Hi everybody! Today I will show you some items I scratchbuild for the fuselage.
There are a few things which have to be added to the fuselage which are missing in the kit or have to be enhanced.
Again I found a lot of detail-drawings of the goodies to be added in the Dambuster Book from Mark Postlethwaite and Piotr Forkasiewicz as already stated in some of the other posts.
First thing to detail was the Aldis-Lamp installed under the front fuselage facing to the right:
The HK-part is only basic without any plumbing, struts and adjustment parts.
I added them from fine wire and an old brass-sheet:
This is how it looks like installed in the camera-compartment in the bomb-aimers room:
Here you can see the strut connecting the 2 brackets holding the lamp:
The same part was applied to the front side.
Next thing to improve was the trailing aerial mount on the left side of the fuselage close to the calipper arm:
This was an aerial which could be winched in and out for communication.
The kit part is only basic without any aerial. I added this by forming 2 „balls“ out of superglue and drilling a hole in one ball and gluing a fine wire into the hole:
This was then attached to the fuselage.
Next thing to improve was the ILS-antenna located under the back of the fuselage on the left side. The Lancaster already had a simple form of an instrument-landing-system which helped the crew to land in bad weather conditions after a long raid to Germany. The HK-part has the form of a club which is completely wrong for a Dambuster aircraft. It has an aerodynamic cover at the front and is attached to the fuselage. I took a thick piece of plastic sheet and sanded it to the needed form.
This is how it looks like after having been
glued to the fuselage:
There are 3 whip-antennas on the upper side of the fuselage. 2 are located between the escape-hat-
ches:
I added insulators in the respective places and then drilled holes:
The whip-antennas will be added in the final assembly.
The third whip-antenna is located at the top of the canopy going directly to the
avionics of the wireless operator:
and on the model:
I added this already when gluing the canopy to the fuselage because the antenna also goes through the fuselage under the glass.
For the antennas going from the canopy to the fins I added 2 small blocks to the canopy frame and drilled holes in which at the end the antenna wire will be glued. Thank you, Sven for the tip!
The fixing-points on the fins are not located at the top of the leading-edge but on the inside of the fin. I used 1/32 turnbuckles from Gaspatch cut to length and glued into the holes I drilled into the fins:
This will make it easy at the end to install the antenna with the correct tension.
Last thing to do was to drill 2 holes for 2 rod-antennas which can be found under the bow and stern of the fuselage:
I will add the corresponding antennas in the final assembly of the model.
This was all for today. I hope that I could give you some hints for your builds.
In the next post I will show you how I started the painting process of the fuselage and tail and I will introduce you to the 2 sets of Topnotch-masks I bought for painting of the aircraft.
Have a nice evening and weekend.
See you soon!