The Peter Buckingham Column Part 19

IN PURSUIT OF PERFECTION - I WISH I COULD FIND IT!

For those of you who follow my ramblings on things modelling, you will know that I am halfway through the build of the lovely 'little' kit by Revell at 1/144 scale - the C17A Globemaster.

The fuselage was all but finished, the wings and engines had been glued together and the aluminium parts of the engine had been sprayed with Alclad, masked ready for the 'big' spray and the wings and tailplane halves had been glued to the fuselage. A small and very annoying step at the rear wing root/fuselage had been rectified, the 14 wheels and 5 oleo sets had been sprayed, and everything was assembled into complete sets.

I felt like a break from this build for a short while and via the email newsletter of TOTS (The One True Scale) which covers everything in 1/200 scale - yes, that is 1/200 scale, I saw that enthusiastic Kentish modeller and manufacturer of things in this scale, Wojciech Benzinski, had produced a beautiful model of the Percival Mew Gull. I got in touch with him and bought the 'kit'. It is a little jewel. Cast in white metal as a one piece fuselage and wings, there is a propeller and spinner together with a set of decals for the record breaking aircraft that flew from England to Cape Town and back in the 1930's. A version of this aircraft is still around today performing at air shows.

I immediately set to and started to clean up and prepare the metalwork using very fine files and fine wet and dry paper with very soapy water endeavouring to produce the best possible surface. Once this was done which took about 2 hours, I sprayed the parts with Tamiya White Fine Surface Primer from a rattle can followed by another wet and dry session and then two coats of Tamiya acrylic white gloss smoothing down between the coats and again after the second coat to get a high gloss.

The decals went on beautifully and a coat of clear sealed them in nicely. The whole enjoyable exercise was completed in two days and certainly caused some interest at my next Medway Club meeting! I posted pictures of the model on www.britmodeller.com which produced some interesting comments including one from a friend asking if there is a 'cockpit set' for this model! Yeah! Yeah! Wojciech does a range of models and I am particularly interested in the DH Beaver and Twin Otter for future builds.

The cockpit comes together very easily after the various components have been painted. The canopy can be posed open and I chose this option before closing the fuselage sides around the cockpit and gluing with Tamiya Extra Fine cement. The fuselage sides were taped together and put to one side while I glued the wing top and bottom halves together with the same adhesive. There are two options for the anti vortex wing tips - the short version and the extra long version. I chose the short version because the long tips looked to be very vulnerable and possibly prone to breaking off or just 'bending' out of alignment.

I then dry fitted the airbrake assemblies to make sure they slotted into their respective homes easily, fitted the delightful 'T' tailplane and glued the wings to the fuselage. I knew that after the full size gliders are assembled, competitive pilots seal the wing root joints and wing tip joints with adhesive tape to reduce the possibility of turbulence and/or drag. I reproduced this by finding some very thin adhesive metalised tape cut into strips about 1.5mm wide. Apart from masking the cockpit she was ready for what was going to be a lengthy painting period with my plan to use many coats of very thinned paint.

More next week.

Peter Buckingham.