1:72 Tornado GR4, Dambusters70th Anniversary

[dr_gn]

Thanks guys. No, there won't be any crew, maybe a ladder and a few remove before flight things.

[dr_gn]

Ian Lancs said:

dr_gn said:

I think the round display on the pilot's instrument panel should be rectangular, but not much I could do about that:

Thats a pity - it is indeed rectangular on GR4 (the Pilot MultiFunction Display - PMFD). The cockpit you've got would appear to be a GR1 when it was the Repeat Projected Map Display (or something similar)(RPMD). But the entire thing is stunning - way more patience than I ever had building models!

Ta - yes it's a cockpit for a GR1; it's the only one available.

[dr_gn]

johnS2000 said:

That cockpit is amazing

Just one question ?

How the hell do you do that ??

Basically a very small brush:



We've been through a lot together over the past 30 years or so. It started off - I think - as a Humbrol #000, but gradually lost it's bristles. I never seemed to get around to throwing it away. I also use it for applying tiny amounts of PVA to various bits, but despite the abuse it never seems to mind.

[dr_gn]

Did some mods to the wings yesterday: The pylons, as fitted looked wrong when assembled to the fuselage with the correct anhedral. They were designed to pivot, but unfortunately when the wings were straight they were distinctly angled inwards towards the fuselage, and there was no way of making them hang more vertically without over stressing the pivots. I decided to snap the pylons off, and fill the holes with plastic:



I've drilled some central witness marks which, after final painting, will be fully drilled out to fit the pylons, which I will fit with plastic spigots.

I also did some work on the wingtip lights. With the exception of the windscreen, all the clear parts in the kit are totally crap, and either need replacing or modifying. Revell already sent me a replacement canopy which is a slight improvement on the original. I temporarily attached the lenses and sanded them to profile, followed by polishing to bring back the transparency:



Left image modded, right original.

[dr_gn]

Really slow progress on this one, mainly due to the Aires resin stuff which never quite seems to fit, usually by a few microns.

This was the third attempt at the wheel bays, legs and doors. They may still be a little bit over weathered, but it seems to depend on an individual aircraft:





I added some brake pipes, and I still have to make some main door rams. The wheel lamps are almost ready for fitting too.

There are a couple of small vanes in each intake, which I made from some spare plastic strip:



Here they are fitted:



The intakes are not that great, but in the end they won't be too visible.

There were a couple of sink marks on the exhaust fairings which needed a bit of filler:



Now do do battle fitting the cockpit and wheel bays.

Can anyone gues what this is:

[dr_gn]

Boatbuoy said:

Not sure how far you've got with this project, but unless you've finished it's fairly prototypical according to to todays headlines!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30338659

Yeah I saw that.

No it's not finished yet!

[dr_gn]

So now I've got a problem. Concensus was that the GR4 is painted in Medium Sea Grey, and this seemed to be right according to the sample pics I took at Duxford (MSG, Neutral Grey, maybe a bit of light grey in the mix too, but basically Vallejo MSG was close enough):



So I used the MSG from the sample, and mixed in 30% sky grey to lighten it to compensate for the dark preshading I intended to use, and also to lessen the scale effect which tends to make colours on small models look darker.

Problem is, it's way too dark. Here are the stores compared with a photo (LloydH's photo actually):



Obviously the comparison is a colour balance nightmare, but based on the contrast between the nose of the Skyshadow pod and the body, the grey is way, way too dark; the tail graphics will look totally wrong in terms of contrast next to MSG.

I don't think the GR.4 in the photo is anything like Medium Sea Grey, and to be honest, I've now got no idea what it should be, so I'm stuck.

[dr_gn]

Perdu, it's still way off. Here are a couple more of LloydH's images, even the darkest one looks nothing like the grey I've got. The test is the Skyshadow contrast:

[dr_gn]

I wonder if they used barley grey for some aircraft? I think the Typhoon has that, and it looks lighter than MSG.

[dr_gn]

Perdu, Yertis, I don't think I can take any more grey. I just counted 10 different types in the box, and I'm still mixing whites and blacks into them. It's getting wierd...I want to go back to just building stuff and painting it in an evening.

[dr_gn]

I always promised myself this wouldn't happen...

[dr_gn]

I made the masks for the swept parts of the wing roots, and glued the wings in place in the unswept position. I added some bits of plasticard behind where the intake openeings are, to cover up all the mess that's in the fuselage:







Next job is to attach the top fuselage, forward fuselage/nosecone (with ballast) and fin.

[dr_gn]

I've substituted a much more sturdy tailplane pivot/fixing out of aluminium tubes and brass pins for incidence pegs. This will allow me to paint them seperately and fix them on after the fuselage is complete:



Who'd have though after all these months, it would look something like a Tornado when all the bits are put together:

[dr_gn]

Ta perdu. I taped everything together to see how much nose ballast I'd need, and it turns out the answer is 'none'. Instructions call for 10g, but I guess resin and Araldite weigh a lot more than the equivalent styrene:

[dr_gn]

I ended up ordering an SBS resin nose - I wasn't 100% with the one I re-profiled. Luckily the original nose snapped off with a clean break. This is the new one; looks like I'll now have a spare brass pitot tube too:



So while it arrives I've been filling the various gaps between parts and re-scribing the panel detail that was lost (or not there in the first place). The forward fuselage on this kit is strange because it has good surface detail on the top and sides, but very poorly defined detail underneath. It isn't uncommon on kits to see surface detail refined in the areas the eye is drawn to (like the nose of an aircraft), but this one seems to have taken it to an extreme. Even more puzzling is the fact that the rear fuselage has excellent detail underneath. Anyway, I filled the fuselage joins and what was left of the panel lines, and re-scribed all-new ones:





The top of the intakes is also very vague, again with the lines partially formed or missing:



So I filled in what was there, and again re-scribed the whole lot on both sides:



You can also see on that test-fit picture that the IFR pipe fairing touches the intake. I will have to carefully sand the fairing back to give a bit of a gap. the ridges and bumps on the paint are where I've masked the cockpit etc. while applying guide coats. It will all disappear before final painting.

Yes, it looks a mess in the photos, but once it's had a final flatting and a coat of grey it will look acceptable again. Re-scribing lost detail is not a job I like very much, but it does make a difference.

[dr_gn]

So most of the re-scribing is done. Just waiting for the nose and to fit the windscreen and I can get it painted.

I think this one is going to fight all the way; I noticed that the shoulder rails were way off a good fit on the fuselage:



It must just be the way the kit is - the forward fuselage was a pretty good fit (it's not bend downwards) and in any case there is a large gap at the rear of the rail too.

The rails themselves do have quite a bit of detail that need adding to their undersides, mainly square and round pockets.

Also fitted the misile rail to the port inner wing pylon (the only one fitted on this aircraft at the time of the flypast), and that needed quite a bit of filling too. It also needs some detail added to the face:



Much to my surprise, my son has obviously been taking careful note of my modelling endeavours; for Christmas he made me this "not finished model holder" out of some polystyrene and a bog roll tube:



It's surprisingly handy for holding not finished models.

I also got a few modelling books for Christmas:



They are all great books, for different reasons. the Osprey Painting and Finishing one is very slick and is full of great tips and techniques. The other two (the Build and Convert" series) you have to be a bit careful with. The ones by Mike Grant are excellent - loads of great ideas for improving old kits, although his love of black-ink panel lines ruins his work in many cases IMO. The other books in the series, i.e. the ones "Edited by...." contain models built by various people, many of which are hilariously bad. Once you've got over the shock of a published book containing such appalling work, it's quite funny to read how much effort has apparently gone into the stuff that's in there. You can learn a lot about how not to build models, although I guess that wasn't the pont of the books. Ow, I am terrible...

[dr_gn]

The SBS nose arrived today, just needed the resin casting head sawing off:



Here it is compared with my reprofiled nose (middle) and a spare original:



I think the biggest difference is at the interface with the fuselage - it's more tangential. TBH I shuold have just used the kit nose, the difference is tiny, and I would never haev noticed any error.

Also made a start marking the pockets under the shoulder rails. I'll hollow them out before attaching to the fuselage and filling the gaps.



The other daft thing is that the wing seals are wrong if you have the wings extended - they have a massive gap where the wing root would fit. I've made some new ones which I'll sand to a precise profile once the fuselage is painted. I cut off the rear portions of the seals and filled the remaining cut outs with plastic rod. These parts are not fabric, so will be attached now, filled and painted fuselage colour:

[dr_gn]

perdu said:

Did the brass new pitot come with it doc?

Or will you still be able to reuse the old new one



Old?

New?

you know what I mean

You get a brass pitot tube and AoA probes with the resin nose. So I've got them duplicated. I'm sure I'll end up building another Tornado at some point - I've got a couple in the stash.

[dr_gn]

I've added a few square and round pockets in the underside of the rails.



They aren't 100% accurate, but are better representations than the originals:



Also added some detail to the missile rail on the port pylon:

[dr_gn]

The nose is proving to be a nightmare - I wish I'd just used the kit version. From what people said, it was way off, but I think the fact is that once painted, you'd be hard pressed to tell the original from this resin version. The tangency of the nose to fuselage interface is all over the place. At least it's giving me a chance to use my new flexi file, which is ideal for this kind of stuff:



Also thought I'd make a start on the rose joint type things at the back of the shoulder rails. Again, not perfect, but when finished they will at least suggest that something is there: