Blenheim WIP

So been a while as the move has ended up taking a lot longer then I ever thought it would, one of the down sides of moving cross country and trying to do it all yourself. Because of this I have not built anything in almost a year and could not fight off the urge any longer.

Picked this kit up for free from my local IPMS club and decided to give this a good as my next project. Because of the age of the kit, 70s vintage, there is very little detail to most areas. This however is not that big of an issue in 1/72 scale as most of those details would be hard to see. But to help hide the areas where it would be a problem, mainly the main gear bays I am going to pose it in flight. 

One area that will be a problem is the decals. To say they are toast would be an understatement. So what I will do is try my hand at painting the most of the markings and remake the aircraft number as a new decal. This will be a bit of a challenge but one that I think will prove worth it in the end for the learning experience. 

Getting into the actual build the first thing was to assemble the main gear to test fit them in the close position to see if any adjustments would be needed. 

Thankfully they do fit nicely with the wing halves closed up. 

Fairly substantial update on the Blenheim today. First up I did the positioning of where the stand will go. After determining the location I progressively opened up the hole.  

 

After that I drilled the hole in the base.  

The next step was to decide on the height above the base it will be.  

The rod was then cut to height and a test fit was performed. 

With that done I primed and painted the interior parts.  

 

I then attached the wing halves together. 

Lastly I found several areas on pilot and bombardier figures that will need some cleanup. I also made the decision to swap which figure went where based on how much leg would be visible, moving the pilot figure to the bombardier position. 

Been a bit since the last update, was out of town working on the new house. So after getting back I decided as a easy way of getting back into the flow of this project I decided to start work on the lower turret. So I clipped the plastic barrels and set to work attaching the replacement metal ones. Unfortunately I ran into a bit of an unexpected problem, my CA glue had gone bad. Even using accelerator did nothing to get it to set up. Thankfully I did have a small tube of glue that was still good. Lesson for the day, only buy the smallest tube of CA glue you can get as they can expire and or go bad on you and stop working. 

So after that I was able to get both barrels on. While not perfect they are still not bad in terms of alignment and look significantly better then the kit's plastic one. 

Moving on so as to give the glue some extra time to make sure that it is fully set up I started on some of the detail work on the cockpit. The first thing was to add a wash to deepen and detail the aft bulkhead. 

Next was the yoke which receive a coat of paint on it. 

Lastly, was the base coat of black on the instrument panel. Will drybrush the dial details once the black has fully set up. 

So here is the Blenheim progress from the last couple days. First I started work on the turret. I removed the bit sticking up, which the instructions did not show as being a locator plug so will make due when it comes time to attach.  

I then attached the barrels from the last update and the locking peg to seal it all in. 

Next I moved back to working on the fuselage. Main thing this update was getting the side windows installed. One of them required a little more work to get it fitting correctly, but it did eventually fit into place. 

Last bit is a major change of plans. I initially planned to use the kit's parts for the rear turret, but the more I looked at them the more I knew they looked like crap. So I was fortunately able to find some stl files to print the rear guns. These parts also came with the supports already placed so I was able to just place them in the slicer software and go. As a precaution and save time and ensure my math was right I printed a couple extra at slightly smaller size. These were ultimately not needed as the initial size worked perfectly. 

After checking some references I, and checking that the metal barrels would still fit size wise, I clipped the barrels off the 3D printed parts and attached the metal ones.  

Personally the metal barrels perfectly complete the look on these. My only issue now it mounting them as I believe I already sent my scratch build box to Florida. However, even if it was still here I am close to certain that I don't have the right size of plastic for these guys, so will get some next chance I get. 

Spent most of today working on the pilot figures so we can finally close up the cockpit. For figures like this i am using Vallejo as that is what i have available. Started with doing a base of Medium Flesh Tone on the B/N, only figure in the crew with exposed skin, which I unfortunately did not grab a photo of.

I next did a rough 50/50 mix of the initial skin tone with Basic Skintone. This was applied a little more conservatively sticking more to the high areas of the face. 

After this I used just Basic Skintone keeping even more to the high areas then before. 

After this had dried I then made a 50/50 mix of Basic Skintone and Light Flesh and did a heavy drybrush. 

Finally I used a light drybrush of just Light Flesh to finish his skin off. 

I then moved onto working on the uniform. For the base I am using Blue, however it did not come out as dark as I wanted. So I will be looking for a darker blue tomorrow to try and do a thin over coat to tone it down. 

So finishing up the crew figures as I want to start getting everything assembled and get the project done. So first up I worked more on the uniforms, painting a base khaki color. 

This was then drybrushed with a lighter mix to catch the highlights. 

I then moved on to the flight caps and gloves. 

These were then painted with a lighter mix color focusing on the high areas. 

Lastly I painted the goggles and oxygen masks. Aside from a few touch ups the figures are done and I can star work on closing up the fuselage.