Me and Frank...that 1/72 Carvair

[Tony P]

Coming along nicely. Looks like you did a good job on the fuselage.

[VH-WAL]

Hello again,
The model looked mostly ok after the prime but it rapidly became evident that panel lines and rivet lines on the vacuform fuselage were too crude and in many places too deep to either keep or to expect primer to cover, so I did what any other brickie would do to cover a bad job.. I rendered the fuselage with Tamiya filler thinned down with GP thinner. Worked a treat..dried quickly and wasn't too bad to wet sand back.

Rendered


Sanded back, trenches filled

another hour or so sanding to go, then another coat of primer then we'll see if the surface will be suitable for Alclad

[Knotty]

That will come up alright Wally , I can see the finish line in sight !!

[VH-WAL]

Wing and fuselage all jigged up, checked square everywhere
30 min epoxy setting



next fill and shape the wing root fillet

then jig and fasten the tailplane

[VH-WAL]

Last night I filled the wing root join with milliput and approximately smoothed it into shape. This morning Frank was stretched out on the rack again and the tailplane was fastened into position, again with 30 min epoxy. After it had set Frank came out of the jig for the final time and took flight around the house for the first time with appropriate brrm and zoom noises causing a fine shower of spittle to atomise in the chilly Perth Morning air.

next job is filling the hole around the tailplane join, smoothing some milliput over into some semblance of a fairing.
Then some really tedious work will ensue around shaping those fillets into some semblance of credibility.. that is THE BIG job left ahead of me, the rest will be a doddle.
Not perfect, Frank is a bit fat around the middle but it still looks the part, I am pleased
and now the jig will be disassembled till required again (not too soon I hope)

[tor lives]

She sure is looking the part Wal.....just like a store-bought one
TOR

[hrtpaul]

Amazing work as per usual there Wally

[wombatair]

Outstanding

LL

[VH-WAL]

Hi gang, thanks for comments,

Now that the heavy lifting has been completed, I can look forward to the cosmetics and coincidentally today the postie delivered some 1/72 decals from that splendid fellow Peter Mahoney from Hawkeye Models.

I presume these decals are scaled up from those that were designed to fit the Roden 1/144 kit, and I have been thinking it will be a bloody miracle if these are going to be a perfect match for Frank.




At some time I will scan these decals, print on paper and test fit. Peter has kindly offered to tweak the decal design for me if required. I won't be making any copies for anyone else, this work is just to see if I can use these decals out of the "box" or determine what changes need to be made.

These decals have highlighted a shortcoming of my fuselage... it doesn't have the albeit quite short and not very high, dorsal fin extension, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it also masking up the white on fuselage and the black on the leading edge of the fin is going to be quite tricky to achieve a good decal fit (the white bits of the decal design requiring a white background to show through)
Any way here he sits with the first application of filler on the tail fillet. Even though I filled the empty space with bits of balsa, the awkward access to the tailplane "hole" area meant there were still many gaps where the milliput could be pushed through. I will have to wait for this application to set solid before I can put some more on without it disappearing into the void.

[VH-WAL]

Hi guys,
had a bit of a rest with this waiting for some apoxie sculpt to arrive in the post, I found milliput too stiff to shape into fine fairings. I'd read about this apoxie stuff and can confirm it is much better to work with. So I fine-tuned the fillets / fairings around the wing and tailplane and shot them with primer to check our work...hmm not bad .. a little more shaping and smoothing to be done but this just about ends the really difficult part of fitting Franks limbs together. I am feeling the love here, I am very fond of this model!