Martin's SEAC Fury ***Finished***

[Martin R]

Hmmmm. I'm not sure one way or the other. There are certainly differences in the parts breakdown, but there are also similarities imho. the odd pinched canopy shape and the way the cockpit is open behind the pilot is one; the prop / spinner / cowling breakdown looks identical. Are the undercarriage bits the same? I thought so, although I don't have the FROG one to hand at the moment. Finally, the overspan rockets 'neath the wings looked very reminiscent.

Having said the above, obviously the FROG has wings that can fold and the PM don't, but I would hazard a guess that the PM bods took a close look at the FROG before doing their own tooling.

OK, having opened my mouth, I had a look at the FROG bits I have to hand and at least some of the very confident points that I made above are total b.s. Sorry, Paul!

regards,

Martin

[PaulBradley]

No worries, Martin - it's pretty obvious once you actually compare the two.

I also worked on the brick wall trailing edges today - except I had THREE sets to take care of....there's an hour of my life I won't get back...!

[Martin R]

Done as much thinning of wing halves as I'm going to; I've also thinned down the upper and lower surfaces of the oil cooler intakes and squared up the cockpit opening. Hopefully, from now on it's more construction than destruction. Time will tell.

regards,

Martin

[Martin R]

Taken some time off the Fury to finish my 1/48th Mossie. Hopefully, that'll be done tomorrow, so normal service should resume on Monday . . .

regards,

Martin

<Edit: Just finished the damn thing tonight, so tomorrow evening I plan to crack on with the Fury! /Edit>

[Martin R]

. . . and back to the Fury.

I am trying to follow most of Lancfan's (David's) improvements, shown in his build thread of which the link is in "Historical Reference". Tonight, I fitted an IP and seat / rear bulkhead combo from a cannibalised Tempest I had in the spares box. I have bent a bit of styrene sheet and placed this in one fuselage half behind the bulkhead to act as a base for filler, as the rear of the 'cockpit' a la PM should actually be fuselage skinning..

I have also gouged out the lip at the front of the exhaust bays, to allow for the placement of exhaust pipes in due course. A splash of paint (very dark grey) round the cockpit tomorrow and I may be able to get the fuselage halves joined. That's the hope anyway.

As for the wings, sanding was completed a few nights ago and I built up walls for the main gear bay tonight. These will need reducing in height in due course to allow a wheel bay roof and the upper wing halves to fit. Once I've reduced the height of the walls a bit (hopefully tomorrow night when the glue has dried) I want to have a go at the roof to see if I can get it looking anything like as good as David's.

Pics tomorrow.

regards,

Martin

[Martin R]

Progress as of last night.

Firstly, the cockpit: use of spares box seat, rear bulkhead, floor and IP. It all fitted with just a bit of fettling. The cover over the rear part of the cockpit can also be seen. I have added nothing else (although I have done a bit of judicious re-painting since this photo was taken). Given the dark grey / black cockpit and the small opening, I don't reckon much will be seen once closed up:



Now the undercarriage bay. I have added walls all around the periphery, with a fair bit of support so they stay in place when sanded down to height, as you can see here:



And now tonight's pics. The first part of the evening was spent making an undercarriage bay roof from styrene sheet and strip, using the detail in an Academy Tempest as inspiration. Tamiya Extra Thin cement is an essential for this sort of job. It welds pieces together, but evaporates rapidly preventing any glue marks, even on the very thin sheet I'm using here. Another top tip: marking the position of the wheel bay walls on the bay roof bit made achieving symmetry and proper placement of gubbins much easier!



And here's how it looks when in position. The styrene blocks outboard are to give the undercarriage legs somewhere to locate into - once I've drilled them out, of course.



Here's where I am at the moment. Fuse halves are together and tailplanes have been added. Cowling and underwing piece are dry-fitted in place to show that the gear bay does actually fit (although I had to remove the plastic web across the wing centre-section cut-out in the fuse halves to ensure this).



Tomorrow night, I hope to add the exhaust stubs, paint the various intakes in the wing and interior of the landing lights and get the wing halves together. I will also add some filler behind the rear cockpit bulkhead.

regards,

Martin

[Clashcityrocker]

Lovely work on the undercarriage bay.

Nigel

[DazDaMan]

Excellent stuff!

[Martin R]

Thank you, chaps.

I just had a short time at the bench tonight, but got most of my evening's 'to dos' done. Here are the major airframe components. You can see that I've added some filller behind the cockpit bulkhead and head armour, and treated some sink marks around the place. Also, I added some (slightly oversize) exhaust pipes to the cowling. I'll cut these to size tomorrow, give them a sand down in height and add the cowling fairing over the top of them.

The wings are now in one piece. I'll let them dry overnight before I attempt to extend inboard of the leading edge intakes with filler tomorrow.



Here are the undercarriage legs and wheels I propose to use from the Heller Tempest Mk V:



Finally, here is the main reference I'm using: the Warpaint Sea Fury edition.



Hopefully, I'll have some more progress to show tomorrow.

regards,

Martin

[DavidWomby]

Nice work on the wheel wells and exhausts!

David

[Martin R]

Thanks, David!

No pics tonight, but I've sanded down the filler behind the pilot's headrest and trimmed the exhaust stacks so that the cowling now fits; I've also bulked up the inboard leading edges with filler and done the same to the corresponding bits of the wing roots. Finally, I've painted the prop and started painting the undercarriage.

Hopefully get tonight's filler sanded down tomorrow and be able to put the wings on. If so, pics will follow - as will more filling!

regards,

Martin

[Martin R]

Hi again.

I sanded down around the wing roots (extending the wing leading edge fillets and edges) to my satisfaction and then thought about adding the wings. Suffice to say there are some ugly gaps around the wing / fuselage junction on the underside. Well, they were nothing that sufficient filler won't fix, so not too worried there. However, I wanted to make sure that the wings and fuselage undersides sat at the same height, so I added some pads of styrene sheet at the rear of the fuselage side joints for the wing centre section to sit on.

At the same time, I thought I could minimise the upper surface wing / fuse gaps by putting a spreader bar inside the fuse. You can see both mods in this pic:



So, as the underside joints are indeed ugly and scared off the camera, I can instead show that the topside joints are relatively tidy. (I know, you didn't see what they were like beforehand but trust me, they're better):



Finally, I had another glance at those drop tanks. What they hey! Just how much fuel did this thing carry externally! I have looked at photos of Sea Fury drop tanks in my Warpaint tome and none of the photos show anything the size of those! In fact all the drops on view look very similar to those carried by Tempests. So, I thought I'd do a comparison of sizes:



LHS top - Special Hobby Tempest II
LHS bottom - Heller Tempest V
RHS - PM Sea Fury.

That's a big ass tank! You gotta wonder how carrying a set of those would affect the performance and handling qualities - and the pilots'd better pray they didn't get a hang-up on one side if they tried to jettison 'em. So, I don't believe that the PM tanks are a representative operational fit (long range ferry, maybe?) and I'll use the Tempest drops, thank you very much.*

regards,

Martin

* Unless of course I can find the 1000 pounders from the Airfix Typhoon, or some Type 3 rocket rails from somewhere.

[AndrewR]

I have seen elsewhere that the tanks are long ranged ferry tanks. I included them on my FB.11 because they are on an aircraft from an OTU and might have to fly extended ranges to get out to the support carrier HMS Unicorn. I'm omitting them from the T.20.

[Martin R]

I have seen elsewhere that the tanks are long ranged ferry tanks. I included them on my FB.11 because they are on an aircraft from an OTU and might have to fly extended ranges to get out to the support carrier HMS Unicorn. I'm omitting them from the T.20.

Thanks Andrew,

So, trying to get things straight in my tired brain, Tempests had 45 gal tanks, which is what I've got in the picture in comparison to the PM things, but Furys had 90 gal tanks - or double the volume. I still think that the PM tanks look rather large for double the volume. (~1.3*length and ~1.5*diameter)

Interestingly, doing a bit of googling on the subject, I found this link: http://www.valiant-wings.co.uk/148-hawk ... -461-p.asp. It takes you to Valiant Wings' website and an advert for "Sea Fury 90 gal tanks". These look* identical (in shape, anyway) to the 45 gal tanks (which makes sense from a Hawker design and development point of view) but are, presumably larger, so I'm still not sure about the shape of the PM kit tanks. I think I need to buy a Sea Fury reference book to do some more research. Anyone got a recommendation?

regards,

Martin

*although it's not a perfect viewing angle, but the angle would tend to accentuate any tendency to 'stumpiness' wouldn't it?

[AndrewR]

How about the P51 90 gallon tanks?

Also remember that British gallons are bigger than US ones!