Let's start with the cockpit and interior.
The first photo (upper left) shows the crude out-of-the-box Frog cockpit. I didn't use this and instead went with the ACE PE set.
The second photo (upper right) illustrates the cutouts I had to make for the little 'windows' for the pilot to look out when needing to look 'down'. I drilled out near the corners and then slowly filed and sawed my way through the outline to get the correct shapes. Much later on, I used Micro Glaze to create the 'glass'. You can also see the inner frame (PE) applied atop the fabric dope. This turns out to be almost completely invisible on the finished model.
The third photo (lower left) was my trusty friend from The Small Shop, the Mini Hold-N-Fold PE folding tool - shown here for the pilot's seat.
The last photo was a reference guide from Eric Brown's book on the interior parts. Some of these were scratch built as they didn't come with the PE set.
Here the photos are a little out of order but they show the cockpit assembly in some more detail. Color was Model Master RAF Interior Green. The five Swordfish was back when I thought I could assembly line out several planes at once. I was mad.
The interior was trying and not just because of the tiny PE parts but because I had lots of fit issues getting the fuselage halves to meet. Much sanding and bracing bits were added to finally get it level and gap free.
And speaking of the fuselage, all of the Frog kits had warped fuselages as shown in this composite image. The lower left photo shows the hand bending after a plunge into 180F water
One note about the interior was that the second position was going to be covered by the long range fuel tank so no detailing was done here. In the photo below, you see the brass pins I inserted into the three piece upper wing elements in order to provide a stronger joint as the wings were going to get a lot of handling during the struts and rigging operation.
Not shown in the photos below were all the holes I pre-drilled (all the way through on the lower wing) and partial for the upper wing to insert the rigging wire.
In the composite below you can see the paper masks. To get a soft edge, I used little balls of Blu-Tack to hold the paper up from the wing/fuselage. Big mistake. Blu-Tack leaves a residue almost immediately and it was a real pain to clean up. I also tried Uhu Tac but this was no better. Next time it will be little rolled balls of Tamiya tape. Paint was Humbrol 123 (Extra Dark Sea Gray) and Humbrol 224 (Dark Slate Gray).
The lower left photo shows the scratch-built long-range fuel tank made from Plastruct styrene rod. I love Plastruct as a company because they force you to buy a minimum of $25 so I loaded up with single pieces of strip and rod in all sorts of small dimensions. These came in handy for scratch built odds and ends such as the tie-down straps for the tank and the little vent pipe.
The photo below shows the various 1/72 kit engines available. I went with the resin Vector engine plus Ace PE parts.
One of the PE options was to replace the kit oil cooler with a 15 part assembly. I spent several days on this trying various jigs to make it align correctly and be of the correct height with the correct number of louvers. The photo composite below shows the least worst outcome. I abandoned this effort and deemed the Frog molded-with-the-fuselage oil cooler to be good enough
Rigging was done with steel wire from Small Parts. I used .008 wire for the inter-wing rigging and .006 wire for the fuselage-to-tail rigging. The wire is great to work with in one respect in that it doesn't sag. However, it is hard to darken -- I used Floquil railroad markers after trying Sharpies. One mistake was that in my excitement of finishing the rigging, I glued and trimmed the excess below the wing before ensuring that the wires were taut in all places. You can see the rigging in the final pictures much later in these posts as I lost my in-progress inter-wing rigging photos.
Tony Wray's plane of 815 Squadron had non-standard colors and markings. Photo evidence and material from the Fleet Air Arm Camouflage book said that the sides of the fuselage were darkened from normal and that the underside was all black. The question for me was how to darken the base camouflage in such as way as to be just right. If I went too dark, I'd have to start painting all over. So, I did three other Swordfish upper wings in the base camouflage (I could have done all fuselages but wings were easier to mask) and then mixed up four (4) blends of black to thinner: 1:3, 1:5, 1:8, and 1:10. You can see these in the composite below (upper left).
The upper right photo is just before Future and decaling. The lower right shows the first decal and also the scratch cable to release the life raft on the upper wing. This photo also shows another mistake which is the location of the roundel. This was actually deliberate on my part as the true location sits over the fairleads on the fuselage. Since this was going to be a challenging rigging location with three separate lines (x 2 for each side) and poor attachment points, I didn't want to mess up the nice yellow decal. Since many other Swordfish (although not necessarily from 815 Sqn) had the roundel in this location, I decided that Wray's plane opted for this roundel location and called it a day.
In the lower right was a sheet of custom decals I made for the serial number. This was a major pain for two reasons - one, the decals were super fragile and hard to manipulate and two, I made a huge error in not realizing that black letters would be invisible against a darkened fuselage side. After checking photo references, I realized the serial numbers were supposed to go atop a light gray rectangle painted on the rear of the fuselage. Of course, I already had all the other decals on, the camouflage done, and the plane assembled. Now I had to super carefully mask off a perfect rectangle on each side and spray the light gray. Needless to say, I screwed up the first time and messed up the underlying camouflage with overspray so the camouflage and darkened black overlay had to be partially reapplied.
Eventually the serial numbers went on
Here we see more of the decals and the gloss of the Future. Here also is a first glance at the inter-wing rigging and some weathering on the leading edges and around the engine. I went lightly on the weathering, mostly for fear of messing up the plane by being too heavy and by this time, 18 months had passed. You can also see the PE torpedo sight in the lower right photo. Eagle eyes will note that I omitted the gun sight as I forgot to add it to the underside of the upper wing before assembly. Since I had also forgotten to pre-drill an attachment point; it simply wasn't possible to get the tiny PE part into such a tight space. Well, the raid was at night and they weren't planning on sticking around machine gunning the Italians so maybe the mechanic took the sight back to his bunk to polish it<g>.
The upper right photo also shows the tiny little steps on the landing struts. These were also difficult to afix (I didn't learn about pre-drilling attachment points until trying to put four of these tiny parts on).
The tail rigging kept me at bay for weeks as I pondered how to do it well. The upper left shows the fairleads I added from Plastruct styrene rod. I tried using the Ace PE set but these parts are so small and you have to bend six of them into cones. I found this impossible. The photo in the upper right shows the control horns that afix to the elevators and rudder. These too were PE and very hard to bend to get looking correctly. The photo shows some mistakes. After a while, I got these to look OK.
Somehow, during assembly, the styrene fairleads all fell off and I never noticed until it was time to do the rigging (and by that time the camo and decals were done. This turned out fortuitous as getting .006 wire to attach via a butt joint wasn't going to be secure. So, I went with another terrific supplier - Albion Alloys - who makes brass tubing in incredibly small interior dimensions. What I did was cut the tubing to size, crimp the end and then insert/glue the .006 wire. This assured me that one end of the rigging wire could be pulled without the fairlead end popping out. In the lower right photo you can see these brass fairleads (and the serial number in its gray rectangle). The photo was taken before I realized I should glue in the wire before mounting the fairlead to the fuselage so that's what I did on the other side.
The next sequence of photos shows the rigging process. Per side, there were three (3) lines to run to the rudder/elevators, 1 small line across the elevator from the fixed panel to the movable panel, and two (2) bracing wires. The set of three had to afix to the tiny control horns from the prior photo. This took a while to get right. I snipped the .006 wire at the control horns (not so easy as .006 wire is still pretty strong). The bracing wires went into pre-drilled holes so that wasn't too hard.
You can also see the Archer Transfers dry transfer lettering used for the tail number (4R). The 'R' got a bit damaged in the process. The wacky white and black thing that the plane is upside down atop is a piece of my son's styrofoam boomerang toy that I cut up and carved slots for the tail to sit in securely so I could do the work without damaging/dislocating already assembled mini-parts. You can also see the black underside.
Here's more work in progress of the tail rigging. You have to look closely to see the .006 wires in these relatively low-res photos. The final product photos (to be posted later) show it better. All in all, I was pleased with the way this came out. At this point I was afraid to touch the plane. Plane is still awaiting a flat finish.
Somewhere earlier in the build process, I scratch-built the torpedo crutch. Simpilot34 was my inspiration here. The crutch was a combination of brass rod (for strength) and styrene. The all black underside hid some alignment mistakes despite my constructing a simple cardboard jig. The torpedo was camouflaged like the plane (using a drawing in Fleet Air Arm Camouflage of an 815 Sqn plane as a reference). Ace PE parts were used for the propeller.
OK, it's late, off to bed...more tomorrow