Going old school

So, in my previous comments on the Revell 1/144 scale 727, I mentioned that lacking dexterity for detail painting might make me fill some of my recovery time with another airliner build.  That has come to pass.

It seemed that the Hawker Siddeley Trident, as a similar '60s design single-aisle tri-jet might make for a logical companion to the 727.  Airfix first produced these in the 1960s, but the kits have always seemed hard to find, perhaps because the actual aircraft never served in North America.  As a result, my kit was purchased, already opened, at a model show many years ago and, with many other small scale civil aircraft, languished in the stash awaiting a relapse of "Airliner Flu."

Perhaps during that long incubation - or more likely, before - the kit developed the bane of all second-hand-model purchasers: The missing part😡.  In this case, the outer half of one of the engine nacelles. A quick trip to e-Bay confirmed that the Airfix Trident was still hard to find, with no boxing available for less than $25.  That seemed awfully steep for a one inch long, 1/4 inch diameter replacement nacelle.  More drastic, but less costly, measures would be required. We were going to go old school, and the search for a piece of long-neglected modeling hardware ended with success.

I had had a prior Mattel Vac-u-Form back in the 1960's, which, in the day, I used mostly for making Creepy Crawlers™ out of "Plastigoop," but it had long since gone to a church rummage sale by the time I discovered the need to vacuform model airplane canopies in the 1980s. I was egged on by Bruce Mathes, who ran "The Plastic Place," a great hobby shop in Syracuse dedicated solely to plastic scale modeling. Bruce described carving replacement and conversion pieces from balsa wood and then vacuforming them. If I recall correctly from those pre-internet days, I located a replacement machine through the classified ads in Scale Modeler or Fine Scale Modeler magazines for the princely sum of $35 plus shipping.

Vacuforming is a difficult art and I have never truly mastered it with that 1960's toy, but reached my pinnacle with an Airfix Blenheim, circa 2001, when I was able to produce a pristine copy of that old kit's complex nose and canopy glazing.

So, having located the Vac-U-Form machine, I went back to the Trident.  I was fortunate that the nacelles on the aircraft were fairly symmetric (lacking the prominent ventral droop in the center of the 727's nacelles).  I was unfortunate that I had already cemented the other nacelle together by the time I discovered the missing part. So I mounted the completed nacelle on the Vac-U-Form's suction platform with poster putty and fired up the machine for the first time  in more than 7 years.  It worked, so I heated a sheet of .020" thickness plastic and took the plunge.  I didn't get the sheet hot enough the first time, but the second time was the charm and I got a good clean molding of the outer half of the nacelle

I delineated the centerline with a marker, slapped a fresh #11 blade in my hobby knife and - more easily than I expected - liberated the copy. Usually, I need at least two or three shots before I get a piece the way I want, so first time success was a little victory.  After trimming and sanding to reduce that extra 2/100ths of an inch of thickness, I adhered the new piece to the kit's inner nacelle half with gap-filling CA cement. A primer coat revealed I still had quite a step between the pieces, so I slathered on some red auto body putty and knocked it down with 320 grit wet-and-dry sandpaper, using flexible foam sheet from the craft store as the sanding backer.

I provided the opposite (full-kit) nacelle the same putty and sanding treatment and test mounted them on the kit fuselage.  The new part will require some finessing at the front and rear to better match the kit parts, but I am pretty happy with the way they turned out.

So, now - after a whole day on one part - on to the rest of the Trident...