At the end of my previous post in this build log, I’d got together most of the modifications necessary to make my model of the whaling Walrus “Boojum”, which flew in the Southern Ocean during the 1946-7 whaling season.

The next task was to make preparations for all the rigging wires that need to be added to this biplane. First up was rigging the struts above and below the engine nacelle, the assembly of which is complicated by the fact that the Revell instructions show a part going into place the wrong way around. Here’s a comparison of the original Matchbox instructions for this kit with the instruction sheet provided by Revell:

Part 14 is reversed, and dry fitting shows that Revell got it wrong. I also needed to drill a hole in the front of the nacelle—another part of the kit in which an opening is modelled as a blank flat surface.

Then I started running monofilament nylon between the struts in a cross-wise bracing pattern. A look at close-up photographs of displayed aircraft suggests that the bracing wires for the lower struts were attached to the struts themselves, rather than running between the fuselage and the nacelle, so I hooked by monofilament through little blobs of cyanoacrylate glue on the locating lugs of the struts. The upper rigging attached to the centre section of the upper wing, so I drilled holes and pulled my monofilament through. There’s not much room for manoeuvre in the cramped space between the nacelle and the underside of the centre section, so I pulled the monofilament through before cementing the underside part to the upper struts. Here’s the whole assembly just after that stage:

(The bits of tape on the lower struts are holding them in very slight compression, so that their lugs align precisely with the locating slots in the fuselage. That way I can make a final assembly without any of my rigging going slack.)

The next step was to tighten all the monofilament and glue it down with cyanoacrylate in what will eventually be the hidden interior of the wing.

Meanwhile, I had a lot of holes to drill for the rigging wires that run between the upper and lower wings, and from the lower wings to the floats, as well as a couple of aerial wire supports in the upper wings.

Then a coat of flat aluminium to the undersides, and trainer yellow to the upper surfaces, ready for decals.

The upper part of the centre section is visible at top between the two pairs of wings. I’ve sanded off the rather unconvincing moulded version of the lifting sling provided in the kit—I’ll add that with stretched sprue at the same time as I add all the other ropes to the fuselage.

JBOT’s decals required a bit of attention, however, before applying. They provide a rather muddy green set of registration letters for the fuselage sides, but no large green letters for the upper wing. And the ornate script reading Ex S.S. Balaena on either side of the aircraft’s nose looks a lot like Ex F.F. Balarna instead. It’s probably too small for anyone to notice, but unfortunately I’ve noticed it. So I printed my own decals using a scanned image of the JBOT decals as my base, but brightening the green lettering, adding a set of green upper wing letters copied from the black underwing lettering, and co-opting the text from this image of G-AHFN, which is a much better match for the lettering that appears in photos of the real aircraft. I also did my own version of BOOJUM for the nose, since the JBOT decal sheet version looked a little ragged. Here’s my effort:

And the markings in place on the wings:

The engine nacelle went on without difficult. By ignoring the error in Revell’s instructions, I ended up with the upper centre section correctly aligned with the fuselage, and the engine nacelle correctly (but disconcertingly) angled very slightly off -axis.

You can see my little magnetic stand is doing its job, too.

And the markings on the nose turned out well:

You can also see my little fairing in front of the observer’s window, which I fashioned from a bit of half-round styrene rod that last saw action as a stand-in for the service tunnels on the S-IC stage of my Revell Saturn V. The little silver rectangle represents the wing-folding instruction panel, which Revell for some reason moulds on the port side of the kit and not the starboard. You can also see the little red-and-white United Whalers flag beneath the cockpit side window. Unusually, the starboard flag is the mirror image of the port flag. (For its painted flags, United Whalers used a convention of “hoist towards the front” rather than “hoist towards the left”, as explained here.)

Next time, I’ll put the wings on and complete the rigging and detailing.

• Go to final post in this build log

This the old Matchbox kit, reissued by Revell. I’m using it as a basis for a model of an unusual Walrus—one of two that were carried by the S.S. Balaena factory ship during the whaling season of 1946-7. Named “Boojum” and “Snark”, these yellow-painted aircraft could be catapult-launched, or lowered into the sea for a conventional water take-off. They were used to gather information about approaching weather, about the ice conditions, and to spot whales. (No-one had ever used an aircraft for whale-spotting at that time, and there was significant doubt among the whalers that it was even possible to see a submerged whale from the air.)

John Grierson, who was in charge of the aircraft, left details of the adventure in his book Air Whaler (1949), a lecture to the Royal Geographical Society entitled Whaling From The Air, and an article in Flight magazine entitle Air-Whaling. So the aircraft are fairly well documented. In fact, a total of four Walruses were originally purchased and equipped for the Antarctic, registrations G-AHFL, G-AHFM, G-AHFN and G-AHFO. Grierson won the 1946 Folkestone Aero Trophy race in G-AHFN, but it then never left England. G-AHFM, christened “Moby Dick”, got as far as South Africa and was then left behind—the hangar on Balaena could only accommodate two aircraft, and a third would need to be “parked” on the catapult, making aircraft handling and maintenance excessively complicated. But G-AHFL “Boojum” and G-AHFO “Snark” made it to the Southern Ocean and logged 96 hours flying there.

I’m building “Boojum”, because its markings were included on a sheet of JBOT decals I bought years ago, with the intention of building a completely different aircraft, Scottish Airlines’ G-AJNO. From that sheet I learned that there was a Walrus associated with a company called United Whalers, and from there I was lured into the whole story of “Whaling Walruses”.

So, here’s “Boojum”:

For part of its time in the Antarctic, “Boojum” flew without an undercarriage, there being no landing strips for hundreds of miles:

And here’s a view of “Snark” which adds some information about the appearance of the upper wing markings and the run of the radio aerial wires:

Immediately, it’s evident that the Revell kit is going to need some modification. The major addition will be the grab rail around the nose of the aircraft, but I also need to scratch-build the tail-wheel. The aircraft was normally equipped with a sort of shroud around the rear wheel, which functioned as a rudder. The kit parts provide only this rudder, with its oleo in a compressed position, so I need to build a bare wheel with an extended oleo for my planned in-flight model. I also need to add some runners for the rear hatch, and add a few other tweaks here and there, including the notorious festoon of ropes that bedecked the Walrus. And then there’s the hook under the nose which was specially fitted to the whaling Walruses, so they could do something called a “mat recovery”. While still making headway, the Balaena would tow a net from its side, and a returning Walrus would motor up on to the half-submerged net, cut power, and hook on, ready to be lifted aboard by the hoisting sling on its upper wing.

The very under-detailed interior also needed a bit of work. I opened the navigator/observer’s side windows (which are closed in the kit, and indicated only by a black rectangular decal) and “glazed” them with slips of overhead projector film (remember that?). Then I roughed up some internal partitions from styrene card, and moved one of the kit figures and his seat into the observer’s station just behind the pilot. I confess I didn’t spend much time on detailing, since little of this is going to be visible through the kit’s windows.

I also placed a little neodymium magnet inside the fuselage, because (like my Junkers F.13 build), I want to be able to lift the aircraft on and off a stand without needing to cut a slot in its underside. Using styrene card, felt, and epoxy, I constructed a little magnetic cradle to fit just behind the “step” on the underside of the model, and attached that to an old Airfix stand base.

To mount the external grab rail, I drilled out a series of holes to accommodate some 0.5mm brass rod.

The little bulge visible on the nose in the picture above needs to be smoothed off—it represents a thermometer housing that was present only on the port side of the real aircraft. And I need to add a spray fairing in front of the observer’s window on this side, too. For some reason, the kit provides that feature on the port side, but not the starboard.

Here’s the assembled fuselage with the grab rail and rear hatch rails in place:

The kit provides the rear hatch cover in the open, retracted position, but I need to model it closed. So I split the kit part and reassembled it flat, opened its small windows, and added some plastic card to its front edge to simulate the shape of the real thing.

Modelling the rotating propeller for this one is a bit of challenge, since the four-bladed prop actually consists of two two-bladed propellers bolted together. So I needed to stack two propeller discs one behind the other:

(For a description of how I make these, see my post How To Model Rotating Propeller Discs.)

I’m pretty hopeless at engines, but I painted up the kit part as best I could to match the appearance of various walk-around photos of displayed aircraft, and I cobbled together a rear wheel to match the photographs of the real aircraft, using styrene sheet and brass rod:

Next time, I need to start running the rigging wires.

• Go to next post in this build log

At the end of my previous post, I’d got my two Junkers models as far along as I cared to take them before applying decals. And, after two months in some sort of Covid-plus-Brexit-induced postal limbo, my decals from Mika at Arctic Decals finally arrived.

These featured the typographically correct letter “N” for LN-ABH, as well as a set of custom decals for D 260.

The decals are delicate, and the finely corrugated surface of the models challenging. Mika provides very detailed instructions on how to prepare and apply them, which I followed to the letter … and got excellent results.

With a layer of gloss enamel varnish applied to the kit surface, and left to dry for a week, I slid the decals on to a mix of Micro Set and slightly soapy water. They’re very thin, but pretty tough, and they held together well for positioning and then bedded down pretty well spontaneous. After they’d dried in place, I gently pressed them into the corrugations after brushing them with Micro Sol. They softened extremely quickly, so the trick was to apply Micro Sol to a small area and immediately roll a cotton bud firmly across the surface, following the line of the corrugations. As you can see, the final “painted on” effect was excellent.

So I can’t recommend these highly enough—Mika’s Arctic Decals provide markings for a variety of obscure civilian aircraft, and they’re also distributed through Lima November Decals.

With the decals in place, given time to dry, and then sealed with a coat of satin varnish, it was time to make final assembly, adding the door to D 260 and attaching the fuselage to the wings, as well as adding a few bits and bobs of final detailing.

So here they both are, posed on display bases from Coastal Kits. First, LN-ABH taking off on its final flight:

And D 260 hauled up out of the water:

And finally, a couple of views of the pair together:

Now. What next, I wonder?

At the end of my previous post, I had reached the stage of being ready to apply decals to LN-ABH. But with the decals still in Brexit/Covid postal limbo between Finland and Scotland, I turned my attention to the earlier version of this aircraft, registered as D 260, when it was part of the Junkers Spitsbergen Expedition in 1923.

This was when the aircraft was fresh out of the factory, and so it was largely in the original configuration of the Junkers F13W, with the exception of the odd object behind the head of the man in the centre of the trio standing on the float. I’ve no idea what it is, although a poster on Britmodeller has hazarded a guess that it might be a filler cap for an extra fuel tank behind the passenger compartment. The aircraft was also fitted with extended ailerons, so (as with LN-ABH), I’ll scribe off the moulded ailerons provided with the kit, and add Master-X resin replacements.

For this aircraft I’m using a more recent issue of the Revell kit:

Despite the box art, instructions and decals, it also includes all the necessary parts to build the float-plane version. And, importantly for my purposes, it includes a better version of the rudder, the lower extension of which was noticeably undersized in the older kits. For comparison, here’s the rudder/tail-fin assembly from the old kit I used for LN-ABH, compared to the rudder (detached from its tail-fin) from the newer kit.

This is still undersized, but in a different way. The photograph above was taken maybe 30 degrees of the vertical; the photograph of the real aircraft below is maybe 30 degrees away from the transverse position.

By correcting for the angles in each, drawing around the kit rudder and superimposing on the corrected photograph, I get this:

So the kit part is not quite deep enough, front to back. Perhaps something nearer to correct could be fashioned from a combination of the old and new rudder parts, but the fine corrugations on the parts would make seams difficult to hide. So I’m leaving it as it is.

Also visible in the photograph above is something I’m going to have to scratch-build—the near-vertical bar protruding from the underside of the tail just in front of the rudder. This seems to have been a fairly standard part of the float-plane version, though I’m not entirely sure what it was for.

That’ll be a late addition to the assembled kit. In the meantime, I put together a simulation of the “mystery object” on the starboard side of the aircraft, which I alluded to earlier. Some styrene sheet, a fragment of 0.5mm brass rod, and some aluminium paint produced the object below, superimposed on a British penny for scale:

The main modification I planned for this kit is to open one of the doors to display the interior a little better. So I used a razor saw to chop the door section out of its frame, dividing the kit fuselage half into three parts:

On the opposite side of the fuselage, I scribed in the interior door-frame, and filled the gaps around the kit’s truly horrible windows. I also needed to slightly shorten the rear bench seat of the passenger compartment, which in the kit version protrudes quite a long way into the doorway—this was easily done by carving about a millimetre-and-a-half out of the rear part of the seat before attaching it to the backrest.

I added some lap-belts to the seats, using parts from an Airwaves 1/72 photoetch RAF harness set. The belts used to be stowed in a loop around the back of the front seats in the passenger compartment, so I reproduced that appearance, and left the other belts lying loose on the seats.

Perhaps because it was a newer kit, the interior and fuselage hadn’t bowed out of true, and were easier to fit together. Here’s the improved alignment between the bench seat and the door (which has acquired a little chrome door-handle fashioned out of brass rod).

The fuselage halves closed easily, and as before I left the tail ajar, by a fraction of a millimetre, to prevent the “roof” section overhanging in that area. This one has an engine, and the original “rhino horn” exhaust.

The divided starboard side of the fuselage was easy enough to position—the rear entirely straightforward, because it locates with the port side, the forward part requiring a little alignment using the dry-fitted “roof”.

Once everything was together, I brought the lower part of the door-frame up to floor level with a sliver of styrene sheet, and also added an upper rail at the top of the door-frame. (And, of course, trimmed the excised door section accordingly.)

As you’ve seen, I had scribed off the kit rudder, so I could pose it with a slight deflection. I also did the same with the ailerons, so that I could depict the aircraft with the characteristic “aileron droop” it had when parked. (You can see that in my second reference photograph above.) Here they are in place.

The “mystery object” on the side of the fuselage is also attached. I’ve masked the cockpit openings and the exhaust, and temporarily blocked off the doorway with a little bit of styrene, cut to shape using a masking tape template and held in place with clear glue. The whole thing has now been coated with gloss enamel varnish, ready for decals. (The kit’s “Junkers” logo is already in place.)

The wings, likewise, are painted and glossed, ready for decals. I’ve left the upper and lower halves of the wings separate, because for this aircraft I want to apply decals for the underwing registration codes, and that will be easier before the floats are attached, and the floats will be easier to attach if I glue them from inside the wing, as I did with LN-ABH.

You can see I’ve applied brown kit decals to the upper wing roots, which in the real aircraft appear to have had strips of wood attached to make a non-slip area for boarding. The decals are hard work to position, since they have to be applied to the raised moulded strips in the kit plastic, which inevitably traps air in the grooves between the strips. So having got them provisionally adherent to the raised strips using Micro Sol, I then slit each decal lengthways along each groove, and then smoothed the edges into the grooves with more Micro Sol.

Finally, while I was waiting for my replacement decals to arrive, I was able to use the rather lovely propeller decal that came with the original sheet. This wraps neatly around the kit propeller to produce the laminated wood appearance of the original Heine propeller.

Here it is next to the rotating propeller disc I made for the LN-ABH “in-flight” version:

Next time—decals and final detailing.

• Go to next post in this build log

By the end of my previous post, I’d completed all the necessary revisions to the kit parts to produce an in-flight model of Gidsken Jakobsen‘s ill-fated Junkers F13 floatplane, LN-ABH. (See the previous post for details of its fate.)

Unusually, I painted the fuselage and wing parts before complete assembly—because of the boxy nature of the aircraft, there were no seams that were going to need filling and sanding. One of the challenges was going to be to produce the smooth curve of black paint on either side of the fuselage at the nose of the aircraft, particularly given the very fine corrugations moulded into the kit parts. The kit provides a narrow, curved black decal, intended to act as a demarcation line for this paintwork, but the decal didn’t match the curve of the paint edge on the real aircraft.

First, I coated the kit parts with primer and then airbrushed on my Duralumin paint mix. In a fit of masochism born out of Covid lock-down and impatience, I didn’t use any of the commercial premixed preparations, but blended my own from Humbrol Aluminium and Gloss White, in a 4:1 ratio. (A lot of people complain that Humbrol is practically un-airbrushable, but actually it goes on quite nicely if it’s not thinned as much as usual, and is sprayed at a higher working pressure. I stirred in a little thinner until I got to a paint:thinner ratio of maybe 7:3, which is noticeably thicker than the usual “milk-like” endpoint for most airbrush paints, and then set my airbrush’s working pressure to 30 psi/2 bars.)

Then I scanned the (conveniently flat-sided) kit part and used that image as the basis to construct an appropriate curve using a graphics program, which I printed out at the correct scale, and glued to the back of a sheet of Bare-Metal Foil. I then used this as a guide to cut out the necessary curve in the foil using a new No.11 scalpel blade. Then I laid the foil on as a paint mask on the kit part, and massaged it into the fine corrugations with a cotton bud.

This rigmarole worked out well. (In the view below I’ve also filled the locating holes for the wire-frame step on the port side of the fuselage, which had been removed by the time this aircraft became LN-ABH, and replaced with a ladder. I have, however, not yet removed the little triangular tail-skid support, which was absent from the float-plane version.)

The elderly kit parts had all assumed interesting curves over the years, so it took a bit of effort to get the fuselage floor to fit into one fuselage half. I glued it a little at a time, gradually flexing the parts into alignment, rather than trying to get it done all at once.

The second fuselage half went on more easily.

I found I needed to leave the tail end slightly open, by a fraction of a millimetre, to avoid the roof part overhanging slightly in that region. The slight gap at the rear would be entirely covered by my replacement rudder. Here’s the fuselage largely assembled and painted, complete with new rudder, exhaust pipes and cowling tie-downs:

With Mika’s replacement decals still caught up in an endless Brexit/Covid postal delay somewhere between Finland and Scotland, and heartened by my success with the Bare-Metal Foil paint masks, I decided to make some stencils for the underwing registration letters. I scanned Mika’s original decals, corrected the “N”, and then printed the registration letters in reverse on the back of a sheet of Bare-Metal Foil.

Then I cut them out, and rubbed down the resulting stencils on to the underwing kit part (already primed and coated with Duralumin.

After a coat of black, the result fell into the not-great-but-not-too-bad category. The “B” in particular was going to need a little additional freehand repair work.

The float struts in this kit are notoriously difficult to attach, since there are multiple locating holes that all need to align simultaneously with multiple locating pins. So I decided to fit the floats to the unassembled lower wing section. This let me nudge each float strut into position in its correct hole, and then secure it with a little dab of cyanoacrylate gel from the inside of the wing, before moving on to the next one.

Once the floats were attached, I also added the boarding ladder connecting the float to the wing-root on the port side, putting it together from short pieces of 0.5mm brass rod. There seem to have been two versions of this ladder, one near-vertical and one sloping:

Without any evidence to suggest which was the later version, I went for the more vertical option.

With the fuselage largely completed, I was able to dry-assemble the bulk of the aircraft to check its centre of gravity, because (as an in-flight model) I wanted to put this one on a stand. There was plenty of room inside the thick chord of the wing to place a small neodymium magnet, which I could use to attach the model to a similar magnet on an old transparent Airfix stand.

Then I closed up the wing.

The areas where I’d removed the moulded kit ailerons had a tendency to gap too widely, so I slipped in a little styrene strip as a spacer, and to provide an anchor point for the Master-X resin replacements.

These went on nicely, with only a tiny amount of sanding to get a neat fit along the length of the parts.

At this point, I gave wings and fuselage a coat of gloss enamel varnish and set them aside, still separate, to await the application of decals.

Next time—a much more straightforward build for D 260.

• Go to next post in this build log

So here I have two slightly different editions of the same kit, because I intend to build models of two distinctly different versions of the same airframe—specifically, Junkers Construction Number 650, which went into service as a float-plane in May 1923. (The “W” in “Junkers F13W” stands for Wasser, which is German for “water”, designating the float-plane version of this aircraft. The second kit, despite the wheeled version on the box art, includes all the necessary parts for the float-plane, too.)

This aircraft first saw service as part of the Junkers Spitsbergen Expedition, under German aircraft registration D 260.

It then knocked around Germany, Estonia and northern Norway for almost a decade before ending up in the hands of Norway’s pioneering aviator Gidsken Jakobsen, registered as LN-ABH to her Nord-Norges Aero company.

Unable to obtain a licence for a commercial air service, Jakobsen operated the aircraft on sightseeing trips until June 1934, when it “lost its engine” near Balestrand on the Sognefjord. Literally lost its engine, which fell out of the aeroplane into the fjord below, somewhere between Hella and Vangsnes. The pilot restored the trim of the aircraft by encouraging the front-seat passenger to climb out of the open cockpit on to the engine cowling, and then glided to a safe landing. The airframe was reportedly still airworthy, but the plane never flew again.

So I want to build two versions of this aircraft, as D 260 and LN-ABH, at the beginning and end of its eventful life. Its configuration changed considerably between these two incarnations—its paintwork was revised; it lost the aerodynamic fairings around its float struts; it may have had its engine replaced (but certainly had the engine exhausts rerouted); it lost the original boarding step on the fuselage and gained a short fixed ladder instead; and it had the factory-fitted rudder replaced with a large home-grown version that seems to have been built of wood and fabric.

Both versions of the aircraft are fairly well documented photographically, but many of the images of LN-ABH are copyrighted by the Norsk Luftfartsmuseum (the image above is a rare public-domain photo). My aim is to represent LN-ABH in flight just before its fateful accident, and I’m therefore planning on giving it the all-black rudder that’s visible in this copyright photograph, purely on the assumption that someone is more likely to paint a white rudder black than a black rudder white.

As well as building a new rudder for LN-ABH, I also needed to replace the narrow ailerons moulded into the kit wings with the extended versions that were fitted to this aircraft in both its manifestations. I contacted Master-X, who make resin conversion kits for this model, with the plan of purchasing two of their cheapest conversions from which I could extract the necessary ailerons for my own models. Picture my surprise when Lumír at Master-X not only agreed to send me just the necessary parts, but did so free of charge despite my protestations. I also order up a set of decals for LN-ABH from Lima-November Decals, but noticed that they didn’t reproduce the idiosyncratic shape of the letter “N” on the real aircraft. I was all set to revise this by hand, but when I posted about the problem on the Britmodeller website, I was contacted by Mika Jernfors of Arctic Decals, who had designed that decal sheet. He offered me a new, revised edition with the correct letter “N”, and threw in a set of decals for D 260 as well!

So I started with LN-ABH, because it needed a lot of revision to the kit parts, and I used the older Revell kit (the upper box image at the head of this post) because it has a particularly inaccurate rudder, which I would be putting in the bin anyway.

First, I thinned down the float struts. The top set are the originals, and the lower set have been thinned.

Then, I filled the hole in the kit’s engine cowling, which accommodated the original “rhino horn” exhaust. Here’s a “quotation” from the original copyright photograph I used as reference, which I trust falls in the “acceptable use” domain:

Notice the tie-downs crossing the cowling, which I’ll add with stretched sprue in due course. Here’s my best effort (right) at filling the hole:

This was never going to be perfect, given the difficulty of reproducing the corrugations that were characteristic of this aircraft. In retrospect, it occurred to me that I might have been able to fashion a plug from the discarded rudder, but I was a little too slow with that idea.

I also fashioned a little array of exhausts from styrene rod, to depict the rather informal-looking exhausts on the real aircraft:

And I carved a new rudder out of styrene sheet. Here’s my replacement exhaust stack and rudder:

I’d already primed these parts when I realized that the little triangular support under the tail needed to be removed—it’s appropriate for an aircraft with a tail-skid, but not for the float-plane version.

Also, since this is going to be a flying version, I needed to depict a rotating propeller, a pilot and a front-seat passenger. Here’s the propeller:

I designed and printed this according to the method I’ve outlined in my post about modelling rotating propeller discs, banding it in alternating shades of light and dark brown to reproduce the appearance of a laminated wooden Heine propeller.

For my pilot and passenger, I heavily modified a pair of PJ Production Word War I pilot figures. To get them to fit into the cockpit, I need to bend their legs (and clip off their toes), as well as removing extensive areas of buttock and dropping the kit seats somewhat. Their arm positions also needed to be adjusted to avoid fouling the cockpit sides (and each other), and the kit’s control yoke ended up being levitated slightly. All of that mutilation should (he says confidently) be unnoticeable once the aircraft is assembled around them.

Here they are in position. I omitted the kit engine, since the engine compartment will now be entirely sealed, and only roughly painted the passenger compartment, which will be almost invisible through the kit’s very poor-quality windows.

Next time, I’ll start putting the fuselage, wings and floats together.

• Go to next post in this build log