When I bought this old kit
I didn't know it would become the toughest but also greatest model I ever
built. The old Monogram B-1 neither depicts an accurate B-1A nor a B-1B.
What I wanted was an USAF ACC B-1B. Many changes and additions were
neccessary to achieve that and this is how it went.
Cockpit
Modification of the cockpit
began with cutting out the entire forward tub. New floor and walls were
added as well as new ACES II seats that are completely scratch built, each
seat made of 29 parts. No changes were made to the rear cockpit as it
would be invisible later. Some details were added to the instrument
console, inner canopy frame and the walls.
Landing gear
The main gear is almost
unmodified, just a small strut (with two holes) was added. The nose gear
needed more changes to look accurate. The lights were drilled out and
filled with clear paint, the cables were replaced with copper wires and
some details were added to the doors as well. The biggest modification is
the forward strut. The original one was correct for early B-1, while
the more
recent B-1B have a triangular strut configuration.
Click on
images below to see larger images
Fuselage
The fuselage basically
consists of the upper and the lower half. Again a lot of modifications
were done: engraving the panel lines, shortening the rear weapons bay,
filling the holes for external ALCMs, closing and seperating the big
forward weapons bay, removing the optical turret, sanding the area between
refuel docking and cockpit to create a smooth canopy joint, drilling the
rear cockpit windows, removing front and rear walls so my own radome/tail
cone (see below) woud fit, a short section of the nose cut off for the same
reason, added/opened various inlets/outlets, added vortex generators,
lower antenna near the tail cone moved forward some mm, reshaped the
"sting" above each exhaust pair.
Balance tests showed that
some weight was required to make the B-1B stand safely on its gear even
when the wings are in full sweep. So I integrated 18 steel nails
(altogether ca. 40 g) into the fuselage behind and in front of the
cockpit.
After the wing seals
(plastic foil) had been added the fuselage was closed and sanded.
Engine nacelles
Although each engine nacelle is
made of only two parts they require lots of work to look right. First thing was
removing the outlets on the underside. Two canes were added to each intake.
The upper and lower nacelle
halves need serious sanding/puttying/sanding to become decently smooth. I
realized that the trailing end of the nacelles were a little too short. After
considering various solutions I decided to leave them that way as modifications
would have been very complicated and results not really satisfying. Just
antennas and aerodynamic parts were added.
Exhaust
The featherless exhaust cans -
how can one build them? After considering this problem for a long time I decided
to take the challenge of building them from scratch. To make a long story short:
each exhaust can is made of 62 parts where one part is from the original kit.
The other 61 parts are made of plastic cup and other type of sheet plastic.
After completion of the model I
realized that the four exhaust cans were the major sub-project of this model and
I am pretty happy they turned out looking not too bad.
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images below to see larger images
Wings
The wings are the only parts of
the kit that have engraved panel lines from the beginning. They are made of
softer plastic than the rest of the kit.
Vertical and horizontal
stabilizer
The housing on top of the
vertical stabilizer have a flat end on the B-1B, so I reshaped it using resin
and added the light just underneath the end. When comparing the tail section to
a drawing in side view it becomes obvious that the small cone between the
horizontal stabilizers (pointing backwards) is somewhat short. I decided to
ignore this flaw because it's hard to notice.
Tail cone and radome
Certainly one of the more
eyecatching parts was the tail cone which under any circumstances must be redone
to get the B-1B right. After considering different solutions I developed a
method to produced a reasonable result. In short:
-
use a drawing to cut a
plastic blade shaped like the cone in side view
-
mount the blade on a
driller
-
drill a hole into a candle
using the blade
-
clean hole and fill with
resin
-
extract resin part when
hardened
-
clean resin part
This should also work for the
radome. The radome is slightly too short and pointy - not much, just enough to
be noticed in a comparison to a drawing. However in this case I didn't make the
new part like I made the tail cone because at that time I had the opportunity of
using a turning machine. I ended up with a sharp looking radome turned from a
piece of high density foam.
Click on
images below to see larger images
Decals
As I got closer to the final
stages of this project (ca. 4 years since beginning by that time) I decided to
buy a aftermarket decal set since it seemed impossible for me to paint the
decals by hand. I chose Cutting Edge Painted Bones Part 3.
It offered three gray
Bones. I chose 85062 "Uncaged" with the menacing Eagle noseart. For
the small stencils I added some spare decals. In order to elliminate silvering I
applied shiny clear paint prior to decaling.
Paint
The FS36118 Gunship Gray looks
unspectacular but certainly caused some trouble. By the time I began painting
the whole thing the paint in the can was already beginning to dry, being highly
viscous and drying with shiny finish. I hoped I could compensate the shine with
the final flat clear coat but unfortunately I ran out of flat clear. I simply
bought a new can just to realize that the new paint dries much less flat than
the paint before! In fact even a fresh can of semi-gloss gray would have been
better than this! I was lost!
It was the new Revell Aqua Color
flat clear that rescued me. Thinning it down with water I finally achieved the
result I was looking for. However this paint also made the Gunship Gray a bit
lighter.
Weathering was kept to a minimum
except for the wings which accidentally were weathered a bit more than I wanted.
Click on
images below to see larger images
What took you so long?
After mounting the final
assemblies like landing gear and engines the B-1B finally was complete after ca.
4.5 years of breaks, relaunches, agony, joy and new ideas and methods. During
this time I started and completed 9 other models but the B-1B is matchless in my
collection! The time spent, the amount of new techniques and scratch building -
87 % of the total 515 parts are made from scratch - and of course the size make
the B-1B stand out in my cabinet! For the future I'm not planning to make a
model which will surpass the B-1B but I will try to build faster!
Deun
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images below to see larger images
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