic card that does! (see my Welsh Models MD-11 build here, which is one of their old 'Classic' type vacform kits).

 

A little personal background history of Welsh Models. I started making master patterns for Welsh Models sometime around 1981. At that time, all patterns were made from rose wood and all parts were made in 'classic' vacform layout (i.e. All parts moulded in plastic). During the early to mid-80's, the smaller and engine parts were made from white metal. From the mid-80's to early 90's, the original vacform wings, tailplanes and engines for many airliner kits were re-worked for short-run injection moulding, but still had additional white metal parts (like your B757). From the mid-90's onward, the original kit wings, tailplane and engine parts were further re-worked or re-made to be cast in resin (still with additional white metal parts) - this is still the standard for Welsh Model kit today. I mastered the B707/KC-135, B737 and MD-80/90 kits for injection moulded and resin parts (amongst others). The Welsh Models B757 kit pre-dates the Minicraft one by at least a decade - hence my allusions earlier on - so you can draw your own conclusions?

 

HTH

 

Derek

 

[LSP_Kevin]

Thanks, Derek. The risk of the solvents in the sprue goo affecting the plastic did occur to me, so it's not a done deal yet. And the bulkheads certainly don't fit where intended! In fact, they don't really fit anywhere properly. I've put them in their respective "best fit" locations, and they at least help me test-fit the fuselage halves together - something that's nearly impossible to do without some kind of reinforcement!

 

Thanks for confirming the age of the kit, too. There's no date supplied anywhere with the kit itself, so I'd be curious to learn when exactly it was made.

 

Kev

[Derek B]

Some useful links Kev:

 

https://airlinercafe.com/model/kit-welsh-models-boeing-757-200-2698/ (For airliner model makers, Airlinercafe is a fantastic website!).

 

https://modelingmadness.com/review/civil/brown757.htm (Interestingly, in the conclusion, he wished that he had filles the window depressions with CA glue, which is what I would recommend!).

 

http://www.arcforums.com/forums/air/index.php?/topic/229220-wanted-1144-boeing-757-200-iron-maiden-ed-force-one-decals/

 

The same kit as yours in USAir colours was released in 1992, so I think that I am correct in thinking that your kit is early 1990's vintage (it also fits with my vague memory timeline history of Welsh Models). Looking through the Airlinercafe database pages for Welsh Models, it was like a trip down memory lane for me as I saw several other models that I had either fully mastered as patterns or had a hand in modifications/conversions or updating to other variants (including reworking for injection and pressure-resin moulding), such as the B747SP (which I really enjoyed making - and it is very accurate!), B720, CV-880/990, Jetstream, TU-154, IL-18 and 62, Super VC-10, DC-8-42/62, and others beside! (I also made some military ones as well - my first two master patterns for Welsh Models were the Hawker Sea Hawk and Chinook back in 1980!).

 

Cheers

 

Derek

[LSP_Kevin]

Thanks again, Derek. Great to have your company and support as always! I haven't had a chance to check out those links yet, but will do so when I can.

 

In the meantime, I continue to make unseemly progress on this one - it might even catch up to the Minicraft build at this rate! I started tabbing out the fuselage with 5mm styrene squares, before realising that simply making random alternating lengths is much quicker, and without the accuracy and precision required for the first method. I did manage to put the forward bulkhead right where the nose wheel bay needs to be, though...

 

 

 

A test-fit of the fuselage was promising:

 

 

So I set about opening up the nose wheel bay and trimming the bulkhead out of the way:

 

 

I also made some progress with building it out, but it's far from finished yet:

 

 

I suspect this may require a scratch-built nose leg, too, as the kit-supplied white metal unit seems a tad short, and may well be designed to be attached directly to the outside of the fuselage.

 

While all that was setting, I decided to glue the engine halves together:

 

 

For the most part I think these are passable, but the back ends are a worry. The instructions merely say to "File out jet exhaust pipes". That would not only leave a gaping bare hole at the back of each engine, but said hole would seem to be, in my estimate quite large! I'll have to look at some photos and drawings more closely to see how this area works on the real thing, but at this stage, they're going to be a problem.

 

More soon!

 

Kev

[Derek B]

53 minutes ago, LSP_Kevin said:

I suspect this may require a scratch-built nose leg, too, as the kit-supplied white metal unit seems a tad short, and may well be designed to be attached directly to the outside of the fuselage.

 

54 minutes ago, LSP_Kevin said:

For the most part I think these are passable, but the back ends are a worry. The instructions merely say to "File out jet exhaust pipes". That would not only leave a gaping bare hole at the back of each engine, but said hole would seem to be, in my estimate quite large! I'll have to look at some photos and drawings more closely to see how this area works on the real thing, but at this stage, they're going to be a problem.

 

Good work so far Kev. you'll have noticed that I made strips of plastic from the backing carrier sheet for use as joining strips on my MD-11 build.

 

The 'standard' nose wheel fit for the majority of the Welsh Models kit fuselages with nose wheels is to cut out the appropriate nose leg fuselage doors and make and glue a square of plastic card directly to the inside of the aperture, which effectively leaves a small wheel well depth that equates to the wall thickness of the fuselage plastic - there is probably something to this effect mentioned within the sparse assembly notes (the length of the nose leg is designed for this purpose and often either feature a locating pin moulded into the top of the leg or a flat platform which meant to be glued into/onto the internal square plastic card).

 

Yes, the rear engine faces of most Welsh Models airliner kits are devoid of any detail - just open black spaces (this is another old vacform only legacy). This is where spare engine turbines and compressors from other kits are useful, if you have them. If not, obtain some Green Stuff World blue mouldable plastic and a two-part epoxy putty of your choice and mould a number as required from another kit and adjust them to suit to fit the inside rear faces of your engines.

 

Cheers

 

Derek

[LSP_Kevin]

Thanks, Derek. There's nothing in the instructions about the landing gear other than "assemble and glue in place". And as it happens, Lee White (bless his little cotton socks) has just alerted me to the fact that my cut-out for the nose wheels is way too forward. Here's the real deal:

 

 

It seems I'm off by quite a bit here! I just followed the engraved lines for what I assumed was the bay doors on the kit, but obviously I'll need to start again here. I know I said I'm not an accuracy nut, but I can't live with that!

 

Kev

 

 

[Derek B]

1 hour ago, LSP_Kevin said:

Thanks, Derek. There's nothing in the instructions about the landing gear other than "assemble and glue in place". And as it happens, Lee White (bless his little cotton socks) has just alerted me to the fact that my cut-out for the nose wheels is way too forward. Here's the real deal:

 

 

It seems I'm off by quite a bit here! I just followed the engraved lines for what I assumed was the bay doors on the kit, but obviously I'll need to start again here. I know I said I'm not an accuracy nut, but I can't live with that!

 

Kev

 

 

 

Good spot Kev (and Lee). I am very surprised that Welsh Models got the nose leg location so wrong! However, having to relocate it aft may just be your saving grace!

 

Derek