Scaled Small: May 2007

Joystick Models kit Joy 15

Purchased: Hannants, £7.40, photoetch wire wheels from Jadar-Model, zł 32.00
Completed: 25 May 2007

Nation: Italy
Era: 1910-1919
Justification: As far as I can tell, this was the only Italian-built fighter to see squadron service during World War I. Some machines saw service with foreign air forces in the 1920s.

Introduction - who's afraid of the big, bad vac?

I've lived most of my modelling life with an unhealthy fear of vacs. Sure, I've collected quite a few over the years, but these have all been safely sequestered away deep within my stash, with the fervent hope and prayer that I'd never have to actually build one of them. Time and time again I've been saved by the familiar strategy of "if I hold onto it long enough, I'll never have to build it - someone's sure to come out with an injection-moulded or resin kit of this sooner or later..." I'm especially grateful to Academy for saving me from building that vac kit of the Boeing Stratocruiser!

Precisely why vac building has acquired its reputation as one of the Dark Arts is a bit of a mystery; if you listen to anyone who's ever actually done it, they all seem to say that there's nothing to be afraid of and that it's really quite like building an injection-moulded kit. Nevertheless, that advice gets treated with the same kind of confidence reserved for doctors' assurances that "this won't hurt a bit" . Well, guess what? It is really easy - I was very, very surprised.

Conventional wisdom is that one should delve into vac building gently, perhaps by tackling a conversion kit first, or at least with a simple, non-fiddly subject. Well, I'm not very conventional nor perhaps very wise, so for my very first vac ever, I chose a World War I biplane in 1/72.

Why a vac? Simple - cost. The Ansaldo Balilla has been kitted in this scale a number of times. Apart from this kit, it's been issued as an injection-moulded model (by Hit Kit) and more recently, as a very favourably-reviewed resin (by Karaya). Now, normally with both an injection-moulded and resin alternative available, there would have been no way in the world that I would choose a vac. However, this project was meant to be as low-cost as possible; so nice as the Karaya kit was, I just couldn't justify spending over €20 on a 1/72 biplane when there was an alternative at 1/2 the price. As for the Hit-Kit offering, it seems to be quite scarce now and not much cheaper than the Karaya kit when it can be found (while being reportedly of quite low quality). So, vac it was.

The kit

I'm assuming that most people reading this article are at least familiar with what a vac is, but just in case, I'm going to take this a bit more slowly than usual. Knowledgeable readers who get bored are invited to skip ahead... Well, the picture at right speaks for itself, really. The shapes that go together to make up the model have been created by a flat sheet of plastic being heated up and formed over a mould. This immediately gives rise to the most noticeable difference with building an injection moulded kit: instead of just snipping the parts off a small number of attachment points holding them to a sprue, the shapes that make up the vac kit must be cut out from the surrounding sheet of plastic that they were formed from. Actually, for anyone who's built a few poorer-quality short-run injection-moulded kits, this is not so formidable (I remember a Yak-25 from some anonymous Russian manufacturer that had nearly as much flash as this kit!) but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The kit provides the fuselage as the familiar left-and-right sides, and includes a surprisingly complete cockpit compared to the injection-moulded biplanes I've built for this project so far. All flying surfaces are represented as single-sided only, meaning that due to the limitations of the moulding technique, one side is completely lacking detail. The kit itself has been produced using a female mould, and there is a decent amount of really fine surface detail, including various panel lines on the fuselage and ribs on the flying surfaces. Moulded templates are provided for the struts, as well as representations of the undercarriage. I couldn't decide whether the latter were intended as templates or to be cut out and used. I eventually decided to use them. Five cast white-metal detail parts round out the kit.

There are no instructions to speak of - just a three-view plan and some general vac-building advice in prose followed by specifications and a brief history of the subject. Decals are provided for two Polish examples, along with some spare decals for Kosciuszko Squadron that can be used on other kits such as an Albatros D.III. On my example, the decals were pretty crude and badly out-of-register.

The build

Construction

With no shortage of trepidation, I began construction by following the sequence I'd so often read about but never attempted myself. First, I made a series of scores in the carrier sheet around each of the major parts. This was so I could snap the plastic along these scores and isolate each part. When I had each component on its own small carrier sheet, I traced around each one in turn with a Sharpie marker. Now the fun began. With a new #11 blade, I scored the plastic around each part, trying to undercut the part at around a 45° angle. This cutting out of the parts is, I think, the first of two mental obstacles that most of us have in our thinking about vacs, but in honesty only took around 5-10 minutes. The second of the obstacles was next: sanding! The idea now is to sand away the last bits of carrier sheet remaining underneath the parts that have just been cut away. Cutting at an angle reduces the amount of material that needs to be removed, and the marker pen line indicates the point at which the part originally sat on its carrier - sand thus far, but no farther! Most treatises on the subject recommend gluing down a sheet of sandpaper to a hard surface and then gently rubbing the part against that until the pen line is reached. Instead, I used an emery board and just sanded each part until I reached its pen line. All up, this took around 20-30 minutes, and I was now pretty much at the point where I would have been with an injection-moulded kit. Small parts like the cockpit interior, I simply cut from the backing with a pair of sharp nail scissors.

I have no basis for comparison, so I don't know whether this particular vac kit was good, bad, or indifferent, but I was amazed by how much easier and quicker this all was compared with what I had been expecting!

Construction now followed the familiar pattern. I began by installing the cockpit, which Joystick provides as front and rear bulkheads (the front also containing the instrument panel), a floor, and the white metal seat. With absolutely no guidance from the instructions, I simply had to make a guess as to where these bits went. Fit (at least where I put them!) was excellent. I now joined the fuselage sides and then encountered my first problem with this kit when I went to attach the white metal radiator to the nose - because the radiator is noticeably taller than the nose of the vacform fuselage. I used CA to attach the radiator so that it lined up with the fuselage top. Fortunately, the Balilla's fuselage is flat-bottomed in cross-section. This meant that I could glue scrap styrene to it (left over carrier sheet!) and blend it in so that there was no step remaining between the parts. A lot of putty and sanding later, and it worked out quite well. I painted the fuselage at this point (see next section), and then started worrying rather belatedly about how the lower wing was supposed to attach. Well, if I'd thought about this sooner, I might have been tempted to cut slots in the fuselage sides to accept tabs shaped into the lower wing. But I didn't, so had to come up with some way instead whereby I could safely butt-joint the wings on. The lower wing was scribed with marks showing the position of the fuselage sides, so I separated the wings along these lines and set out to shape the mating surfaces. The problem is that the fuselage sides of the Balilla are gracefully curved, whereas the lines marked on the wing were straight. I now had to try and sand a concave line into the wing roots that would match the curve of the fuselage as much as possible. I thought I did a pretty good job, but later, when the top wing was in place, I discovered that I'd only got it 50% right: the port wing is spot on, but the starboard wing was left with a slight forward sweep. Oh well.

It was also around this time that I briefly considered adding rib detail to the undersides of the wings. I'd read about a technique of filing small grooves into the surface, then liquid cementing fine plastic rod in, then sanding this to almost nothing. However, since things seemed to be going so well, I decided not to tempt fate on my first vac, and left these surfaces smooth.

Painting

As usual, I wanted to duplicate a preserved aircraft, and the obvious choice is Antonio Locatelli's machine preserved at the Bergamo Museum of History. Once again, this aircraft features some elaborate markings (paintings of St George slaying the dragon) that will have to wait until I have enough markings to commission a custom decal sheet from somewhere.

I'm really quite chuffed about how the fuselage paint scheme worked out. This was meant to resemble varnished wood, so I tried out another new technique that I'd read about somewhere. I began by brush-painting the fuselage Tamiya XF-68 NATO Brown overall. When this was dry, I drew wavy lines all over it with a 0.4 mm black draughting pen. In turn, when this was dry, I painted over the top of it all with Tamiya X-27 Clear Red. The effect was magical! I was so pleased with the outcome it made me want to do it again straight away (visions of an Albatros with a fuselage of honey-coloured light wood...) but instead, I painted the engine cowling XF-16 Flat Aluminium, and mixed up a brassy colour for the radiator from the same paint with a little X-12 Gold Leaf stirred in.

The wings and tail were more prosaic, airbrushed in my usual linen mix of 50-50 Flat White XF-2 and Buff XF-57. The red and green identification bands under the wings were plain XF-7 Flat Red and XF-5 Flat Green. On the upper surfaces of the top wing and stabiliser, The same flat green was brushed on in geometric lines with a #00 brush, with XF-9 Hull Red over the top of it in a separate pattern. The XF-9 was really too brown (as I noted once before, but didn't learn from...)

Rigging and final assembly

I'll admit that I cheated a little here. Instead of using the rod and strip supplied with the kit to make the struts, I robbed an Airfix Avro 504K. The supplied stock just seemed way too flimsy to me, and like I said, I wasn't in the mood for tempting fate. Everything went together well, with the only remaining snag being the wire wheels. As with the previous Sikorsky project, I wanted exposed wire wheels on this plane, while the supplied cast metal parts represented canvas-covered wheels. I didn't think that I'd be able to use the same trick as I did on the Sikorsky project, thinking that it would be harder to work with the metal wheels, so I started looking for plastic replacements. Noting that the wheels were about the same size as those of my Fokker D.VII, I found another one of these kits and proceeded to saw one of the wheels in half. Unfortunately, the Fokker wheels were much much thinner than those of the Sikorsky, and I quickly ruined one of them. I started looking for wheels of similar diameter but greater thickness, and tried a pair from a Testors F4U Corsair. These worked OK, but even after prolonged sanding, the Corsair tyres were way too big - the result looked like dune buggy wheels! Eventually, I just ended up cutting discs from sheet styrene, drilling out the centres, and sandwiching the Eduard photoetch discs between them. The result looks way too flat for my liking, but it's the best I could come up with.

Rigging was a mercifully unremarkable experience.

Decals

As it happens, there was one pair of Italian roundels on the decal sheet, but Locatelli's machine needs two pairs and the ones provided were so far out of register anyway that I didn't try to use them. Decals will wait for now.

Conclusions

Well, a lot of things went right here! The vac building experience proved quite painless, and the wood finish on the fuselage was both fun and effective. Go out and build a vac!