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I'm
not going to go into much history of the Buccaneer here, but instead
will refer you to the following most excellent web-site regarding The Brick:
Blackburn Buccaneer - The Last
British Bomber (Individual Aircraft Histories & Colour Schemes)
I once read that the Bucc was not so much built, as it was laid down like the keel of a ship! Which seems fairly fitting considering the robust appearance of the airframe. It's stated that this was due to the initial design parameters for needing a long airframe life, due to the harsh low level environment that the Bucc was intended to operate in.
I initially had no interest in the Bucc partially because of its appearance and mostly because of a lack of interest in anti-shipping aircraft, but when it gained its place among the many other tired, aging dinosaurs that showed they still had teeth in Operations Desert Storm and Granby (and which also served to be the operational swan-songs for most of the other said dinosaurs) in early 1991, it held a lot more interest for me. Having associated Bucc's with a normal war-load of Martel Sea Eagles and a primary mission of anti-shipping, it was strange to see it show up for a desert based conflict as a laser designator for LGB's. Besides, who can resist the smart looking ARTF (Alkali Removeable Temporary Finish) Desert ("Titty") Pink paint scheme, along with the decidedly anti-PC nose-art that the majority of the RAF contingent seemed to wear during that conflict. (Thanks go out to those of you that were involved and thumbed your noses at the PC-crowd BTW - its appreciated from the standpoint that it gave the aircraft much more color and character, instead of being just another boring and drab jet with no personality traits!) Yes, I know I'm a rebel... but like Whoopi Goldberg once said about her colorful language at one of her performances: "If you're offended and don't like it, get the @#%$ out now!" :)
Going into this build, I knew that Czechmaster (CMR) was planning to release their new resin kit fairly soon and that it would eclipse all others from a detail stand point... but I sat and mulled over the options I had at my disposal which was both the Airfix and the Revell of Germany (formerly Matchbox) Buccaneer kits and thought about what I had paid for them in comparison to what the (yet to be announced) price of the CMR kit will probably be. I also have an aversion to resin kits for the most part (unless they're smaller conversion pieces) and prefer to work with styrene as a medium when it comes to modifying, filling, sanding, polishing, etc. I don't like the fact that resin kits require cyanoacrylate to glue their parts together, which doesn't leave a whole lot of room for work time when finessing something together... and I've yet to see a resin kit that had perfect fit of all of its pieces.
So the decision was simple... I wanted a Bucc and didn't want to wait until CMR would decide to release theirs. Plus, doing a kit-bash of the Airfix and Revell of Germany kits sounded like a fun proposition.
The Airfix kit gives a fairly good outline of the Bucc, but many of its details are lacking and the moulded on intakes to the top and bottom pieces of the fuselage make for some nasty clean-up work and still don't look very realistic once finished. The Revell of Germany kit on the other hand has some really nice intakes, but the entire rest of the kit leaves a lot to be desired from an outline standpoint, not to mention the typical panel lines done by Matchbox's "mad-trencher" and the fact that my Revell kit had some pretty terrible mould defects that made the kit almost unbuildable as far as the main airframe was concerned. Revell's QC was obviously fast-asleep with this one.
Taking a que from Gary Hatcher's "Pretty In Pink" article in Issue 3, Volume 6 of Scale Aviation Modeller International... I grafted on the intakes from the Revell Bucc to the Airfix. If the cuts are made correctly to the Airfix kit and with some good filing work, the Revell intakes are almost a perfect fit with minimal filling/sanding needed.
A spacer bar made of sprue scrap was placed in the lower fuselage between the intakes and behind where the cockpit tub would be, as there was a pretty bad over-hang of the upper fuselage to the lower in this area and the spacer fixed it nicely.
I was not happy with the overly pointed nose of the stock Airfix kit (and the Revell nose was no better) so looking at reference photos I carefully started filing a more pronounced kink in the upper and lower nose pieces of the Airfix kit and then by using 3M Acryl-Blue putty, started building up the radome to be a bit more bulbous between the tip of the nose and the kink. The weapon recorder bulge on the underside of the nose was also thinned down as it appeared to protrude too far from the underside of the nose. This all may not be totally accurate in regards to the nose, but it looks a lot better to my eye and helped to fix what was the 2nd most visible error of the Airfix kit, with the intakes being the 1st.
The rest of the airframe build went pretty smooth with a lot of Cyano and 3M Acryl-Blue being used around the tail section... with very special attention being given to the jet-blast plates in the sides of the rear fuselage. Airfix put the fuselage break right through the middle of these jet-blast plates which required very careful filing with a half-oval rat-tail file and some sand paper to obliterate the seam at this point. The wing-tip extensions were also clipped off as well, since almost all but one of the Buccs that went to the Middle East had these removed.
The Airfix weapons pylons were used, but required careful removal of the Martel rails from beneath them since these weren't seen on Operation Granby Buccs. The ALE-40 Chaff/Flare dispenser attachment holes were filled under the jet-exhausts and the ALE-40's were moved to the inside of the outboard weapons pylons. Even though all evidence points to the right inboard slipper tank not being carried on operational missions in Granby, I attached it anyway as I felt it would nicely compliment the rest of the asymmetrical load-out. The ARI 18218 Aerial housings on the leading edges of the wings were scatch-built from Evergreen styrene rod.
I sanded off the forward frame bar of the main canopy and rescribed it a little further forward as the combined frame bars of the windscreen and canopy looked way too wide to my eye. I also thinned the rear hood of the canopy that fits over the upper spine of the fuselage as it was overly thick and nothing near scale. I then polished the canopy and attached it for final painting. I didn't do any detail work to the cockpit and just used the stock kit ejection seats as I'm not much for an interior details type of modeler. I only wished I had put some sheet styrene under the ejection seats to raise them up a bit, as they appear to sit too low in the cockpit.
| Model Alliance decals were used to replicate XW533/A, Miss Jolly Roger/Fiona/Glenfarclas. The Miss Jolly Roger noseart seemed the most fitting of all the Granby Buccs, considering the detachment name of "Sky Pirates" and the associated Jolly Roger skull and crossbones insignia worn on the left side of the nose. |
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image below to see larger image
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I could not find anything at my local hobby shop that even came close to matching the ARTF Desert Pink, so I went about mail-ordering Humbrol and Extra-acrylics versions of this paint, but was not happy with them either... both of which seeming too dark and too brown in shade. One day I got a wild hair and decided to go outside of my normal venues to acquire paint and stopped in at my local Hobby Lobby to check out their acrylic craft paints. I came across a bottle that seemed to be a close approximation that was called "Dunes Beige" by a company called Delta Ceramcoat. Not only did it provide more paint (2 FL. OZ.) than normal hobby paint jars, but it was cheap too!... being like .87 cents for a bottle! I figured what the hey, give it a shot! I heavily thinned it with water and little denatured alcohol and commenced with painting. Unfortunately this stuff seemed to have the same air-brushing qualities as Polly-S paints if any of you ever tried to air-brush the old Polly-S line! I managed to get it on, but not without it spitting many small glops of paint on several places all over the model. At this point I set the model down and gave it a few days thought (and cooling off period). When I came back to it, the paint seemed to have sufficiently hardened, so I took an Xacto blade and proceeded to carefully scrape these glops off and did some sanding with 1500 grit wet/dry sandpaper. Amazingly enough I got a pretty good finish out it, so proceeded on with detail painting, Future coating it and applying decals.
The "Glenfarclas" name on the right side of the nose I robbed from an Xtradecal sheet as the Model Alliance version looked as if it had been printed in BOLD! On the Xtradecal sheet there was also an "XW533" that is supposed to go on the inside of the nose-gear door, so this was used since Model Alliance did not include this. I also robbed the RAF low-vis roundels from the Xtradecal sheet as the Model Alliance just did not seem to come as close to matching color references in my humble opinion.
I used the Revell main-gear struts and wheels since these were a little more realistic in appearance than the solid units in the Airfix kit. They're not totally accurate, but a heck of a lot better than what Airfix moulded and I couldn't justify the cost of searching for the metal after-market units that are out there. For the nose-gear strut, I used the upper half of the Airfix unit with part of the lower half of the Revell unit and scratch-built the rest in-between with Evergreen styrene. The spoke holes were drilled out of the nose-gear wheel using a pin-vise with a small drill-bit. A little hobby jewel that was also found on my foray to Hobby Lobby, was glued to the front of the Airfix landing light housing and looks pretty convincing in my humble opinion. The Revell nose-gear door was used as it was a little thinner than the Airfix and the Airfix main-gear doors were re-engineered at their attachment points with some more Evergreen styrene as the Airfix stock doors do not have the most positive attachment points.
The Revell IFR probe was attached to the nose as the Airfix one looks like a piece of sprue with a blob of plastic on the end of it. The Revell one is much better defined and really helps improve this area of the kit. The ALQ-101 ECM pod and the CPU-123 LGB came from an Airfix weapons set. The AVQ-23 Pave Spike pod came from a Hasegawa weapons set, as the AVQ-23 that was in the Airfx weapons set, had some serious sink marks on it that do not appear to be repairable. Most of the antennas on the spine and under the nose were replaced with Evergreen strip styrene as the Airfix pieces were way too thick for scale. The kit supplied vent-pipe that attaches to the left underside of the rear fuselage beside the arresting hook, was shortened and attached, as it is too long in stock form.
With that, my Brick, Banana Jet (or if you prefer) the Bucc, was finished. It took a little extra work and may not be up to par with the latest wonder kits, but it looks nice sitting amongst my collection and was a lot of fun to build. Perhaps someday I may do another and given the choice between going this route or the CMR kit, I would definitely do the Airfix/Revell kit-bash again. That is, unless Airfix decides to downscale their 1/48 scale kit which has somewhat of an unfair reputation.
J.C.
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