realworkingsailor

Trying to decide whether to pose the speed brake opened or closed. Photos of it on the tarmac shows it both ways.

Finished! 

Thanks for all the likes and kind comments!
 
One small update for today, I have finished painting the landing gear doors. 
 
Once again, I strayed away from using the supplied decals on the main doors and painted them on as I did for the fuselage stripes. Apparently the ground crew of the kit supplied scheme made a small error when they applied the invasion stripes (see if you can guess what it is 🤔):
 

 
I've also installed the engine exhaust pipes. They were painted with Humbrol gunmetal followed by a wash of Floquil rust to give a nice burnt metal look.
 

 
This gets me just about as far as I can go. My usual next step is to paint and attach the landing gear, followed by the last little parts like the arial, pitot tube, etc (any items that would be at risk of damage should an accidental belly landing occur). Until my replacement parts arrive (which I'm really not expecting until the end of this week at the very earliest), I will have to be content to sit and wait. Oh Well....
 
Andy
 
 
 

Very carefully.  I'll get my hat and coat now.   You are doing a great job on this model.

it's almost become a lost art.....
 
Of course I would be one foolish enough to try it.... {chuckle}

Thanks for all the likes and kind comments!
 
One small update for today, I have finished painting the landing gear doors. 
 
Once again, I strayed away from using the supplied decals on the main doors and painted them on as I did for the fuselage stripes. Apparently the ground crew of the kit supplied scheme made a small error when they applied the invasion stripes (see if you can guess what it is 🤔):
 

 
I've also installed the engine exhaust pipes. They were painted with Humbrol gunmetal followed by a wash of Floquil rust to give a nice burnt metal look.
 

 
This gets me just about as far as I can go. My usual next step is to paint and attach the landing gear, followed by the last little parts like the arial, pitot tube, etc (any items that would be at risk of damage should an accidental belly landing occur). Until my replacement parts arrive (which I'm really not expecting until the end of this week at the very earliest), I will have to be content to sit and wait. Oh Well....
 
Andy
 
 
 

Well received, thank you so much! 
 
Andy

Well received, thank you so much! 
 
Andy

Thanks for all the likes and kind comments!
 
One small update for today, I have finished painting the landing gear doors. 
 
Once again, I strayed away from using the supplied decals on the main doors and painted them on as I did for the fuselage stripes. Apparently the ground crew of the kit supplied scheme made a small error when they applied the invasion stripes (see if you can guess what it is 🤔):
 

 
I've also installed the engine exhaust pipes. They were painted with Humbrol gunmetal followed by a wash of Floquil rust to give a nice burnt metal look.
 

 
This gets me just about as far as I can go. My usual next step is to paint and attach the landing gear, followed by the last little parts like the arial, pitot tube, etc (any items that would be at risk of damage should an accidental belly landing occur). Until my replacement parts arrive (which I'm really not expecting until the end of this week at the very earliest), I will have to be content to sit and wait. Oh Well....
 
Andy
 
 
 

Thanks for all the likes and kind comments!
 
One small update for today, I have finished painting the landing gear doors. 
 
Once again, I strayed away from using the supplied decals on the main doors and painted them on as I did for the fuselage stripes. Apparently the ground crew of the kit supplied scheme made a small error when they applied the invasion stripes (see if you can guess what it is 🤔):
 

 
I've also installed the engine exhaust pipes. They were painted with Humbrol gunmetal followed by a wash of Floquil rust to give a nice burnt metal look.
 

 
This gets me just about as far as I can go. My usual next step is to paint and attach the landing gear, followed by the last little parts like the arial, pitot tube, etc (any items that would be at risk of damage should an accidental belly landing occur). Until my replacement parts arrive (which I'm really not expecting until the end of this week at the very earliest), I will have to be content to sit and wait. Oh Well....
 
Andy
 
 
 

Gotta love painting three different colors on small parts 😁

Thanks Mike.
 
Here the intakes have been cemented in place and an application of Mr Surfacer 1000 brushed into the seams. Once the Mr Surfacer was dry, knocked it all down and smoothed it out with a Tamiya fine sanding sponge, wet. Helps prevent the creation of new scratches when you sand it wet. Also added some stretched sprue to the hefty gap that was in the seam in front of the vertical stab.

Thanks for all the likes and kind comments!
 
One small update for today, I have finished painting the landing gear doors. 
 
Once again, I strayed away from using the supplied decals on the main doors and painted them on as I did for the fuselage stripes. Apparently the ground crew of the kit supplied scheme made a small error when they applied the invasion stripes (see if you can guess what it is 🤔):
 

 
I've also installed the engine exhaust pipes. They were painted with Humbrol gunmetal followed by a wash of Floquil rust to give a nice burnt metal look.
 

 
This gets me just about as far as I can go. My usual next step is to paint and attach the landing gear, followed by the last little parts like the arial, pitot tube, etc (any items that would be at risk of damage should an accidental belly landing occur). Until my replacement parts arrive (which I'm really not expecting until the end of this week at the very earliest), I will have to be content to sit and wait. Oh Well....
 
Andy
 
 
 

Thanks again everyone!
 
The lettering is tentatively finished. 
 

 

 
As I did with my Hurricane, I laser printed the registration number on blank decal paper. As long as I keep choosing to model airplanes with black painted numbers, I can do this as many times as I like. The font is about as close as I could get and the "1" in 518 is actually a lower case "L", but overall I'm happy.
 

 
The only spot where I have questions is the stencil located inboard of the underside roundels. It reads "Check Firing Contacts Before Connecting Leads". After I had applied them and figured out what they said, it got me wondering if these stencils are specific to rocket firing Typhoons or were they applied to all Typhoons, regardless. If anyone has information, please let me know. I haven't sealed the decals yet, so removal is still easy.
 
Andy

Thanks for all the likes and kind comments!
 
One small update for today, I have finished painting the landing gear doors. 
 
Once again, I strayed away from using the supplied decals on the main doors and painted them on as I did for the fuselage stripes. Apparently the ground crew of the kit supplied scheme made a small error when they applied the invasion stripes (see if you can guess what it is 🤔):
 

 
I've also installed the engine exhaust pipes. They were painted with Humbrol gunmetal followed by a wash of Floquil rust to give a nice burnt metal look.
 

 
This gets me just about as far as I can go. My usual next step is to paint and attach the landing gear, followed by the last little parts like the arial, pitot tube, etc (any items that would be at risk of damage should an accidental belly landing occur). Until my replacement parts arrive (which I'm really not expecting until the end of this week at the very earliest), I will have to be content to sit and wait. Oh Well....
 
Andy
 
 
 

good evening everyone
thank you for comments likes
 
day 28 1st parts off keel, prow, stern post 
 outer layers for transom and upper gun ports
 and more gun port fairing
 
also a lot of deck fittings are being made up between planking etc, but i am trying to avoid messing my log up to much

I’ve been doing as much digging on my own as I can, the only real reference that I can find is from a decal company called aviaeology. In their aircraft stencil set for the Typhoon, they are ambivalent on the status of that particular stencil. From what they say, definitely present in rocket Typhoons, maybe/maybe not for bombphoons…
 

 
In all honesty it’s enough ambiguity for me to leave things as they are, but my curiosity is still piqued…
 
Andy

Thanks again everyone!
 
The lettering is tentatively finished. 
 

 

 
As I did with my Hurricane, I laser printed the registration number on blank decal paper. As long as I keep choosing to model airplanes with black painted numbers, I can do this as many times as I like. The font is about as close as I could get and the "1" in 518 is actually a lower case "L", but overall I'm happy.
 

 
The only spot where I have questions is the stencil located inboard of the underside roundels. It reads "Check Firing Contacts Before Connecting Leads". After I had applied them and figured out what they said, it got me wondering if these stencils are specific to rocket firing Typhoons or were they applied to all Typhoons, regardless. If anyone has information, please let me know. I haven't sealed the decals yet, so removal is still easy.
 
Andy

Taking a break from putting the finishing touches on the interior, I decided to spend some time on the engine.  The kit engine is quite nice, but I picked up an engine that Vector makes specifically for this kit (VDS 48-118).  Very detailed kit as you can see below.  
 
Note:  the Vector set includes a replacement bottom part for the engine housing.  If you are building this kit with the Vector engine in the order in the instructions, you might miss this as the engine housing is built first on page 10, and the engine isn't built until page 15 of the instructions.  This part is important as the Vector engine has a different shape to the underside than the kit part which is a little simplified.  As part of the Vector set, you also have to trim off part of the pair of pipes that come down off the part containing the front pairs of legs.
 
 
 
My one pet peeve about this and other resin engines I've built (Aires, CMK) is that the propeller rod does not fit the kit propeller (way too narrow).  Why can't they make the rod to fit the propeller??  Now I have to figure out how to make everything fit. 🤬
 
The engine took a few evenings to put together as I didn't want to rush gluing the cylinders in and having them out of line.  In case you are deciding whether to buy the Vector set, as you can see in the picture below, the kit engine (left, dry fitted) is quite nice, but the Vector engine (right) really takes things up a couple of notches.  I need to do a little filling and cleaning up, but otherwise, I'm really pleased with how the engine came out.
 


 
Here is the engine mount, where you can barely make out the Vector bottom piece in the second picture.  I dry fitted the back pair of legs at the moment, as I want to button up the fuselage and test fit the engine mount before finalizing the mount.  There's also an opening in the mount that you can see in the second picture.  The kit provides two different parts that one can include on the side of the mount.  I just need to pick one of them, since I'm building a different Walrus than the three included in the kit.
 


 
Interestingly (to me at least), the Walrus Pegasus engine/mount was pointed with an offset of 3 degrees to the left.  The kit is designed this way, so kudos to Airfix.
 
Thanks for looking in!

Possibly painted while in the dock. Surprisingly, with the right amount of labour a large ship can be fully sandblasted and painted in a remarkably short period of time (about a week).
If the ship was in any way waterborne at the time, it shouldn’t have toppled like that, unless something serious was done to alter the CG of the ship. Most, if not all, commercial dry docks don’t use the old methods where there’s only a single row of blocks under the keel and shoring beams to hold the ship up. Although there are still more blocks down the centreline, there are typically one or more rows of blocks on each side, depending on how wide the ship is. 
 
Submarines are, of course, the exception as they usually don’t have flat bottoms…. 😁 
 
Andy

I doubt the ship was dry docked for that amount of time. That would cost a fortune, and cost the commercial shipyard a lot of lost business having a dock occupied for that amount of time. Tied up at a lay-by berth is what they’re referring to.
 
Modern dock supports are steel with wood bolsters bolted in place on top.
I did read that there were high winds at the time the ship was knocked off the blocks so it’s possible that either the blocks were not in the right place, or the ship shifted during the pump out and didn’t land correctly on the blocks. I wouldn’t speculate any further until the MAIB or whichever investigation authority is overseeing this incident, publishes its report.
 
Andy

If I may, one of my other hobbies is collecting brass model locomotives, so I may be able to provide some insight. Pretty much all brass model trains available are hand assembled, even commercially made ones. Generally the production runs are very small (a few hundred units of a given type), so the industry does not lend itself to expensive tooling and mechanization. The only fundamental difference between a brass locomotive kit (or scratch build), and a "factory" assembled model is the box it comes in.
 

 
Pretty much all of the solder joints are located in areas that are largely invisible, so that a causal observer wouldn't see them. (There is a little tarnish and staining on this model as its previous owner suffered a house fire and the model was subject to the liberal application of water that fire departments are rightfully well known for), it's otherwise in good mechanical condition. The model was built by Samhongsa in Korea and imported by Van Hobbies (who had a working relationship with Pacific Fast Mail).
 

 
After removing the three screws that hold the shell to the frame, you can see the underside, and interior is quite mottled with solder joints.
 

 
Adding to an earlier post about soldering multiple details, in most brass train models, multiple different solders are used with different melt temperatures. Starting with the highest temperature solder and working down to the lowest (although it's worth noting that in the above model, none of the solder will melt with your typical OTC hardware store soldering iron. To perform any repairs, generally a resistance soldering iron is needed, at the very least.
 
Andy
 

I doubt the ship was dry docked for that amount of time. That would cost a fortune, and cost the commercial shipyard a lot of lost business having a dock occupied for that amount of time. Tied up at a lay-by berth is what they’re referring to.
 
Modern dock supports are steel with wood bolsters bolted in place on top.
I did read that there were high winds at the time the ship was knocked off the blocks so it’s possible that either the blocks were not in the right place, or the ship shifted during the pump out and didn’t land correctly on the blocks. I wouldn’t speculate any further until the MAIB or whichever investigation authority is overseeing this incident, publishes its report.
 
Andy

Post Thirteen- completing the fairing
Having applied the test planks at all levels along the hull, paying specific attention to the bow and stern areas I have reached the point where enough is enough.
Or perhaps not quite.
The next stage is to apply the patterns (248/251) around the  bow. They are formed around the extension pieces of bulkheads 1 -5, which have a subtle convex shape to them that the pattern should follow.

0596
To this end I did find it necessary to soak the patterns to achieve a good conformity.

0598

0599
I did do a little more fairing in this area to further fay the longitudinal gunport strips into the extension shapes.

0601

0602
These bulkhead extensions are eventually removed, but the subtle shape remains.

0603
The patterns are now re-clamped into position.

0608
A milestone of sorts is now reached with the fixing of the first plank.
The lower plank runs beneath the bow pattern and level with the lower gunport frame.
The lime bends well and with the plank clamped into place, it gets the heat treatment to produce the bow curve.

0607
The aft section of this strake has a slight lateral upward curve  from bulkhead  12 to the stern, which again was induced using heat after pinning to the hull.

0606
These photos also show the second plank fitted which runs level with the upper gunport frame.

0609
The section between the two planks are now filled, but I found that an additional 6mm strip doesn’t quite fill the space leaving a gap of around 2mm.
I suppose the intention is to fill this with off-cut slivers but I think I have some wider stuff lying around so I’ll dig it out and spile it to fit the space.
 
 
B.E.
27/03/23
 
 
 
 

Well received, thank you so much! 
 
Andy