BAC Eagle GR.7/7a

[kitnut617]

Previous to that I had filled the lower half of the forward fuselage with Milliput.




For a few reasons, first one was I had dry assembled as much of the main kit parts as I could to determine if the kit was to be a tail-sitter. It looked ok but was marginal. Secondly, with the Milliput I could re-enforce the join area, and thirdly, as I was going to seriously reprofile the forward fuselage so it wouldn't look like a Tornado, I suspected that by the time I had finished filing and sanding it to a more rounded shape, the plastic in the square-ish corners would start to get too thin and cracks would start to appear. Which is what did happen but because the Milliput was already in place it didn't effect the end result.

And while I had the Milliput out I filled the underside of the forward fuselage



And here you can see the results of all the sanding and what I thought might happen.

[kitnut617]

But this is what I did use for the cockpit. I had changed the plan, originally I was going to build this model as shown in the painting, but then I had decided to change the cockpit.  Now I changed some other things for a couple of reasons.  In the painting it shows basically, that the mods are what are usually on a Tornado, fuel tanks, BOZ-107. ECM pod, TIALD targeting pod and the little fairing under the nose, well I've found out a few things as I've been going along with this.  First one is the position of the TIALD, it's where the front wheel bay is -- so it couldn't go there could it? I'll try figuring out where it will go later, probably further back under the intakes more I think. Plus the newer version of this pod is much longer. 

 Second thing is I've found out that all the ECM equipment, flare and chaff ejectors are all carried inside the fuselage, this makes the BOZ and ECM pods redundant but it does solve where I want to put a couple of HARM or ALARM missiles, these will go on the outside pylons now.  Which leads to the next problem, on the Airfix kit (1/72 and 1/48) there are two little circles engraved into the top and bottom of the wing, these are the two real pylon attachment point locations on the TSR2 and can be seen on the TSR2 at Cosford.  With the Tornado load-out these are too close together but using the outer pylon for an anti-radar missile does solve the space problem.

 Now back to the cockpit, I'm changing it again as I want something more inline with the timeline and modern.  I thought of going back to the kit's cockpit tub but it doesn't have the features I'm looking for, but I have some parts in the spares box that will do, from an F-15 of all things.  Mind you it's not going to look like one by the time I've finished with it.




I use a combination of these decals for the panels



I painted up some scrap styrene then rearranged how the decals would look like, then cut the panel to suit the cockpit interior.



This is the front panel



And this is the rear panel



I added some additional styrene to the inside of the cockpit to re-enforce the fuselage joint and also to fill in some space between the side panels and fuselage.



A few more decals went in



And then the fuselage halves were glued together. And a bit of putty so things would clean up good.

[apophenia]

Serious surgery (and seriously well-thought-through as usual)!  Loving your cockpit work thus far - those dramatic LCDs, in particular, jump out like the canine's round objects 

[kitnut617]

Thanks Stephen ---