Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Thanksgiving continues to evolve for us, with the kids joining when able. Christine is home this year so she will get the full benefit of her mother’s cooking. Daniel will be in Austin, while Nicholas has gone to Ontario to spend Thanksgiving with Jill. We have been invited to Ed and Darleen's for a full Ukranian Thanksgiving on Sunday. We will have our Thanksgiving dinner on Monday after going to visit the Grandma's.
Things are starting to settle down at the new house. We are starting to build a daily routine that the dogs are able to remember.
This month's modelling adventures included a road trip to the Edmonton train show with Dave in early September and the GOMBS model show in Calgary at the beginning of October. In Edmonton, we caught up with Nicholas and enjoyed spending the day with him. While the Edmonton train show is smaller than Calgary's, we still had a great time. Naturally, we made time for a few visits to hobby stores before returning to Calgary. The GOMBS show was a little larger than past years but is still a relatively small model show. The quality of models displayed was superb, and was an inspiration to get back to the modelling desk.
Daniel came home for a visit the weekend of September 28. Nicholas was able to come down for the weekend so we had the family together for the first time in the new house. The boys made back-to-back early morning hiking trips to the mountains, including a 1:30 am departure to Moraine Lake. On the Friday night, we had 11 people for dinner - the 5 Keys, Eric and his wife in town for Michelle's 89th birthday, and the 4 Heinz family. On the Saturday, Marie and the kids went to a Flames pre season game. I was supposed to go as well but was feeling under the weather. Later in the month, Dave and Corrinne were over for dinner after the GOMBS show, and our Nephew Marc stopped by for dinner the following night.
Marie and I went to our first play and our first Phil concert. Both were fantastic. We have also been enjoying the Bearspaw Farmer’s Market, and did a half day trip out to Canmore to visit one of Marie’s McMurray quilting friends. There is another concert at the end of October (the music of Star Wars!) , and we are seeing Paul Gross in The Seafarer at ATP next week.
It was our 33rd anniversary on October 4th. It’s cliche but it really doesn't seems like it was that long. We celebrated by visiting our favourite Italian restaurant.
House repairs this month have included patching more dents in the walls, and replacing grout in the master bedroom shower. Some smaller grout repairs were also needed in the master bathroom counters and floor tiles. I have also started getting the house and yard ready for winter. Sadly, I still have to rake leaves myself.
I have been making decent progress on the garage. The empty boxes are finally gone, and the shelves are up. Two garage bays are currently filled with things that have been deemed surplus and need a new home. There is enough free space that I have been able to start setting up my tools. On the hobby front, I have assembled the railway sections, and have started pondering how to reconfigure it for the new space. The final bit of hobby news, the HVAC guy installed the new exhaust vent and the new garage heater, meaning my spray booth is hooked up and working. The hobby room is now in full operation!
C-130J Hercules
The Herc is finished.
The decals were finished without drama. Well, almost. The aftermarket decals included red/white/red prop tip markings. The tip markings are quite small, and I had been puzzling over how to paint them. I gave the decals a try and and they proved devilishly difficult to manage. Applying very small, square decals to a curved prop tip is a sure path to madness. It took 5 separate sessions over the course of a week to get all 64 decals in place, trimmed to shape, and sealed. It isn’t perfect but they fool the eye well enough from 3 ft.
I will need to get some decent pictures but here's one to hold you over.
Fokker Super Universal
The Fokker became a bit of an obsession the past month, receiving a disproportionate amount of modelling attention.
Several hours were spent cleaning up the parts and testing fit. The kit comes without any useful assembly instructions, so the time was well spent sorting out a construction sequence. It was quickly obvious that this isn't a shake-the-box kit.
Try as I might, I couldn't square up the wing to fuselage joint. The wing is a solid piece of cast resin, with a slot cut into midspan to drop over the fuselage. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the wing to sit square on the fuselage. If it looked okay from the front, it was skewed when viewed from behind. If it looked square from behind, it looked skewed when viewed from the front. The initial assumption was that the bottom of the fuselage wasn't square to the sides, so two thick layers of putty were applied to try and square it up (Photos 1&2). This reduced the issue but didn't eliminate it.
A set of drawings were soon found on the internet. Out came the rulers and a square to check the model's dimensions. What looked like a possible twist in the fuselage couldn't be verified using the square and the ruler. Rather, the fuselage dimensions matched the drawings, and everything appeared straight and square. The top of the wing appears to have a slight dihedral, when it should be dead flat, but this helps offset the skew. I am also not sure that the dihedral could be corrected without a lot of effort.
Photo 1 - The underside needed some putty.
Photo 2 - Second putty layer.
Photo 3 - The wing is supposed to be flat
Lots more fiddling finally found a way to assemble the fuselage and wings to reduce the appearance of skew to an acceptable level. With that, it was time to paint the interior details.
The interior provided is pretty basic. The cockpit contains 2 seats and an instrument panel. Four overstuffed chairs and two basic chairs are provided for the cabin area. I was able to find a picture of the instrument panel but nothing on the rest of the cockpit or cabin. I decided to paint the cockpit a light gray, with leather seats on silver frames. I doubt very much the four overstuffed chairs would have been used in the north, so they were set aside. The two simpler seats were painted as leather with silver frames. I found some oil drums and a chest of drawers at the train show, painted them, and placed them in the cabin to fill the area. I suspect the cabin walls would have been lined with plywood, so they were painted in a buff colour, and then overpainted with a sienna oil paint to represent wood.
Photos 1 to 3 - Basic cockpit and cabin, ready to install into the fuselage.
The kit includes separate doors for both the port and starboard sides, but only the port side door has an opening cast into the fuselage. The starboard side was completely blank. Drawings show that G-CASK had both doors, so the starboard side needed the door details added. I generally prefer closing canopies and doors to keep dust out. I debated closing the port side door but the kit door was a very poor fit and would have needed a lot of work to close. I will instead have to figure out a way to make hinges to show it open. Not wanting two doors open, and loath to cut a new door into the very hard resin material, the starboard door details were scribed using the kit door as a template.
The kit supplies multiple sets of clear resin windows for the cabin and the cockpit. None of the windows were particularly clear, and polishing didn’t do much to help improve the clarity. I debated using an old CD cover to make new windows, but got lazy and decided it wasn’t worth the effort. One set of side windows seemed about 25% too large, and were quite thick, so was set aside in favour of the other set. The thinner set were dipped in Gauzy Agent, a product new to me, which helped improve clarity. The cabin windows were installed into the fuselage slightly proud, all gaps sealed using CA, then sanded back flush to the fuselage side. The clear resin proved very hard, making sanding a slow process. The windows were then polished to restore clarity and a coat of gauzy agent brushed on to restore shine. Not perfect but I wasn’t looking to show the simplistic internal cabin details.
With the cabin windows installed, it was time to look at the front of the plane. The separate cowling has a distinctly rounded profile, while the fuselage is very definitely square. A considerable amount of putty was needed to blend the transition. As the putty was sanded, it became apparent that the cowling had a number of dips and valleys that were smoothed out by the putty. The top of the cowling was also sanded to try and even out the curvature.
As delivered, the real plane had an unusual forward slanted windshield, where the top of the windshield was farther forward than the bottom. This was latter changed for a more conventional windshield, where the windshield sloped backwards, with bottom ahead of the top. I wanted to model the latter style of windshield. Like the side windows, the kit includes two different front windshields. One is cast with quite a large pour stub. Strangely, the instructions have it X-ed out as not for use. The second front window is supplied in multiple pieces, but they seem to be intended for the earlier forward slanted windshield. I resorted to fiddling with the windshield with the large pour stub in the hope it could be used as the later style windshield. After a few minutes trying to fit it, I began to think it was also intended to be the older style, forward slant windshield, but couldn’t make that orientation fit the provided wing slot. Further fiddling found it could be slotted into the wing from underneath, in the desired backward slanted position. With even more fiddling, a decent fit was achieved - see photo 2 below. Now to cut off that massive pour stub.
Photo 1 - Windows installed and cowling attached. White styrene strips have been added, above the windows, as spacers to level the wing.
Photo 2 - Starboard side door has been scribed. Trial fit of windshield in progress. The large pour block, sticking up above the top of the wing, is still attached to the top of the windshield. The windshield fit proved better than expected.
The fuselage to wing twist continued to nag at me, and I continued to play with it. Late one night, after playing with it for far too long, I came to the conclusion that the wing was too thick on one side, or the fuselage was too tall on the other side. Sanding the wing would be too difficult, so the focus shifted to the fuselage. Sanding down a fuselage wall would drop the wing relative to the fuselage, creating a step between the top of the fuselage and the wing. It was decided to instead build up the other side of the fuselage with plastic strip. This worked, and the fuselage to wing joint finally sits square!
Tamiya Spitfire
Giving the Fokker the bulk of my attention has penalized the Spitfire. Tired of all the sanding, attention shifted to the Spitfire over the last week, and some good progress has been made.
This kit is such a contrast to the Fokker. Fantastic instructions, with clear painting directions, highly detailed parts, and everything fits on the first attempt. The kit even includes photo etched rudder pedal straps that actually fit. Even more amazing, the pilot’s feet slipped right into the straps when he was test fit into the cockpit.
Seat armour was added to early Spitfires sometime in late 1940. It was essentially steel plate inserted behind the seat. The Spitfire I am modelling almost certainly would have had the armour installed but the kit doesn’t include it. The initial attempt to create seat armour as a failure. I found a file on the internet to cut the shape out of 0.001” plastic. Try as I might, I couldn’t figure out how to install it. I eventually realized that the armour was installed between the seat and the seat frame, but simply couldn’t get the cut shape to fit. Recalling a magazine review that installed armour, I found the article and learned the author used photo etch from an Eduard kit. Digging out that kit from the stash, I found the PE piece and the instructions showed how to installed. The photo etch armour was used to cut new pieces from styrene, and the Tamiya seat was adapted to install the new armour. It is very visible in the cockpit so was worth the effort.
It was originally intended to build the kit with the cockpit closed, but was changed to open cockpit with an open cockpit side door to show off all the details. I like including pilots and the kit includes a beautifully cast pilot, that unfortunately is sitting with both hands resting on his knees. I didn’t think it would be possible to reconfigure the kit figure, moving an arm to hold the control stick, so he was painted up as is. It has taken 8 - 10 enjoyable hours to progress the cockpit to near completion.
Photo 1 - side cockpit details installed and painted
Photos 2&3 - The cockpit tub painted and ready for flat coat. The armour is the plate directly behind the seat in photo 3.
Photo 4 - Pilot painted and ready for flat coat
Photo 5 - Pilot test fit into the cockpit tub
And that’s it for another blog update. Stay safe and take care.
Comments