Welcome to the Training / Two Seater Campaign!

The campaign will run from March 1, 2015 through August 31, 2015.

If you haven't signed up yet, or want to see the rules, go here.

Please post your initial and in-progress photos as well as campaign discussion in this thread. Please post your finished build photos in the campaign gallery.

Looking forward to some great trainers and two-seater builds!

Michael

Having just finished a 1/350th Battleship yesterday, time for something smaller.

Airfix 1/72nd new tool DH82 Tiger Moth, in Fleet Air Airm Markings.



The aircraft I am building is the one pictured just below the bag of sprues.



The Fuselage halves readied, one will have the cockpit doors down.



The simple but effective interior, seats and sticks on a simple spine.



The basic interior colours on, the canvas covering is red dope / primer the remainder is interior grey green.



A bit of detail painting, the tubular metal framework was picked out in a silver colour and the throttles etc in black (not sure if this is 100% right for a FAA Tiggie in 1941, but it matches I was lucky enough to fly in 20 years ago.



That's got the campaign under way.

Si

Ok,so here is my entry, the Vampire T.11 from Airfix



The box is a little battered, but the kit inside is perfectly fine







my progress so far, the cockpit has a reasonable level of detail, the only addition I have made are the pull cords on the ejector seats, which I made from an old guitar string cut to length and bent to shape, then painted and super glued in place.

more progress soon, I am currently waiting for the figures to dry.

I may consider getting some decals from xtradecal for this thing because they have plenty of vampire T.11 schemes

Trying to get rid of my old MPM's before it comes a better kit.

Here's my entry.

Fairchild PT-19 Cornell


I did some cleaning up yesterday at our IPMS meeting.


Decals and PE.


My plan is to make a PT-19 from the flight school of the exile Norwegian Air Force in Little Norway, Toronto, Canada

Interesting submissions, guys. I'm looking forward to seeing progress.

Jim

As usual, a campaign starts and I'm traveling around the world... I did bring Hasegawa's 1/72 T-34 Mentor with me....

@Simon, I started that kit for the Great Build-off Campaign. Didn't get done but it is a nice kit. The only issue I had was getting the booms to true up to the wings.

Cockpit almost done. Two hours of etch folding...

In with the old reliable Monogram AT6

Some progress on the Vampire T.11


Painting and dry brushing on the fuselage half


Instructor and student in place, I should have got a picture of these two before I put them in but hey-ho. The nose has been weighed down with a sizeable lump of milliput.


As seen here


Upper surface of the wing is attached

and that's it so far, more to follow




You are right there, this is a very nice kit so far, I will keep that issue with the booms in mind and deal with it when i get there and can see it myself, cheers for the heads up!

constructive criticism is very welcome
Cheers, Simon

And I'm off:
Hasegawa 1/72 T-34A Mentor.


Had to break it sown a bit to fit in my luggage.

Great kits showing up on this campaign, looking forward to seeing them under way.

A bit more progress on the Tiggie.

Decals on the instrument panels.



The panels and the interior in place.



They are a good fit, as long as the interior bulkheads are set in the right place.

The fuselage halves joined and the lower wing in place.



The cowling and the tail group on. Airfix have captured the sit of the lower wing, and the gap between the fin and the tailplane.



enjoying this little tiggie, nice kit.

Si

This is my entry for the Trainer / Two Seater Campaign, the Miles Magister by Air Lines. Quite an old kit like most in my collection. The decals are yellowed but they look like the can be made to work. If not then there is the scrap box. Notice the painting guide which includes call outs for Testor's paints in this US boxing of a FROG kit. The pre-war lines of this little trainer are very attractive. According to the history the first batch was delivered to Training Command in 1937.

I haven't done one of these campaign thingy's yet, so I'll give it a try with this:



This kit's a real pig-in-a-poke in it's native form, so I'm going to try and spruce it up a bit. On the positive side, there's no place to go but up with this one. The Hobbycraft C-45 is a parts donor which is kinda sad because it's a slightly better kit, but it doesn't get me where I want to be. This is also kind of a test bed for what I hope might be an AT-11 version of the ICM 1/48 scale C-45 kit, or maybe somebody will do a conversion set (Hint, Hint!). I'll keep you posted as things develop.
DR

Since the last day or so have been wet enough I didn't want to sling any major paint on my ongoing F4 photo lightning project so I figured I'd launch into the AT-11 build. I knew this was vintage Matchbox going into it (minimal detail, approximate shape, and major gouges for panel lines) but this thing set a new standard of lowness even for Matchbox. The molds have made the rounds through several different kit makers and this version is molded in very soft plastic. The result is ill defined overdone panel lines and a very pebbly surface, this on a aircraft that was virtually always bare metal. This is going to require some major priming, even at that I suspect this is going to be an exercise in polishing turds. This is what I laid out last fall to see what I had to work with:



Further investigation revealed the kit windscreen left a nasty gap along the entire top which would be a bear to fill and blend. The rest of the front end alignment wasn't much better.





At some point I also picked up a Hobbycraft C-45 which is the transport version of the Beech 18; the same basic airframe used on the AT-ll. Closer examination revealed both kits are very similar, but they do have some significant differences, more on this as the build develops. It does appear though that with a little saw work and some reasonable blending the C-45 windscreen will work.



This has the advantage of being able to render the overhead windows (which were ignored completely on the AT-ll kit) by just masking off the applicable area on the clear windscreen part. Otherwise using the AT-11 parts I'd have to cut out the openings and fill with liquid crystal clear or worse, cut acetate. They are quite prominent and need to be there.



While doing some research on the interior, this picture caught my eye:



This is a navigator trainee sitting in front of the rear bulkhead which is just aft of the crew entry door on the left side of the aircraft. Note, he is sitting next to a window on the right side.



This is the window arrangement Matchbox gives you, on both sides! This is what the right side of the AT-11 looks like:



The window the navigator was sitting next to was the one just above the number 55 in this photo. It's not there on the Matchbox kit. A little alignment and a No. 30 drill solved that problem. I used one of the kit windows (which are quite useless in their intended role) as a filler for the misplaced kit window, which would be under the star insignia in the above photo. All of the round windows in the kit have a severe mold mark depression in each one and aren't usable in any fashion. Fortunately with small round windows like these a little crystal clear after painting will solve the issue nicely. This is the fuselage halves after the necessary surgery.



And on the inside:



Since I'm figuring on sprucing up the interior some, I ground out anything on the inside between the aft bulkhead and the nose to make room for some detail, alignment pins, ejector marks and the like. On the bright side there isn't much kit detail you've got to worry about.

Looks like you've got your work cut out for you with your AT-11. Ah, the challenges of old kits! What scale is that kit? Is it 1/72?

Jim

DR, welcome to the campaign. You will not regret it. These campaigns can be quite addictive
Nice progress so far although the kits looks to be a challenge. Sometimes it is great to make a silk purse from a sows ear.

I have not decided yet, but I have a F-16 two seater in the stash, so I am sure I will have something figured out.

Jim,
Sorry, I didn't notice that there wasn't any indication of the scale in any of the photos, the scale is 1/72nd. I don't usually go overboard on detail in that scale, but in this case it's the only game in town, and if any kit ever needed it, it's this one. The original plan was to just add some interior detail since I was able to find more info on-line than I thought I would, but the closer I looked the more inaccuracies I found. So now it looks like a major rebuild. With that in mind, this is the engine situation:



The top things are what is supplied by Matchbox. They're closer to being a wagon wheel than an aircraft engine, and would require an inordinate amount of work to make anything useful out of them. The gray engines are from the Hobbycraft C-45 and while not being overly accurate are acceptable with a little work. The tan ones are resin copies I made from the C-45 engines back when I planned to do that as a separate build, they came out good enough to use at this scale, but since I'm pretty well trashing the C-45 kit for this build, they go into the spares stash. These are the wings and engine nacelles from the AT-11 kit. They're a one piece affair split horizontally with half molded as part of each wing top and bottom piece.





The shot from the front of the right wing indicates the issues with this approach. That is the resulting cowl ring that I'd have to deal with after assembling the wing. After a quick check, it looks like the C-45 cowl rings would fit the AT-11 nacelles.



The grooves in the front of the nacelles are Matchbox's answer to the cowl ring. Another feature that cries to be included are the rather prominent exhaust ports, that were ignored altogether.





I fabricated the exhaust stacks from styrene tube that was slipped over some solder and bent, then cut at an angle. The solder was used to prevent the styrene from crimping at the bend, and some hot water soaking would soften the plastic. At this point the more I looked at the Matchbox wings and nacelles against my reference material the less I liked them. The Matchbox nacelles lack any indication of the cowling flaps that you see in this photo:



The original plan was to add them by sawing off the cowling portion of the bottom nacelle and cutting/filing notches where the cowl flaps would go, and putting in scratch built flaps made from .01 sheet styrene.



After surgery:



After all this I still didn't like the look of the Matchbox cowlings and nacelles. This is what they should look like:



This is a comparison of the AT-11 wing (bottom) and the C-45 wing (top):



While the C-45 cowling looks a little too straight, it's appears closer than the very egg-shaped Matchbox version. Plus, the leading edge of the C-45 wing is straight versus the very cranked leading edge on the AT-11 wing. This feature was added much later in the production run, and doesn't appear on any of the reference photos of the time period I'm looking to represent. So now the plan is to use the C-45 wing instead of the AT-11 kit wings. The cowl flaps will have to be redone on that wing as well, they are represented as a couple of shallow panel lines, and the exhaust stacks are represented, but are inferior the my homemade versions, and some more drilling and filing is required. This brings up another issue, the wing-fuselage join is different on the two kits. The C-45 wing joins at the fuselage, while the AT-11 wing joins to an approximate 1/8 inch fairing on the fuselage.



This issue is exacerbated by the fact that with the leading edge crank the wing root chord is longer on the AT-11 fuselage. The net result is that fairing on the AT-11 fuselage will have to go. Thus the blue tape in the photo to help protect the fuselage during sanding. This is the net result after an extended session with some 320 grit wet&dry sandpaper.



This whole process wasn't too bad, in part due to the soft plastic used in the AT-11 kit, which sands fairly quickly, the down side was it is very flexible and care has to be taken to keep everything even. On the plus side, I knew I'd have to fill the wing root areas on the interior in any event and by removing the wing root fairing I went all the way through the depth of the fuselage plastic. This allowed my to trace the wing root inserts I'd need directly onto a sheet of .04 styrene. These will be glued into the wing root openings as you see here. Since I'm a little worried about the strength of the resulting join, I'm figuring I'll need to add a wing spar through the fuselage just aft of the forward bulkhead (the thing with the opening in it). If I'm going to all the trouble to detail the inside the rear crew door needed to be opened which required a lot of scribe work to cut through the plastic (soft plastic helped). Now the fiddly work starts.

That's because this kit was never really a Matchbox kit to begin with. The moulds originated with Pioneer/PM Models from Turkey in the early 1970s, and have never been updated. Still, the shapes are fairly good and the panel trenches can be filled. It takes a bit of skill to achieve good results, but you look to be equal to the challenge

Great builds going on, enjoyed reading them.

A little progress on the tiggie.

The main undercarriage and tailskid on.



the upper wing built and the cabane struts added.



The yellow sprayed on the lower surfaces (this is Tamiya TS33 "camel yellow" a works well as trainer yellow.



More in while.

Si

Well it's still pretty wet in the Carolina mountains and cool, which is bad news for progress on my Photo Lightning build which is stalled with a half-coat of primer, but good news for progress on the AT-11. These are a couple of shots of interior over the last couple of days:





The ribs and stringers are evergreen styrene strips and stretched sprue. The bomb racks are a donation from the interior of an Airfix B-26 which is surprisingly well appointed, especially considering the kit's age. They aren't particularly accurate, but they fit well and relay the idea (keep in mind it's going to be pretty dark in there when all is said and done). The funny looking thing in the foreground is the rear fuselage flooring and a wooden box cover that sits between the bomb bay openings. It's what this guy is crouching on in this photo:



It was used to cover the extra bombing and navigation equipment fitted to this trainer, and shown on this cross-section:



It's the stuff shown as number 12 in the diagram. The bomb bay openings themselves are like most of this build, a compilation of educated guess work and mark 1.5 eyeballing. This shot does about the best job of showing the placement of the openings:



They look to go from the back of the cockpit bulkhead aft to about the landing flap hinge line. Both were locations I had a reasonable position on and went with it. The width looks like the bottom of the aircraft is pretty close to being split into thirds which is what I did. The openings were made the same way as the aft crew door, a lot of repeated scribing. I did wise up some though after the crew door episode, my primary scribing tool is a cheap-o scribe from Tractor Supply and filed to a triangular shape with a flat edge towards the handle.(it's one of those 90 deg. bent things) I found with the door that the deeper you go, the wider the groove you've got to dig. So after I had a good groove to follow I switched over to the back side of an x-acto knife to finish. Using the backside peels up a kerf of plastic with each pass instead of spreading plastic to the sides and the width of the cut stays at the width of the x-acto blade (ie. less digging). My next major hurdle is how to replicate the astro-dome used by the navigator trainees. It's kind of a weird looking affair naturally, couldn't be a simple dome, (which I might actually have in the parts stash someplace) nope, it's gotta be this goofy shaped thing:



another shot from the opposite side:



That means I gotta fabricate this thing from scratch. But - BEHOLD THE FRANKEN-VAC!



Again guess-timating size of this thing was based on the theory that this aircraft was also used as a gunnery trainer with a .30 cal. twin turret so the opening was probably the same for both uses.(navigator & gunnery). I purloined a turret from a matchbox A-20 (which almost assuredly will never see the light of day) as a guide for sizing and a back-up plan if the astro-dome project failed. Drawback being, having to scratch-build most of the turret structure and the additional fairing work on the top of the fuselage. Based on my advanced guess-work, I found a 1/2 inch wood dowel to serve as my master, and started to hack and file away. The end result isn't perfect, but it does look weird, and the original looks weird, so I say run with it. The set-up:



R2D-1/2; this little guy puts the suck in modeling:



After a trip to the toaster oven, and a couple of failed test shots, It's ALIVE!



For you kids keeping score at home, the preferred oven temp is 270-ish deg. Fahrenheit (132 deg C.). You can tell when the plastic is ready when it develops a noticeable droop (gloves are strongly recommended). If you develop a smoking hole in the plastic and your bagels taste kinda funky for a couple of days, something was too hot. A strip of tape was wrapped around the dome part at the level I wanted to cut as a guide to keep my cut straight and I cut right on the dowel for support. The end result looked acceptable so the next step was placement of the hole on the fuselage. I used a circle template to get the location where I wanted it and outlined it in pencil (this is where that pebbly plastic is a bonus).





I then went at it with a dremel tool and a router bit. That process went much smoother than anticipated, I was able to switch from side to side and work my way from the center out to the ring with a good degree of control and as a result had very little file work to do in the end to smooth everything out.







I'll have to take more care in the final steps to make sure the front is front and the back is back on the alignment, but I think it'll work.

At the end of the day here's where I stand:





Most of the major cutting is done, now I've just got to make sure everything fits where it's suppose to.

Simon, I like how your Tiger Moth is coming out.

Dmiller, you sure are adding a lot of detail to that AT-11. Exceptional work.

Jim

And that is what I am going to build for this campaign. Mirage 1/48 RWD-8. It is old model made by Spojnia in late 80. I am going to use excellent photoeteched upgrade made by PART. It will be all silver aircraft from Flying School in Deblin. What's interesting about this edition is that there is no decals for an aircraft which you see on the front of the box. More about RWD-8:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RWD_8

More progress on the Vampire T.11


All painted now, and looking much better for it!


I have finally fitted the undercarriage too, that was a bit of a challenge due to the way the kit is made, as Airfix would have you fit the undercarriage at the same time as the tail booms, but I prefer to keep it separate until I have painted the model.

Now all I need to do is give this little thing a coat of clear, put the decals on, and weather it. I can give it a coat of clear today but the rest will have to wait a bit because the decals I ordered from Hannants have just been dispatched, so should turn up in a few days

Cheers, Simon

Continuing on with the humble AT-11, having accomplished most of the obvious hacking and slashing on the fuselage I've resigned myself to trying to flesh out the inside with more (very wee) bits and pieces of plastic. The major project was simulating the metal brackets used to keep the practice bombs lined up with the bomb bay openings. They are pretty obvious inside as in this photo.



While these are "U" shaped in reality, I opted for some styrene "I" beam shaped stock which was closest I could find to the size I needed. The next part was real tedious, drilling a kazillion very small holes in about 75 mm of stock. The end result however looks the part and more importantly fits.









Things are a little out of kilter at this stage, but once I get the rear flooring in I can get everything squared away and tied down. The overhead racks are 20 thousands sheet styrene and 1 mm very thin strips (which at this scale are a major pain to work with). Having just about expended my fiddly quotient on the interior, I needed a little more hack and slash to vent my frustration so I launched into the engine nacelles. These are the donors from the Hobbycraft C-45 kit. While they do have some faint lines the represent the cowl flaps, they are the wrong number and really not worth the effort. Unfortunately I didn't think to take a before picture prior to my frenzy of destruction on the cowlings, which is ok I guess, because there wasn't much to see anyway. Unlike the original AT-11 cowlings, the C-45 cowls attach to the wing in a different location. The join is not at the end of the cowling but rather a little further back behind the firewall. This puts my cut point in the middle of the kit part, not just a notch in the end as it the AT-11. My solution was to guesstimate about the size and location of the openings, I cut pieces of masking tape to size and applied them to each cowling to use as a scribing template.



Once I had the location marked I drilled a couple of holes and routed out enough between them to get a jewelers file in and then filed until I hit my scribed lines. The original idea was to make the cowl flaps out of sheet styrene, but they turned out to be overly fiddly and I feared they would break if I bent them outward to the open position. The final solution was to use metal foil which I could bend to my heart's content, was thinner and looked like metal.





The inside of the cowling was beveled to get the foil closer to the outside of the cowling. I've still got a little lip on all of them, but I didn't want to screw up the opening and make a bigger mess. Now that I've got these nifty cowlings, I probably ought to put engines in the things. After a review of my available choices I opted to go with the C-45 engines, they were the best of the lot, and while not perfect, they weren't all that bad either. This is what they are suppose to look like:







Originally I thought I'd add an ignition harness ring to the gearbox, but on reviewing the photos, I realized the ring is under the push-rods, so in the end I opted to just try an highlight the kit's version with chrome silver paint.





Engines a-la-Mangus (engines-on-a-stick). I opted to use gloss black on the push-rods so I didn't want to use flat black on the ignition wires. I decided to try and find a light brownish color that matches (somewhat) the color seen on some period ignition wires. After going through my entire color collection of browns I still couldn't find a color I thought looked right. Since the color I was thinking of had a somewhat yellowish tone, it was into the yellow section and I hit upon Humbrol Africa Corps desert yellow. This thing is so old that the paint number was HM2 which is about 2 or 3 Humbrol numbering systems ago. I have my quibbles with Humbrol paint, but longevity ain't one of them. This paint is probably about 40 years old, you've got to stir 'em good, but they bounce back every time. Once shoved into an engine cowling, these will do the trick.

The interior coloring I decided on was interior green for the forward section and bare metal for the aft compartment. All the period photos I found indicated bare metal:







The last one was from a restoration project and cinched it for me. It's a note to the flight crews, and I figured it wouldn't be stenciled onto the bare metal if someone was going to come along and cover it with primer or interior paint afterwards. The forward section however is under a lot of glazing and glare would be an issue. I also found a couple of relic photos that show an interior green front.



This is after the application of some Model Master non-buffing aluminum metalizer to the aft compartment:









This shot shows the bomb bay area (a restoration) with the wood box that covered the extra bombing and navigation equipment removed. Of note here is the remnants of a dark paint on the plywood floor which I interpreted to be a bronze green color. Referring back to the shot of the bombardier checking the bomb fuses, it looks like the top of the box he is kneeling on is a darker color than the sides of the box. Based on this, I opted to paint the aft flooring bronze green on plywood.



Some oxygen bottles and sundry other small bits to finish off the aft compartment, then it's up front. Carry on.
DR