Alley Cat 1/48 - Tucano

Time for a Tucano

The RAF has used the Short Tucano as a basic fast jet lead in trainer since 1989. The original Tucano is product of Embraer, a Brazilian aviation company, but the RAF required over 900 modifications to this design.  The Tucano produced by Short Brothers under the agreement with Embraer shares only 50% of its design with the original.

As something different to what I usually do I'll be building the Alley Cat 1/48 Short's Tucano.

The Alley Cat Tucano

Instead of the standard military stuff that I build, with matt camouflage and weathering this build is all about gloss and colour.  It's also a mixed media kit with absolutely no injection molded plastic.

The box is pretty small, in fact it's smaller than my iPad.  However it is sturdy and the contents are well protected with those styrene 'peanuts' that protect against impact damage.  Since this kit is limited run you cannot expect the same flawless presentation that you'd get from a mainstream manufacturer like, say, Tamiya.  What you do get however is a level of service from the manufacturer that the mainstream guys would struggle to match.  My kit had the wrong mask set and a small missing part - no problem.  I just let Alastair at Alley Cat know and he was straight onto it.  Replacements were sent free of charge and arrived within a couple of weeks from the UK. 

Inside the box you get a pile of resin parts.  The resin has casting blocks that need to be removed before assembly. Some of these need quite a bit of care.  That said all of the castings in my kit are very nice indeed.

Panel lines are engraved and are very crisp.  While there will not be any weathering on this build at all these will still look great under a coat of paint.

Prop blades and undercarriage are made from white metal and photoetch is used to provide some additional fine detail.  A nice idea is the inclusion of two lead weights which are shaped to be hidden within the nose of the model ensuring that it does not become a tail sitter.  The canopy is beautifully cast from clear resin.

One of the things that Alley Cat are known for are their decals.  This kit has some lovely screen printed decals covering five RAF aircraft.

The instructions are pretty basic, but frankly the assembly of this kit is pretty straight forward so I don't think they need to provide too much.  There's a few photographs of key assemblies and a written description of how to put it together.  They do include several reference photos of the cockpit and canopy which will be useful as the build progresses.  The marking options include four aircraft in the white/red "raspberry ripple" schemes and one in oxford blue.

I'll be building the first one with the Tucan on the tail, primarily because there's a Tucan on the tail.

I do have a couple of extras that I'll be adding.  I'll be replacing the Martin Baker Mk 8 ejection seats with those from Pavla as these look a bit better that those in the kit.

I'll also be using instrument dial decals from Airscale.  The kit comes with a nice instrument panel but there are no instruments so these will add a degree of realism.  I chose their early allied jets set as the Tucano cockpit is designed to mimic that of the Hawk Jet trainer.

This should be a fun quick build.

Italeri 1/48 Hawker Hunter - Part 2

Back to Part 1

The Beginning is the most Important Part of the Work - Plato

So, here we are.  At the beginning.  Sometimes, when I read a book I skip to the last page to look at the last word and marvel that the journey embodied by the book is a meandering, yet coherent, path to that final word.  A model plane is different though.  The journey will ultimately lead to that last bit of paint, varnish or glue - or possibly the trash can.   But you can't take a peek at the end before you begin.

The Tomte that lives at my house, Bob, has been hanging around.  He has been known to get up to mischief and I am pretty sure that as I work on this kit there will be no exception to that.  After looking at the instructions I decided that the best place to start was with the intake trunking.

The inside of the intake trunking had several ejector pin marks.  I have coloured these in with a black felt pen so they're visible.  They'll have to be removed otherwise they'll be visible should anyone look too hard.

After cleaning up the ejector pins I decided to part assemble the trunking.  Leaving it like this will make it easier to clean up the join lines.  Once the outer sections of the trunking were glued some Mr Surfacer 500 was painted along the join.  I set these aside to dry.  I'll clean them up later.

To demonstrate how much smaller than 1/48 scale the kit seat is I decided to assemble it an compare it to the Aires seat.  I'm not a rivet counter by any means.  I can live with small inaccuracies in a kit but this size difference is just ridiculous.

I have to admit I am not keen to start cutting into resin while Bob is hanging around.  Instead I decided to have a look at the exhaust.  This is nothing more than a tube of plastic.  There's no detail in there whatsoever.  There's no replacement in the Aires set so it will just have to do.  I really don't think you're going to be able to see very much inside the jet exhaust anyway.

I moved onto the tail cone.  After test fitting I noticed that a few of the ejector pins would be visible and there would be a visible void where the base of the tail sits.  I've coloured these in with a black pen so you can see the troublesome areas.

The ejector pins to the rear were sanded off.  Also I glued some plasticard into the void where the base of the vertical tail is.  Once this dries I'll sand it flush and the void will no longer be visible.  For now it gets set aside while I move on with other stuff.

Finally I could resist no longer.  I started work on the resin tub by removing the casting block from the bottom.

Resin dust is a respiratory irritant and like many things nowadays it probably causes cancer.  It's best to keep the dust levels down and to clean it up as soon as you can.

There was a bit of surgery required to the fuselage to make the cockpit fit.  Just part of the bulkhead behind the pilot seat needed to be removed and a small locating tab on the inside.

The fit was pretty good.  This replacement cockpit should look nice once it's painted and installed.

That's all for this installment.  Next time we'll do some more work on the cockpit.

Italeri 1/48 Hawker Hunter - Part 1

The Awesome Hawker Hunter

The beginning of the jet age saw the development of some very sexy looking fighter aircraft.  These first generation jet fighters were not supersonic and were designed on principles that were not too different to the last generation of piston engined fighters.  The Hawker Hunter is one such aircraft.  If the Spitfire marked the epitome of sexy for piston engined fighters, the Hawker Hunter does it for jets.  Some of these planes are now privately owned and still flying.  Check out the footage of one such aircraft below.

If you want to find out a bit more about the Hawker Hunter's development and history the Wikipedia article found here is a good start.

In this blog I'll be building a 1/48 scale Hunter FGA 9 which was based at Khormaksar, Aden in 1966 during the Aden Emergency.  I'm building this as part of a group build on the Flory Models website so I won't be starting until that kicks off.  Since it's close to Christmas Bob the Tomten, who has been hanging around on my desk, is going to keep a critical eye on proceedings.

My kit of choice will be the Italeri re-box of the Academy Hunter.  To this I will be adding the Aires resin detail set, Eduard masks and decals from Xtradecal.

The Italeri Kit

The Italeri hunter was released in 2012 and is a rebox of the Academy Hunter kits both of which were released in 1997.  While Academy chose to release the Mk 6 and the FGA 9 separately, Italeri has chosen to include parts for both variants in the same box.  The kit comes on 6 sprues of light grey plastic and one sprue of clear parts.  Colour callouts are given in federal standard FS numbers as well as Model Master and Italeri paint colours.

Sprue A has the fuselage halves which are split vertically.  These have nice detail especially on the tail and around some of the vents above the wing.  Of note is the large hole where the wing will go this is a departure from the usual slotted approach many manufacturers use.  It will be interesting to see how strong the wing joint will be and how good a fit.  Also apparent is that the rudder and the gun bay under the nose are both separate.  On the real aircraft the gun bay is a separate removable pack but on the model it allows for the different versions to be addressed.

Sprue B has the wings.  Again the surface detail is lovely.  Both the ailerons and flaps are separate.  When many aircraft are at rest they lose hydraulic pressure so you get drooping flaps and so on.  Having these as separate pieces should allow this to be captured in the model.

Sprue C has the horizontal tails, the intake trunking, ailerons and some of the landing gear detail.  There are a few ejector pins on the inside of the trunking but these should be easy to take care of.  Making the trunking seamless might be a bit harder given it's shape but we'll have to see when it is assembled.  There are also some nasty ejector pin marks on the inner face of the gear doors.  Given there is quite a bit of detail on these it will not be possible to remove these marks without also removing this detail.  Good thing I have the Aries set to replace them with.

Sprue D has the flaps, cockpit, tail cones, rudder, and a few other bits and bobs.  It's here that the first real criticism of the kit is apparent.  The cockpit tub is way too shallow.  Ridiculously so.  And as if that were not enough the ejection seat is way too small as well.  It has been said in another review that the seat is more like 1/72 scale than 1/48.  I didn't check this as I will be replacing it.  The flaps also have some light ejection pin marks on the inside which will be impossible to remove without removing all of the ribbing in the process.

There are two copies of sprue E.  This has weapons, drop tanks and wheels. All of these look very nice.

Lastly there are the clear parts.  These are passable.  They're not crystal clear like we've come to expect from some of the more recent kits that have been released and there's a bit of distortion present on the sides of the main canopy.

Italeri have been putting a lot of effort into their choice of markings and this kit is no exception to that.  It comes with a total of six possible aircraft: three based on the Mk 6 airframe and three based on the Mk 9 airframe.  The decals have been printed by Cartograph, the gold standard for decal printing, and are crisp and glossy.

All in all the kit is good in terms of general appearance and level of detail.  However it is not in the league of a Tamiya kit, but then again it's not the same price either.  As a base for further detailing it is great.

The Aires Detail Set

I mentioned earlier that I'll be using the Aires detail set in this build.  This set corrects some of the problems with the kit and adds a whole extra level of detail.  Aires tend to box their stuff up in a single bag and unfortunately that means there are a couple of broken bits in mine which should be easy to fix.

Remember the  the cockpit tub from the kit?  Well the Aires version is a lot better proportioned.  It actually has some depth to it.

The flaps are nice too.  No ejection pin marks here.

The Markings

The markings I am going to use are on the Xtradecal sheet.  This aircraft was used during the Aden Emergency and was based at Khormaksar, Aden in 1966.  It's in the standard RAF Green, Grey camo with aluminium undersides.

I'm headed off to Germany, the Czech Republic and Portugal over the Xmas and New Year break so, with oversight from Bob the Tomten, I'll start work on this when I get back in the middle of January 2015.

On to Part 2.

Tamiya 1/32 Spitfire Mk XVIe - Part 6

Back to part 5.
The Home Stretch
In this part we bring it all together and finish off the model.  After the gloss coat was dry the decals were applied.  The stencil decals were prone to silvering but responded well enough to decal softener.  The main decals were very thin and snuggled down nicely into the panel lines.

To ensure that the a wash would go over decals I used a sharp blade along the panel lines and applied more decal softener.  Once that was dry I gave the model another gloss coat and left it to dry for a few hours.  The wash used is Flory Models Dark Dirt.  This is brushed liberally all over the model.

It looks pretty awful once the wash goes on but we'll take care of that.

Once the wash was dry it was wiped off with a lightly moistened kitchen towel.  Wash remains in the panel lines giving a slightly dirty look. In the image below the wash has been cleaned off one wing but left on the other.  It adds a natural grimy look to the airframe.

Once the was was removed it was time to bring everything together. 

The model was given a flat coat and once that was dry the canopy was unmasked.  All that remained was a few final bits of assembly, some soot trails from the guns and some exhaust staining from the engine.

I'm calling this one done.  Check out the pictures of the final model here.