Advice on scratch building

[davecana]

I have been pondering the idea of scratch building an A330 in 1/72. This is mainly because the rest of my RAAF models are also in 1/72, and I would most likely do a second in AirFrance colours. For the fuselage, I have found a piece of poly pipe the correct diameter, but now I'm wondering how to do the wings. Do I carve a piece of wood, try and find a piece of solid plastic and start to carve? Any advice on scratch building something big would be appreciated. This is a long term project, so don't expect to see it on the ACAM expo table too soon. I have already scaled out some drawings from the net, to as close to 1/72 as I can get them, and I think this is the first step.

[skystreak80]

A 1/72 A330 would look amazing
If it was me i would use a revell A330 as a base guide get some measuring calipers and just measure everything and then times it by 2 also by using the revell kit you could assemble the revell kits wings and fuselage and slice everything like a loaf of bread to get the correct fuselage cross section and airfoil ect trace around all the sliced parts and copy and print them out twice the size and then you would have all your templates to work with and take a lot of guess work out of it especially around the nose and tail but if you didn't want to do it that way you could try carving the cockpit / nose and tail out of soft wood or a block of balsa then cover it in resin once you are happy with the shape but carving an accurate A330 cockpit and nose would be tricky to get right not impossible tho. Hope that gave you some ideas let us know if you decide as i actually have actually thought about doing something like this my self.

Lee

[DesTROYer]

Just what I was thinking, Lee. Cross sections.

[RayS]

Dave,

As I mentioned elsewhere there is a guy building 1/48 C-17 and KC-10 over on BritModeller

C-17 Link

KC-10 Link

I also mentioned AIM in the UK were doing a 1/72 A330 kit (including parts for a KC-30). The reason I know is that I was going to help out with creating the masters based on their A310 kit. It turned out the Neil at AIM got help from someone closer to home so I have had no more participation in the project (postage cost of getting the A310 kits to me was going to be high). There was mention of it some time ago on the AIM web page but I have not seen any reference for some time.

oh,, and Lee's suggestions of using the Revell kit as a base and slicing it was the way I was going to do it. That is for the parts I could not use from/or modify from the 1/72 A310 kit.