Well it got finished (kinda) and made it onto the What If SiG stand at Telford (SMW 2014).
The replacement transparencies went okay. I masked the cockpit windows with tape this time and cut round them individually, which is something I've never had much luck with in the past, but it seemed to work this time. Don't know if the mould got cleaned up at some point, but the frames seemed better defined on the replacement than the original. For the cabin windows, I clipped/sanded the "top hat" sections from them and then inserted them into the already-painted and assembled fuselage from the outside using PVA, a cocktail stick with a little old blu-tack on the end, and fear. Went surprisingly well actually.
Then I glued the wings and tail on, and, despite the front half of the cargo and both pilots being white metal, watched it rock majestically back on it's wheels. Yes, it was a tail-sitter. Drilled out the round thing behind the nosewheel, with the intention of dropping steel shot into the space under the cockpit floor, only to hit solid plastic. Then I remembered that I'd "cleverly" glued a central keel into that space months before to make it easier to put the shot in from the sides....
So, nothing for it but to drill
two damned great holes a little further back, fill it with shot, and then stick a couple of black discs (irises from soft-toy eyes) over them to make "geophysical sensors".
I'm only calling it kinda finished on three counts:
1. I want to see if I can make a better job of the jokey bus number over the cockpit (No.77 is the bus you'd get from Cambridge Airport to Maddingly Road where the BAS HQ is
). I stuck a couple of 7s pillaged from the spares box on last week but didn't have time to get into custom decals.
2. The skis are supposed to have various cables and rods that arn't modelled in the Revellobox donor kit. Again, I didn't want to risk screwing it up that close to a show with no time to fix it, but I'd to try and do something that at least acknowledges that I know they're supposed to be there, even if the result isn't 100%. Various ideas.
3. I'd like to put it on a snow base with figures and a vehicle.
Because of this, I'm not doing a full article and write-up now, and these are just temporary pics:
I know the props don't all have the same stripe pattern: the BAS Twotters are sometimes painted like that. The badge on the nose is International Polar Year 2007-2008 so that sets the timeframe.
The "geophysical sensors" (above) and why they're really there (below). The ski bottoms are unfinished to make it easier to put it on a base. The LORAN "towel rail" aerials are optional on the Skyvan, but I figured they'd want every nav aid you can get. Same argument for the aerials on top of the cockpit.
More victims of the masking fluid were the exhausts. I'd got a lovely Metalcote finish on them, but in this case, the masking fluid bound to it so strongly that I had to scratch the finish getting it off. They were repainted from the outside with normal HU.56 aluminium.
EDIT: forgot to include the finished interior shots!