Author Topic: BAC Eagle GR.7/7a (Read 3210 times)

kitnut617 · « **on:** February 13, 2021, 01:53:25 AM »

OK, I've started this project which I had been thinking about for quite a while, since when I saw this painting of a TSR-2 in 617 Sqn. markings. I thought I had a thread here about it but it seems not so. So I'm experimenting with copying it from The Airfix Tribute Forum to here. It was originally started way back on Apr 12, 2009

I've got the XtraDecal 1/72 sheet with some appropriate markings for a 617 Sqn. aircraft but I'm thinking of doing an advanced in-service version of a later date which will have some upgraded avionics etc. Here you can see the scheme I'm using in the bottom profile.

I found the underwing loadout which came off an old Monogram Tornado which was of one used during GW1, so then it was onto what else I wanted to do with it:

To upgrade to a GR.7a I'm cannibalizing an Airfix Tornado for some parts, namely the forward fuselage. I've found, after some careful measuring, that the Tornado fuselage is almost the same width as the TSR-2's fuselage is from the front of it's front wheelbay back to the air intakes, but I did have to slim the Tornado fuselage down a bit, about the width of a razor saw on both sides of the cockpit.

This is just a trial fit-up but you can see where I'm going with this, there's a lot of PSR to do now so stay tuned.

Incidently, the new cockpit is exactly where the old cockpit was, only the pilot sits higher, the GIB is about the same height as before, the new radome is longer so the overall length is now about a scale foot or more longer.

robunos · « **Reply #1 on:** February 13, 2021, 02:22:57 AM »

Me Likey . . .

Have you seen the TSR.2 whiffs with clear canopies ?

https://www.thunder-and-lightnings.co.uk/tsr2/profiles.php

3rd profile down . . .

cheers,
Robin.

kitnut617 · « **Reply #2 on:** February 13, 2021, 02:28:42 AM »

That is actually where this is heading, or I should say was heading. Only I wanted a bigger radar as well as a clear canopy.

Transferring the thread from ATF to here is going to take a little while, because the photos don't transfer over with the text. But at least I can see my photos on ATF as it was before the PB debacle where we could post directly to the forum like we can here.

kitnut617 · « **Reply #3 on:** February 13, 2021, 02:39:10 AM »

I did a little bit of refining to the original fusealge under the new fuselage, I've sanded it down so it's more of a wedge and this tilts the new cockpit down at the front and lines the top profile up with the existing fuselage better so that it is straight across to the end of the canopy. You'll notice that the horizontal join line of the two Tornado halves now runs at the same angle as the cut I did on the TSR-2 fuselage, this cut follows a panel line that is there on the kit.

It now has a sort-of refined TSR-2 look to it and by the time I've carefully sanded off the much squarer corners of the Tornado parts, it won't look like there's any Tornado in it, maybe the canopy though.

ChernayaAkula · « **Reply #4 on:** February 13, 2021, 05:30:26 AM »

The new cockpit section looks great!

ScranJ51 · « **Reply #5 on:** February 13, 2021, 08:07:29 AM »

Awesome - following with interest

kitnut617 · « **Reply #6 on:** February 13, 2021, 10:21:40 PM »

Thanks guys --- keep in mind that I'm trying to recover a thread/s I had going over on ATF and What-If some time ago and I need to share it again with everyone before it disappears forever.

kitnut617 · « **Reply #7 on:** February 13, 2021, 10:45:08 PM »

To continue:

This is how I cut the cockpit off the TSR-2, the fuselage is about 20mm wide from the air intakes to the front of the wheel bay.

From this point the fuselage then had a nice gradual curve right to the tip of the original nose cone, but when the Tornado fuselage gets attached, the 20mm has to go further along to the front. So I've had to straighten out the curved part but this works out okay because the wedged part that is under the Tornado part, follows the corner edges better. All I've got to do is fill in the space in-between. But you can see the difference in fuselage width at the radome and where my plan for a bigger radar is coming into play

Then this is how I cut the Tornado fuselage out.

At the moment everything is just taped together, the fun part starts now with the build.

Now this was a more difficult problem to sort out. My plan all along was to make the top of the Tornado dorsal spline and TSR fuselage at the same height but as you can see this leaves a very difficult join.

One way was to continue the 'ledge' and dorsal spline back until the ledge met up with the top of the TSR fuselage, but I didn't like that idea. The solution was quite simple, as some of you know I'm on the What-If Forum too and at the moment on the home page is an article of Andy's P.1154 RN build (some of you here know him as 'General Melchard' on the britmodeller forum and the same article is posted there too), well the P.1154 has a similar 'ledge' leading up past the canopy and over the air intakes and it also has a dorsal spline and almost at the top there's two small air intakes either side of the spline, well my plan is to make some air intakes at this join I have but they will cover the whole openings each side.

EDIT: I should note here that my thread I had going on the What-If forum has gone Bye-Bye, that is it was left on the "old forum" when the What-If was moved to a new website address. I'm trying to find out if it can be recovered but I've got a feeling if it can be recovered, it will be useless anyway as IIRC I was using PB back then. All the photo there will have gone ---

this is the new Freightdog 1/72 resin kit of the P.1154 and shows the two little air intakes I'm refering too.

kitnut617 · « **Reply #8 on:** February 13, 2021, 11:24:58 PM »

The build got to the point where I had to assemble the rest of the TSR2 fuselage, but as you'll see, one problem followed another --

I'm not sure who was the actual master builder for this kit but I think it was the same person/s who did the 1/72 Concorde, that kit has all sorts of problems/errors and this TSR2 kit has similar problems.

The Big Gimper · « **Reply #9 on:** February 13, 2021, 11:40:32 PM »

Nice work Robert.

So your are recommending that I should have a bottle of 40 proof "liquid patience" beside me when building the TSR.2 and Concorde?

kitnut617 · « **Reply #10 on:** February 13, 2021, 11:48:37 PM »

Well I've read a lot of modelers aren't very happy with the kit's fit etc. so I did a search to see how people coped with the problems. Lots of grumblings but not much in the way of how they fixed it (at least in the few threads I looked at).

I wasn't going to bore everyone with a step by step of the build as I figured it had been covered already but it doesn't appear that anyone has, so I've decided to approach this with open eyes and as I find a problem, I'll try to explain how I fixed it. My first problem was when I went to make up the three parts for each intake assembly. I did a dry fit of the parts as the instructions say to do them but found that it's not very easy way of doing it. Also saw my first example of the appalling fit of the parts.

Here's the parts in question:

on the left you have the outer intake fairing, in the center is the shock cone part, and on the right is the internal duct, the instructions say to glue the outer intake fairing onto the shock cone part first, then glue the internal duct afterwards. The problem is that trying to hold the first two parts correctly while trying to glue it isn't very easy but when I trialed fitted everything with the internal duct it sort-of lined things up better, so I've glued the internal duct on first.

Once the glue had dried I could now see how the intake fairing was supposed to go on, but then I looked inside the duct and could see a very large gap.

I then fitted the two glued parts into the fuselage side to see how everything would look before I glued the intake fairing onto the shock cone part. Well it doesn't just fall in, you have to sort of twist it in -- like this:

Once I got it in and then held the intake fairing in it's place I could see down inside the duct and I could see that the internal duct part doesn't come anywhere near the side of the fuselage and just looks really awful.

Another problem is the very thick edge to the leading edge of the internal duct part so I thinned it down with my hobby knife from the inside, don't thin it down from the outside as we need this side to touch the plastic of the fuselage. After it was trimmed, I then used some pointy nose pliers and very carefully stretched the trimmed edge outwards so that it would touch the plastic of the fuselage, I hope this shows what the results were:

The thick internal duct edge

After I had thinned down the edge

and how it now looks when viewing inside the duct.

kitnut617 · « **Reply #11 on:** February 13, 2021, 11:56:07 PM »

Quote from: The Big Gimper on February 13, 2021, 11:40:32 PM

Nice work Robert.

So your are recommending that I should have a bottle of 40 proof "liquid patience" beside me when building the TSR.2 and Concorde?

Thanks Carl, and most definitely

kitnut617 · « **Reply #12 on:** February 14, 2021, 12:02:18 AM »

Anyway, here's a better photo of one intake glued in with the refined internals

You can see just to the right of my finger, that the intake fairing and the mating surface of the fuselage doesn't quite match up, I did it this way because to me it was more important to make sure the bottom faces did line up. I'll clean this up once the wings are on and another part has been glued in as it's only a little bit to sand down.

kitnut617 · « **Reply #13 on:** February 14, 2021, 12:16:18 AM »

Pressing ahead with the build I've hit a snag, a major one by the looks of it.

I was following the next stage in the instructions where you glue in the wheel bays, front one fits ok in it's little slots and gets glued in on one side of the fuselage and the main gear wheel bay has to have a couple of bits glued in first then we glue that to the same side. I've made sure the part sits properly on it's little shelves and follows the profile of the side before I glued it up.

I then dry fitted the other fuselage side to make sure the parts set in the proper orientation when both sides are together. Everything appear to be going okay, but when I dry fitted the bottom fuselage part too so that this part would again help to orientate the wheel bays, it wouldn't fit. Well it would but it left a huge gap down one side of the front wheel bay plus it started to push the not glue fuselage side away from the main wheel bay by about the same amount

Something definitely is not right, so I did some measuring with my vernier, when I measure the space where the bottom fuselage part is supposed to go but when it's up tight to both wheel bays, I get 14mm, when I measure the bottom fuselage part I have 15mm

It's a bit baffling as to what has happened but I need to get on with this so I decided to glue the fuselage sides together with everything tight against the wheel bays and I'll sort the bottom bit out later. I started by glueing all around the main wheel bay making sure everything is nice and snug, when it had dried, I then glued along the top of the fuselage but I had to hold it together with clamps in some places to do this, like in the photo.

Now I'm going to let this lot thoroughly dry before I go to the next part.

I should add that all the parts naturally fall into place if the bottom fuselage part is left out but don't when you fit this same part in, but even odder is that the rear end of the bottom fuselage part just falls into place when I have the fuselage glued up tight to the wheel bays. I will have to sand both edges with a tapered edge starting with 1/2mm from the front end of the bottom part so it will fit the space where it's supposed to go.

kitnut617 · « **Reply #14 on:** February 14, 2021, 12:39:54 AM »

Backing up a tad, when I glued the front wheel bay in I only glued it to the little slots on the inside of the fuselage half, I didn't run glue along the bottom edge of the wheel bay part where it joins the opening in the fuselage bottom. I did this for a reason, I wanted to be able to adjust the wheel bay part after I had glued some other bits to it, this proved to be the right way to go because before I finished gluing the bay in I decided to attach the lower half of the Tornado fuselage to the TSR fuselage.

I did this so it would hold the TSR fuselage at the correct width naturally while I worked on making sure other parts lined up right. By doing this it opened the front of the wheel bay opening a bit which made the wheel bay part slightly off center so I carefully pried the part out of it's front slot (luckily I had used the glue sparingly so it came apart fairly easy). I then made a bulkhead the right width and glued it in up close to the front of the wheel bay.

Then using a small screwdriver as a wedge I centered the wheel bay and glued that to the bulkhead. Once that was dry I then glued along the bottom edges of the wheel bay part where it contacts the opening in the bottom of the fuselage.

Once this was dry I then positioned the bits of TSR fuselage under the Tornado fuselage in the correct position and glued them in place.

kitnut617 · « **Reply #15 on:** February 14, 2021, 12:43:54 AM »

What happened next was I revised my "Plan". I was going to use bits & bobs from the TSR2 and Tornado cockpits to make up the cockpit. But this was to be a 'late' variant so I decided to upgrade the cockpit to something a bit more advanced. So I'm not going to include what I didn't do and just show what I did do.

Also while doing the build, I was jumping around doing other parts of the build so the thread got a little messy. From this point I'm going to tidy up the way I'm showing how it went.

Artoor_K · « **Reply #16 on:** February 14, 2021, 12:47:45 AM »

I have "stash queen" 1/48 TSR-2, still waiting for finish, watching your WIP I'm starting to look at it with growing urge to complete this beats . Keep up the good work

kitnut617 · « **Reply #17 on:** February 14, 2021, 01:32:00 AM »

Thanks Artoor --- mine is also a hanger queen. I will have to make an effort to finish this one too. But I have a few more posts to show of the many problems I got around before I get to the 'where it's at' point.

Kerick · « **Reply #18 on:** February 14, 2021, 02:58:22 PM »

I really like this whif combination. The TSR cockpits always looked a little odd to me but the Tornado front end looks much better. Keep it up!

Robomog · « **Reply #19 on:** February 14, 2021, 06:57:09 PM »

Always liked the TSR2, I finally managed to get an airfix one that didn't cost the earth so documenting your build problems is really useful,

The Tornado nose looks really cool, watching this one with interest

Keep up the good work

Mog
>^-.-^<

kitnut617 · « **Reply #20 on:** February 14, 2021, 10:13:15 PM »

Thanks guys, the build on ATF was basically a 'how-I-fixed-this-problem' build so I was hoping not to bore anyone here. I've just found out the thread I had going on the What-If forum can't be recovered, so thanks to Greg, who directed me to a link on ATF where I didn't need to log-in too, I thought I had better create another thread somewhere else

kitnut617 · « **Reply #21 on:** February 14, 2021, 10:22:23 PM »

When Airfix announced the 1/72 TSR2 new mould kit, I signed up for one immediately. It was offered to club members first (which I was at the time) and when it arrived it came with a really nice print all carefully rolled up in paper.

I had taken it to a picture shop to get it framed but what I was quoted surprised the heck out of me. It was in the 100's of dollars and when I asked why because it's just a print, I was told, 'no, it's not just a print, the paper used is very high grade and it has to be stretched properly before putting in a frame' I was then told it was worth quite a bit --- much more than what I paid for the kit ---

Buzzbomb · « **Reply #22 on:** February 16, 2021, 11:59:52 AM »

Very nice work.
Vernier and all... serious Aero engineering happening.

kitnut617 · « **Reply #23 on:** February 16, 2021, 10:03:39 PM »

Thanks BB, I'll try to get some more of the build down loaded today.

kitnut617 · « **Reply #24 on:** February 17, 2021, 12:54:05 AM »

Originally I was going to use some of the both cockpit bits, like the tub from the TSR2 and instrument panels from the Tornado and I cut the tub in half as the Tornado cockpit area is longer that the TSR2's. But it wouldn't work so I then decided to use all the bits from the Tornado.

I found that because I was planning to use these Aeroclub Ejection Seats, I had to lower the floor.

I did this by making a new slot in the front bulkhead and making the slot in the rear bulkhead a little deeper

What this did was to make the floor run parallel with the fuselage join line and lowers the seats so they won't foul the canopy.

But in the end I went a different route altogether.


Swords to Plowshares GB Now Open!!

News:

Author Topic: BAC Eagle GR.7/7a (Read 3210 times)