Westland Wessex airliner, Rugrat resin 1/72

 

 

 

The Westland Wessex trimotor passenger carrier of 1930 is such an attractive machine that caught my attention very early on my modeling endeavors. I started to gather material to do the usual scratchbuild and had managed to fill a pretty portly folder, when I saw that Rugrats released it as a resin kit with accessories.

I understand that Rugrats released several batches, and this to me seems to be an early one, since the decal sheet carrier had aged possibly beyond redemption, as you can see in the accompanying images (no, I don't like to put the decal sheet against the window to get sun to fix it, it doesn't, really and after you apply it eventually yellows again).

The kit portrays one of the variants the Wessex transport spawned, so bear that in mind when you look at your references.

This is the completed model:
https://wingsofintent.blogspot.com/2019/03/westland-wessex-airliner-172-rugrats.html

The contents of the box, plenty of reference material. Many goodies are bestowed, among the most practical for me the spare for the transparencies and the inclusion of the resin master to vac more if anything bad happens:

 White metal parts, decent, but of  less quality than even the older Aeroclub items:

 More white metal goodies:

 The engine pods and wheels, subtle wing detail:

 The ill decals:

 Of great printing quality, though, but as an all-encompassing carrier you have to individually trim.
This may not be ideal for the window frames, for example:

 Intelligent pouring blocks:

 The seemingly unavoidable pinholes (very little of them, fortunately) -some of these are not pinholes, but the strut locations:

The parts are separated from their pouring blocks. The resin is very, very hard, and you won't need to go to the gym the day you do this:

A little bubble opened up as I was sanding the elevator trailing edge -which was too thick-, so I had to remove a tiny section and superglue a little piece of styrene to restore integrity:

 A more careful inspection revealed a high number of the nemesis of low tech resin kits: pinholes:

 So out again with the filler, one side at a time:

As per instructions and pattern provided, the front bulkhead is scratched:

 The fit seems good:

 The transparency has good clarity, and fits quite well (dry-run):

Speaking of instructions: you get a very long step-by-step description of what you are supposed to do. More than other kit will provide, and surely well meant, but some times the description is confusing and ambiguous. The absence of graphics or any exploded view or images makes the whole business a little bit tricky.

The photos of the real thing in the instructions are of very bad quality, almost useless, so you better go online and look at good ones, fortunately there are plenty.

The engineering of this kit is unusual and sometimes seems awkward, but I won't pass judgement or criticize it until I am immersed in the build.

For reasons that remain obscure to me, while some pinhole issues can be in some kits simply trated with any filler, others reject most of it, and the pores remain open. For those cases the only remedy seems to be superglue, which I am never happy to apply in that guise because it creates bumps that are difficult to level with the rest of the surface:

A blob of resin is removed from the cockpit:

 Construction of the interior starts. I opted not to use the white metal seats provided, but scratched some of the interior instead. The tailwheel had a very feeble locating pin, so it was removed and replaced by a discarded drill bit shaft to make for a secure anchoring (given the massive weight of the resin components):

The transparency is trimmed, little by little, very carefully. If you patient and do a good job, the fit is good:

Some interior elements are painted, and the rest of the parts is given a coat of primer to better see what needs refinement:

The white metal parts showed with the primer prominent mold seams that had to be sanded, carefully, as no to bend the parts (the metal is quite soft). 

Once that was done I decided to glue the resin engine pods (two parts, front and back) to the corresponding metal array. The fit is not bad, but it is not perfect. In the real plane there is no "ring" (here part of the white metal to greatly facilitate things), and that will be very difficult to hide.

The engineering of all this, again -I believe- aims to help the modelers, but creates other issues too. The strut array is so complex and has in the real plane so many members that to envision a different modeling solution (other than the kit's) for this area is indeed challenging:

Photos show that the aft cone of the engine pods was hollowed, so it is done thus:

 The interior is now in place, a restroom is being added::

 Unfortunately, given the engineering of the kit, no doors can be posed open unless you want to add a lot of grief and time to the build, and still not be certain of a sound result, so that beautiful toilet will be only half-guessed only through two small circular windows on the roof:

Restroom in place:

 Another canopy dry-fit to be sure things are ok before gluing. Before that, though, the locations for both wings have to be cut out, another requirement of the strange engineering required by this kit. No masks for the transparency are provided, so you have to make your own:

The slot for the wing is very carefully cut, incrementally and always checking:

 This is how they are supposed to be inserted:

 Yes, the wings had a small broad arrow attitude:

 A dry fit of all components. It will be interesting to glue those wings with epoxy, without blotching anything, at the right angles and symmetrically. Many photos show an opened hatch (the full top of the cockpit glazing, actually), but doing so will perhaps further compromise the mechanical strength of this strange solution and/or risking screwing things up:

The exhaust rings in the kit are inaccurate, being round in section, whilst the real ones were more like flattened tubes, therefore new ones are made of heated and wrapped plastic strut material (thanks, John, and not the last time for sure!):

Some perhaps useful additional notes:
1) The transparency is clear and well shaped, but it is quite thin (0.2mm), so be careful when trimming and especially when cutting the slots for the wing roots.
2) There is a mistake in the position (reversed) of the aileron control linkage in this view in the instructions:

3) The instructions have G-AAGW (while with Great Western Railway Air Service) as silver with  black regs, but in fact whilst at that service it was repainted cream and chocolate (source: The Cardiff Books of Days by Mike Hall) and had an additional chocolate patch aft fuselage/mid-tail.

The exhaust rings of proper section completed:

Priming stage is completed for the flying surfaces. The wings were very good and had almost no blemishes. Engines and props are painted and set aside:

In order for the wing roots to make contact at the center, a small strip of styene had to be glued and then adjusted:

Now is the time for details, and among them more of those pesky darn little pinholes:

New exhausts:

Some Wessexs had flare tubes:

 New wind-driven generator:

The photoetched lights provided with the kit are discarded in favor of 3-dimensional home-made items:
Shape the end of a styrene rod of adequate diameter, then drill the hole for the stem:

 Cut the part off, and now round a suitable diameter piece of clear plastic (I use stretched clear sprue) to form the lens. Then paint it with a permanent marker:

 Cut off the round end of the clear part:

 Mount the stem on the case:

 Add the "lenses" with a very small dab of white glue or one of those canopy glues:

Be sure to clear all the holes necessary to anchor parts down the lane:

The transparency is ready, after its bath on acrylic floor polish. To glue it to the fuselage will require care, patience, and precision, so this is a task you need time and disposition to do it correctly:

The transparency was glued on. The next day I used quick-setting clear epoxy to glue the wings on.
At that moment I panicked, because the wings looked as if one was ahead of the other (the position of the wings is mandated by the manufacturer's casting of the tongues), but no, the mistake was...in the wing tanks!
The manufacturer has them unequally mastered, the one on the right wing being about 1,5mm ahead of the one on the other wing. A slight misalignment by design!
What had prevented me for spotting this before applying the glue was
1) Blind trust on the kit -a lesson I learned long ago and should have applied here.
2) The fact that those tongues prevent you for actually getting the wing roots joined and compared.
Such is the life of the modeler.
Solutions:
a) live with it
b) adding a thin strip of styrene to the back of the tank on the right and to the front on the tank of the left, and then mask and blend.
Sigh....

Styene is glued to compensate for the mismatch:

 And back, again, to putty and sanding to level everything:

Issue solved:

 Now it's the turn of the seam all around that big transparency:

I am almost certain that I will go for G-ACHI. If this is also your case, don't be mislead by the drawings in the instructions, G-ACHI had blue struts, not aluminium ones as depicted on the side views. Meanwhile, I made a photocopy of the decals to be able to produce masks for the transparency, using the window decals as patterns:

The masks are cut and applied. Two round smoke color vinyl masks are added for the restroom area:

 The actual masked areas are quite small, compared with the size of the transparency:

Primer is airbrushed to see how that transparency blended in. What can I tell you, some work is ahead, almost all the edges need touch ups (not quite visible in this image, the main culprits being the aft and lower seams):

The seam has to be dealt with with caution, given that the vac canopy will flex inwards in ceratin unsupported areas when the sanding stick passes on, whilst the rest remains of course "solid":

A coat of gloss white follows and the model is placed inside a cabinet to dry:

Ready to proceed:

The areas in metal are painted gloss black:

Given that the decal sheet provided in the kit yellowed and has an all-encompassing carrier, subjects have to be cut and trimmed individually. All the frames for the windows of course do have carrier inside them, contributing to detract from the transparencies. Not a very smart move. I scored all the carrier areas inside them, and will remove the bits once out of the water. I will cut the individual letters from the smaller regs right before application, in order not to lose the small bits:

The "G" on the decal sheet has a minor fault, a "spur" that shouldn't be there. Trim that off:

The metal parts on the plane are painted polished aluminium on gloss black. The rest is going to be painted in normal aluminium and white aluminium on gloss white:

Masking of the first metal hue and application of the other two follows. Respective colors applied to struts and tires:

And the moment of truth arrived.
The complex system devised for this kit of resin and various metal parts to solve the outrigger engines and landing gear did not work for me at all.
There was no way I could find to correct the many misalignments created by this or that part, trying to get the locating devices in their positions at the same time. Finally some compromises had to be made for this to work at all. Not to mention the constant buckling of the white metal many struts when you try to press this or that in place.
I can't but honestly say that from my subjective perspective the engineering leaves much to be desired.
May be abler modelers will find less problems or other solutions for the problems. As this build stands for me now, it is not a very satisfying one:

Still, one manages:

Decal application begins.
The decals are superb, if, as noted before, the carrier is badly yellowed, and the manufacturer couldn't provide replacements. I cut the carrier around as close to the images as I could, and inside when possible (like inside the triangle the "A" forms in its apex):

Application continues. You get 0 spares, so be very careful, as this are thin and you don't want to fold them or brake them (I did both, but recover them). Plan your fuselage edge lines, because again you get barely a couple inches extra, and that won't be enough for a whole length (what is with manufacturers that they can't add just another darn duplicate of the most likely ones to be messed?):

 The canopy/windows decals are as predicted bad in two accounts: you ca't get the carry out of the centers properly, and the windshield and windshield sides do not fit at all. So I used the cockpit's roof and the fuselage sides only, the rest will be thin lengths from other decals.
Sigh... and not for the last time I think:

The number of small parts to be added now is high, and the model has to be handled carefully in order not to not knock them off:

 Some of the parts are: four stab struts (I used airfoiled metal material, not the kit's P.E. parts, that looked flimsy to me), wing strut cross wires, rudder/tailwheel linkage, control cables under the fuselage (that I put first reversed, again courtesy of the botched instruction graphics), fuel leads from tanks to front fuselage, linkages from struts to front fuselage, an airfoiled connection from left tank to front fuselage, aileron linkages,fuel gauges. The photoetched part for the rudder linkage was spot on, the one for the elevator was quite short, so it had to be re-made:

To be continued...