Fuel Tank Piping
On many projects, I want to open up maintenance panels and scratch build them but I couldn’t as I did not have any good reference photos to support my effort. However, the Duke Hawkings book has many good photos of open panels which almost make me mandatory to do something with this model. Not wanting to waste my efforts on locations that will be hard to see later, I selected the fuel tank piping/flap motor panels at the top of the plane to open up.
(Photos Above: The fuel tank piping and flap actuator motor access bays are installed and painted).
The Kitty Hawk design team for this model must have been their C-Team (low level) or they bought this kit from another model company. The joint seams on this model are very poor and require some effort to smooth them out. All of the fuselage seams are poor fitting. The worst are the fuselage halves seam right by the cockpit and the wing to fuselage seam.
(Photo: The fuselage seam between the front and rear halves is pretty bad. I had to sand heavily here to blend the seams. Then I fill the seams with epoxy and putty. The heavy sanding removed many panel lines which I have to re-scribed later).
The bottom fuselage seam is also very bad. The beam I installed earlier helped to reduce the bad seam dramatically as can be seen here. I only had to putty the forward part of the seam.
The landing gears and wheel wells are all painted before I glue them into place. The wheel wells and inside of the undercarriage doors should be painted with yellow zinc chromate. Various components within the bays, including the landing gears, are painted in Light Aircraft Grey, but again fairly grubby and worn.
Adour Engines
The kit comes with two Rolls Royce Adour engines which you can model them exposed or enclosed. It is my longest desire to do a jet model with a fully exposed engine. To reduce my scratch building workload, I opted to expose one engine and I will dress up that engine as much as practical. To dress up the engine, the kit comes with a photo-etch exhaust petal and burner.
(Photo: The Rolls Royce Adour engine is supplemented with photo-etch parts. The photo-etch nozzle petals worked out very well and looked effective).
This is where the real fun begins. Not wanting to duplicate all the scratch building, I will only expose and detail one open engine bay. Using the photos of the open engine bay I have found online and in my reference book, I scratch built the details in there and the engine using styrene rods and sheets. I am a student of Shep Paine’s school of gizmology: One can’t replicate 100% of some details on a model exactly and to the full extent as the real thing, so one just needs to get close to the most observable details and the rest can be made up of shapes, from leftover model parts, to make the area look busy. This is the same idea when they build the Star Wars models for the movies back then.
The grill or mesh at the burner-can section is completely missing from the kit engine. I cut sheets of photo-etch mesh with the appropriate mesh opening spacing. I bend the cut mesh around the handle of my “big” brush so that each sheet will sit perfectly flat on the engine. Each mesh is delicately adhered to the engine using quick set cyanoacrylate glue along the centreline. To hide the glue there, I cut a thin sheet of styrene and glue on top of the glue line. It sure looks the part!
(Photo: The engine bay is detailed to the extent that I can see when the engine is installed. If I can’t see it then I won’t need to detail it).
I replicated the major piping and tubing over the engine as faithfully to the real thing as practicable using 0.3, 0.5 and 0.6 mm diameter solder wires and styrene rods. My spare parts bin provided the other various shapes to make the start-up compressor and stuff mounted around the exterior of the engine. I find armour model spares are the best stuff to make gizmo. Gizmo from a distance away looks busy. BTW, a real Modeller must have a healthy box of leftover parts. Scratch building to embellish this engine took me about seven hours of work.
(Photos Below: The top one is the original kit engine – bare. The bottom one is the engine after I improved it).
For completeness sake, I also detailed the starboard engine cover. I don’t have any reference photo of the interior details of the cover except what I can extrapolate from a photo that shows the cover when looking in from the aft end.
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