Well, this is the little project I am doing for the Driffield Show in two weeks time. I had always had the urge to build a Vulcan either landing or taking off. But doing this in 1/72nd scale was going to be a problem, so the plan was to get hold of either a 1/144th or 1/200th scale Vulcan kit. Now earlier this year, I finally got hold of one, the Dragon 1/200th scale kit with Blue Steel missile.
Construction was straight forward, just a little filling in some gaps between the upper and lower fuselage halves. A basic kit in all, but it does come with the ladder if you want the access door open to the cockpit.
I used a short length of acrylic rod to mount the model on, shaping it to fix into a opening in the rear section of the fuselage. At the present time, the rod is a bit longer than required. Once the base is made, it will be cut down to the required size for it to hold the model just above the base. All of the undercarriage gear has been assembled ready for painting, but they are held on in place in these photos with blutac just for the photos.
Now jump a little and the Vulcan has been airbrushed with Mr Hobby gloss white followed with a couple of coats of Alclad Aqua Gloss clear. The kit has two options of marking for this kit, XM 595 of the Scampton Wing, RAF Scampton in 1970. This is with camouflage upper surface and white on the lower surface. I chose to go with the other option, anti-flash white in the marking of XL 321, No.617 "Dambusters" Squadron, RAF Scampton in 1962. The reason I went with the Dambuster aircraft is so it can be displayed with my Dambuster Lancaster and Tornado with the anniversary markings on (once they are built!).
Even in this scale, Dragon have supplied a pilot and co-pilot figures. I am not sure if they will be seen through the windows, but I have painted and glued them in place just in case.
Decals all finished, cockpit canopy glued in place, paint touched up and model cleared.
Detail painting and final assembly all finished, and yes, it is tail heavy. But this is okay as any extra weigh in the nose would effect the model standing on the acrylic rod in the base.
The final piece of the model to be fitted. The instruction said to paint the missile with Mr Hobby's smoke blue. This is a translucent paint and I was not sure it this was right. All of the Blue Steel missiles that I have seen in person were white, so after some searching around on the net, I found some photos of some 617 Sqdn Vulcans, from this period with missiles painted blue. So the smoke blue was airbrushed in light coats over gloss white, and believe it or not, the shade is very close to the blue that the missiles were painted back then. In the various photos I found, some missile had markings on them and some did not. These marking also varied to, so using the decals left on the sheet, I added the small roundals and a couple of warning marking to the missile to finish it off before gluing it to the model.
The last stage of this project is the base to mount the Vulcan on. I did not want to make the normal shaped base for this project, but one in a similar shape to the Vulcan. So I cut out a silhouette shape of the model in paper and used it to come up with a shape for the base. After some measuring and playing with shapes, I came up with this offset diamond shaped base. Once it was cut out, I routered the edges and then sealed the MDF to ready it for painting.
The next post (hopefully in a couple of days) will be of the model fixed to the finished base.
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