Revell 1:28 Spad XIII as Luke's plane, at least the one he was photographed near

[RAGIII]

Nice save on the seat SP. Looks much improved! Your interior is coming together quite Nicely!
RAGIII

[RichieW]

Rapid progress SP, I'm learning a lot about the importance of forward planning and practice fitting from this one. It's looking excellent!

[smperry]

Thanks for the kind words guys. I'm having trouble getting anything done as I can only handle 30-40 min at the bench. I thought it was just my bad back, but a recent scan prompted a call from the Dr. It seems I have grown myself an eighteen millimeter diameter kidney stone. That's as big across as a US penny. And the hospital isn't doing elective surgeries at this time. So it is work a short spell and then go lie on a heating pad for a longer spell. Pain pills are strictly rationed to one a day, that leaves 21 or 22 hours a day where the only relief is a stiff drink. I'm a very occasional drinker who is fast becoming a drunk, but a happy drunk, in a shop full of models. Nothing to do but endure until TDV, (This Damn Virus), lets up and i can schedule a procedure.

Currently I am working on instruments. I am trying slices sawed off pieces of sprue and also discs punched out of plasticard for the instrument bodies. Hint, sprue isn't as round as one might assume. I need to try chucking a piece in a drill and holding it between some folded sandpaper ti see if it gets any rounder. The punched discs are working better so far. They are already white and I have a punch the exact size of the little PE beezels.

I am still gnawing on how to do the fabric panel behind the seat and the oil tank and associated piping next to the seat. The PE throttle quadrant is hugely over scale and pretty much unusable, so I get to scratch one and a compass mount for the left sidewall as well as the map holder and some other device with a crank handle on the rt fuselage side. So I'll keep chipping away at it 30 min or so at a time. Not too bad a way to work if it wasn't for my poor memory that has me spending half of each session at the bench trying to remember where it was I left off and what I intended to do next. Now what was that by the way? Oh yeah, finish drink and enjoy an hour or so of reduced discomfort.

sp

[RichieW]

Oh no SP, so sorry to hear about the discomfort. That's a seriously big kidney stone you've grown!

Glad you can still carry on with the build, there's nothing like a good project to distract the senses from pain.

Best wishes
Richie

[smperry]

I have about done with the cockpit. just a few pipes left to put in. I managed to represent most of the major features of the cockpit. Not as well as I would have liked, but about the best I can do at this point. I need find some good aftermarket WWI instruments. The ones I had came with printed clear film that was half again as thick as the PE beezels. Rather a pain to trim. Various sizes of brass tube and rod are also lacking until Albion Alloys comes back to work. They aren't even responding to emailed requests.













Oh yes, forgot to add the hammer for unjamming guns.



sp

[RAGIII]

You are doing a lot to improve this old kit SP! I look forward to more!
RAGIII

[smperry]

I got good and tired messing about with details and set the project aside for a couple of days. I learned that I need a good stock of instrument decals and beezels in addition to a wider selection of micro tube and rod.

Next job is to deal with the wings. The strut trenches were filled with the cut off tops and bottoms of the struts and given a good swipe of liquid glue to melt them in place seeing as they will take the holes and pins from the struts. Those will take a couple of days to cure before any sanding and filling happens.



This, by all accounts, is a late model Spad XIII C.1 built by Bleriot and was built with the squared off wing tips at the factory. Using the full size drawings provided in the article by Ray Rimmel, there is some material to be added at the front and back corners and some original wing material to remove at the center of the tip. That will be a job for another day after I decide what I will use to add to the corners.




This is an old kit and it would be far easier to scratch build the definitive Spad than try to make one out of this old kit. So I am trying to bring out the best of what's here. In that light, I really liked the molded hinge detail. To bring that out, I used a scriber tool to scrape a gap in the hinge line of all the control surfaces leaving the surfaces attached only by the molded hinges. I was pleased with how that worked.



sp

[RAGIII]

Nice work on the ailerons SP!
RAGIII

[smperry]

I suppose the conversion from early to late production wing tips is arguably the hardest mod to make on this kit, though dealing with the huge trenches in the wings for the kit supplied struts is right up there too. Kind of nothing compared to the major surgery required for the 1:28 Fokker D.VII. I used Ray Rimmel's article on the Revell kit as a guide since it provided full size drawings in 1:28 scale. To match the outline of the drawings, I had to nip a bit off the center of the tips and them sand the remaining ends straight to provide a suitable surface for gluing on additions to the corners of the wingtips. The lower wings requires the same treatment, only on a smaller scale. Once good and cures, I was able to sand the corners to shape and then fill and sand until the join became invisible, (well at least unnoticeable without a very close look).

Here is an upper tip over the outline drawn on tracing paper. Tape marks the line to saw along.



The end nipped from the tip. The corners sanded straight.



One early production rounded wingtip and one modified, squared off late production wingtip. (Guess that makes it a mid production wing, at least until I get the other tip done.)



Still sanding and filling on the other three tips.
sp

[RAGIII]

Excellent results! Looks the part for sure! "If" I decide to do Guynemers aircraft as one of My three I have to do the opposite conversion. Still debating it at this point!
RAGIII

[smperry]

Rick
The reverse would not be too bad. Sand the corners and add a little putty to the center of the tip and you would have the outline. The early to late conversion requires gluing on additional pieces strongly enough that they can be worked hard which means a joint with enough glue that it takes a while to sand down. Sometimes sanding can be relaxing at others it is a royal PITA.
sp

[RichieW]

Great bit of surgery SP, love the way you detailed the hinges too. Great attention to detail is bringing his old kit up to date, ancient kits terrify me now. I still have mental scars from a childhood of trying to build old Airfix 4 engined bombers.

[smperry]

I hear you about the bombers. I had issues with the nose gear on a B-58 Hussler. More and more tube glue did not firm it up. The model ended up being "flown", at scale supersonic speed, in to a wall.

The hard, brittle plastic of old kits makes surgery even more difficult. I love the WmW plastic, it is so easy to work, then again you so rarely need to work it.
sp

[Borsos]

Great improvement over the original kit here. Your huge amount of work pais off, it’s looking great!
Andreas

[smperry]

Thanks Andreas. These wingtip mods are brute force modeling at it's best. Revell put a lot into this old kit, especially for when it was made. Some of the stuff just needs to be brought out a bit. Once I settled on that as a goal, the whole project became more fun.
sp