1/32 Boomerang - WIP

It will be interesting to follow along!

Issues! Firstly, there is no cockpit floor (in reality the upper surface of the wing centre section), which means seeing daylight through the wheel wells. Not a terribly hard thing to fix. Secondly, the canopy, including the window panel behind the pilot, is a vacform moulding, which is going to be a right pain seeing as I wish to model it with the cockpit open so you can see all that lovely (improved) detail. this is going to take a little extra work!

Started the build with ......... the electrical box! Doesn't everybody? Before and after pics.There are a couple of errors on the finished article. It's one switch short, and it wasn't until after I finished that I realised the two leftmost switches should not have been under the switch guard, but that willbe very difficult to see once the cockpit is completed.

Great aircraft!  I've always had a thing for these short, stubby WWII fighters like the Boomerang, the Brewster Buffalo, and then F4F-Wildcat.  Good luck with the build.

tjs

G'day Chris. The Boomer is one of my favourite aircraft. I have the FM Models 1/32 vacform. I was going to build it for Lost Again's 100th aniversary of the RAAF GB, but decided to wait untill I had a few more aircraft under my belt. (Recently returned to the hobby after a 20 plus year break).

If you don't mind I'm going to tune in and watch your build because of my interest in this subject. I also have a lot of reference photos which I'm happy to share.

All the best,

Dodgy. 

You are more than welcome. Currently I am scratchbuilding a new cockpit frame as, being a resin kit, I am not convinced as to the roundness and consistency of the kit frame, and I wish to add a host of extra detail, which will be far easier if the bulk of it is styrene.

The photo shows a scale drawing of the fuselage frame (dotted), overlaid with the right side cockpit frame from the kit. As can be seen, there are a couple of places where the kit frame has errors, the most important being the angle of the diagonal at the front of the frame. So, scratchbuilt replacement required, using copies of the drawing as the template.

A big job ahead of you Chris.

Cheers

Dodgy

Slow progress, but here is the new starboard cockpit frame. There's still an awful lot of detail to go on it before attaching the various boxes to it. Speaking of boxes, I offered up the kit electrical box which I had put so much effort into ...... and realised it was entirely the wrong size and shape! It should be a much squarer rectangular shape, so into the bin and build a new one. A friend at the Temora Aviation Museum offered to measure the actual item on their Boomerang, which will be much better than scaling it up from photographs, and for which I am most grateful. 

Looking good mate.

Thank you. Alot of the detailing depends upon the replacement electrical box in order to get the correct positioning, so I'm currently making the port side frame, which is pretty much identical. 

Just a taster of what's to come. The first two bracket clamps on the cockpit frame. The front one is one of the hangers for the electrical box, which will be completed once the new box is in place, and the other is a fuselage shell mount, which still requires the rod to be fitted once I get to the fitting of the completed cockpit into the fuselage stage. There are a lot of these bracket clamps in the cockpit!

Joining the two halves. The two side frames are now joined. Getting the two halves perfectly square and aligned was a real pain and took ages! I'm still not convinced it is 100% right, but it is as close as I can get it. Once the glue is well and truly set all the cross braces will go in, then the real fun starts.

Very impressive. You've only just begun and that's a lot of modelling right there.

Cheers,

Dodgy

Good news, and not so good news. The basic cockpit frame is now complete. Now for the hard bit. I'm sure I will find bits I wish I'd fitted earlier due to restricted access, as the Boomerang cockpit is a very cluttered beast, where many other aircraft had all the gubbins hidden away under pretty covers! The not so good news is a fairly major fit issue. It appears the Starboard side is the problem. Does anyone have a remedy for out of shape resin other than brute force?

The cockpit frame looks great. As for the resin problem I use very hot water and gently push it back into shape.

Dodgy

Thanks for the advice. I was thinking along those lines, but it's great to have it confirmed.

The resin venders always tell me to apply hot water and reshape warped parts. The frame work is excellent.

BK

Thank you

Progress has been slow due to one particular part. I have decided the oil cooler duct in the cockpit is a right royal pain in the butt! I have two surfaces which sit at 90 degrees to each other, but which I cannot join for some time yet, and an object which changes direction in all three axes to meet two very specific points on those surfaces, whilst being hollow at one end where it has to match up precicely with a hole in the fuselage side. I also realised I was going to have to take into account the thickness of the fuselage sides. It took three attempts to get it right, the final solution being to cut the kit part in half, and graft a new fuselage end onto the kit firewall end. The photo shows all three. This is a fairly critical part to get right as so much in this area of the cockpit depends on it.

Due to the thickness of the fuselage sides, I discovered after I had opened out the hole for the duct exhaust, that the hole on the inside face was the wrong size and the wrong place. This meant fixing microstrip into the upper and rear faces of the hole, and then chamfering the edge as shown in the pic. Final filling, filing, and fettling will be done once the cockpit is installed.

For some strange reason, especially for a large scale kit, there does not appear to be a control locking bar, or the cockpit ventilation tube, both of which sit roughly between the pilot's feet. Here is the vent, which took around half a day to get right, and is only slightly larger than an Aussie 5c coin.

Awesome work mate.

Dodgy

Thank you. It's now painted and installed.

Cool! Can you post a pic of the whole frame?

Dodgy

If you go back a couple of posts there are a couple of photo's of the frame. The only difference between those shots and now is the area around the footboards at the front of the cockpit. The plan is, finish footboard area, fuel tank and radios, control rods, electrical box, rudder pedals and controls, finish right side of cockpit, fit out left side of cockpit, control column, instrument panels, then seat, in that order. I rapidly figured out that if I didn't do it in a fairly specific order, access issues would mean I couldn't get stuff in!

Understand and totally agree.

Dodgy

After a couple of false starts, I finally got the control locking bar built. Shame I couldn't find this in the kit! Believe it or not, there are 34 individual pieces of styrene to make this. The other photo shows it installed between the footboards in the unlocked position (it was far too much of a challenge to get it right for the locked position!)

ChrisJH666;

   A Boomer in a decent size. I always wonder, When our fliers don't care for a plane, Folks like your Aussies and the Germans with the F-104, fly the heck out of them. Good on you and I like the work you're doing!

Excellent work mate, but you might need to start taking sedatives if you keep this up!