I really have done some extensive building the last few months. I still have to finish the Shuttle stack, I know, and I will. But I got a little frustrated after printing the boosters out wrong twice on very expensive paper (silly, of course, it just is a few euros at most - if not less).
I put the SRB’s aside for the time being went on and did the Eoles. After that I went and made one of my favourite aircraft models of all time, the Supermarine Spitfire. It is the well-known Anwalt model, available via Kartonmodellbau.de and via the Papermodelers forum. The model is designed as the plane Douglas Bader flew and it is a dream to build. Everything looks nice and fits just great.
While buildiing this I also have my daily jobs and a very nice girlfriend I have to take care of. So this build went slow. Slower than I wanted and perhaps even slower than I ever have been. I started this in the end of january. Feels like a long time ago. Different times.
For those of you who easily get bored by a building story, here's a photo of the final result. Click it to expand. The rest of the story is below!
The start is - as always - the cockpit tub. Nicely but not overly detailed. Just enough bustle and handles to make it look nice and cockpit-y.
Now the hull is wrapped around this cockpit and that went fine. The last time I tried this was with the Myasishchev M.55 which I abandoned because of the bad fit (my fault, I reduced the model in size significantly but used paper that was too thick). I will get back to the M55 another day, but then again, I might not in the nearby future.
The fit of the Spitfire is amazing. it all looks nice and fits snug. The edges of course are all coloured with art pencils, with fitting colours. Now I don’t have ‘sky’ as a colour in my pencil set, the odd desaturated greenish grey colour used for many aircraft undersides but there’s a grey pencil that will do just as well. Grey always is the option to go to if you miss a certain colour. The cockpit was done, the fuselage end to the back was coming on fine. The canopy (the Malcolm hood in particular) is a special shape which is hard to repicate in paper and isn’t easily made in transparencies either. One has to mould it. This will be made in the end, using a 3D mould made of card and clay.
The model calls for hinges in the tail section and wings for being able to move the steering surfaces. Now this isn’t a toy and I am not going to play with it. The only thing I like to be able to move is the propeller. So I glued the moving parts of the tail section in place. That went right. Now on to the wings.
The center piece of the wing section is supposed to be folded over to make the attachment to the fuselage and has extra add-ons for the chines, nice curved-up sections that make the transition to the hull more fluent. It all needs a litle sanding of the edges to make the fit more flush. it goes together quite well. I just made some small cutting errors and printed out a new sheet - but at the wrong size; my printer automatically wants to resize everything to 97% while I need 100% to keep true to the scale. I forgot to change the setting and I realised it too late; when I had the mid-section almost ready and it didn’t fit the wing. [insert some nasty profanities here] After that I reprinted is and now it does fit. Of course it does.
Onward. The question rose: What next? The wings. But in what order? Because the instructions leave you hanging a little as far as which steps to take first but just shows you exploded views from certain steps. I figured I had to close the wings up first. next would be attach wings to the hull but also the curved chines. Should I first gkue them tie t eh wongs and then the whole shebang to the hull section? Okay, let’s see. Chines cut, lots of careful curving. Now, what next? how to add the hull? Where to put the glue? I decided to do it as follows:
Glue the chines to the wings. Put the hull into place, carefully checking the position of the letters on the hull with the piece on the chines. Then I added some cocktail sticks between chine and hull on one side. The gaps between were given some drops of white glue on the inside and then the sticks were carefully removed. Carefully pressing the chine top edge to the hull to avoid smearing. Result was snug. Nice. Same on the other side, after the glue was a little more cured. Then ailerons were added.
I made a start with the landing gear. Wheels were cut out of cardboard, and clad with book binder’s linen. It gives the wheels a nice off-road-grassy fields - tread. I left the wheels alone for a while to concentrate on the added model within the model: the Rolls Royce Merlin.
Yes. The nose section of the Spit will be open. No ‘bonnet’, so to speak. The propeller will be attached but the engine will be fully exposed.
There were a few people before me who did this too and so I can use their experiences for my build. Now, the Merlin was meant for another paper model but with some study of the location of the Merlin firewall, the Merlin model can be added to this kit too.
The Merlin kit has some amount of metal rods involved in the build. I used mainly brass for it. The frame / engine cradle itself is easy and fairly straightforward. I added some extra detailing to the firewall with thin wire for pressure (oil?) lines. I also used zinc chromate acrylic paint for all of the metal.
Now for the paper. First engine part after building the cradle was the engine’s supercharger. It’s the rearmost part of the engine. Complex shapes, lots of edge glueing. Small parts, especially the small ladder-like parts that go over the cylindrical elements. Amazing results though. Up next was the engine block itself, with the rocker boxes on top and all the whatnots an doodads and the pointy bit that holds the prop axle.
Again it all went together very well and before I knew it, I was a day further and had built most of the engine. It just was a little… wel, how can I put it, crooked. Bent. Un-straight, so to say. I don’t know exactly where it went wrong but it now looked as if the engine had an accident. I carefully loosened the engine in its cradle and repositioned it the best I could. It looked a lot better. Not perfect but better nevertheless.
The engine had lots of small and smaller pieces to add. Let’s just say I needed a lot of new knives because of their sharp pointy bit. The outer frame was just single layer paper and quite fragile. With all of it added and ready, the engine was added to the firewall at the front of the Spitfire. It immediately looked the part. Wonderful result.
Wheels were added, Gear doors, easy stuff. I made a diorama base for the plane. I plan to display it in a perspex case so it won’t be gathering dust too much. For the display I used a wooden picture frame about 5 cm deep and a piece of ceiling-sysyem board I had laying around. I cut that to size, covered it in hobby glue and sprinkled it with grass fibre used in model landscaping. I made some muddy tracks in it where the plane rolled through to show the field's quality.
Last part of the build was the Malcolm hood canopy. Unfortunately, I didn;t make photos of the process. Sorry. What I did: I made a canopy-shaped frame from cardboard and filled it up with air-drying modelling paste (DAS) and used putty and sandpaper to smoothen the irregularities and the overall shape. I heated a piece of packaging plastic over my stove and pulled it over the canopy-mould. The result was great. I left it stuck on the mould to add the strips around the canopy’s outer edges. Then I carefully wiggled it loose, cut off the ecxess plastic and glued it in the open position on the Spitfire. The windscreen was easier and I used a little CA to attach it all together.
And there she stands. Douglas Bader’s Spitfire, on a grassy field, for a quick engine maintenance, the engine panels leaning against the wing.
Here are some more photos of the end result, be sure to click on them to see them in full size.
Anyway, that's it for now, I will try and go back to do some stuff that is waiting to be finished: The Shuttle stack, and then I thin, ANS.
Because, in the time between last post and this one we resumed filming and we actually started editing material together! It is a giant puzzle but it is great to see stuff working out and coming together. The deadline of the film is somewhere in november so we stiul lhave some time. I'll keep you posted on both models and film now and then.
Thanks for stopping by,
unitl next time, stay safe!
--PK
No comments:
Post a Comment
attention spammers: all posts are moderated before placing.
you won't get through. you lose.