Gulp - I'm in......

[Weaver]

Well here goes nothing......

I won't spoil the finale by going into the backstory yet, but what I have in mind is this:

A circular "helicopter", with three jet-engine-tipped wings rotating around a disc-shaped body. In the middle of the disc is a cabin and a small anti-torque engine which also provides electrical and other services. On the underside os a hatch and a lower piloting position with vertical windows. It's purpose is air-sea rescue, so it'll be white with dayglow panels and dirt. Style-wise, it's basically a joke-done-seriously, so the overall configuration is more important than the technicalities/practicalities, in other words, I KNOW it wouldn't work!

Here's a photo of the starting components (I really need a close-up lens for my new-fangled DSLR...):



Components are:

AB-204 helo, for it's cabin and engine. What I had in mind was an AB-205 for it's longer cabin, and I would then add a 90 deg. jetpipe to the engine pod. However, in one of those classic moments, I was just about to walk out of the shop with a Hasegawa AB-205, when I noticed that the Italieri AB-204 already had a 90 deg jetpipe (I never knew that!). That then left the question of cabin size (it's supposed to be a SAR machine, so it needs to be reasonably big), but then I noticed a Wessex kit underneath the AB-204. On of the problems I've been having is that all the easy saucer options (plastic plates, etc..) are too deep (when doubled up) for the original thin concept, but the Wessex made me think: have a split-level cabin with the pilots up top and the passengers below: then the deep saucer makes more sense.

Avro RJ-85 (Revell 144th) for it's engine pods. These need to be longer (for reasons which will become apparent later), so I'll have to buy some tube: thought I had some, but it's too wide....

Saucer sections: cannibalised from two LOVELY "tick-tock clocks" (box in shot) bought from our local cheapo-emporium for a devastating 69p each. Mind you, if you'd bought these as clocks, you'd feel you'd been ripped off: the paint on them is devastatingly bad, worse than you can do by accident. You'd have to sand them down and re-paint them just to hang them on your wall.... Somewhat surprisingly, the glass is real glass (I was rather hoping it'd be plastic), So I'll have to make plasticard discs to fit.

Not got yet: wings/rotors. I was hoping to rob some off a kiddie's flying toy type of thing, but apparently they're all foam nowadays for "safety"...... I'm still looking for a "salvage" solution, but I may end up either biting the bullet and cannibalising two kits, or scratch-building them.

[Weaver]

Very rough mockup (Christ, I'd forgotten how fiddly 1/72nd helos are!):



As predicted, the AB-204 body is a bit short. However, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the engine pod is a separate piece, which means I can rather neatly mount it on the cut-off tailboom halves, so that it slightly overhangs the disc. This does mean that I have to find/make something to fill the gap, but then that will help avoid the "helo sinking in a swimming pool" look that would come from just sticking it on complete.

I'm going off the RJ-85 engine pods: they're just too delicate. I may try and knock up something from brass tubes.

[Weaver]

Minor progress: tail unit assembled and I'm quite pleased with it. I realised that if I stick the tailboom halves onto engine pod, then that makes the tailboom wider and more in proportion. I can then bend the rear sections of the cabin outwards, behind the cockpit bulkhead, to match.

Progress would have been greater, but I need the disc to mount it all to, and I havn't got any thick-enough plasticard (the white disc in the photo is just paper under the clock glass).

Figure for scale: I think most of the space outboard of the cabin is going to be taken up with undercarriage.....

[Weaver]

Three wings, scratchbuilt from thin brass sheet bent over an oval tube former:



Next, engine pods........

[Mossie]

Yep Weave, nothing like mine!  Well, on closer inspection, maybe it is.....  Very interesting!

[Weaver]

Okay, minor progress this weekend, after a long spell of real-world obstacles.

Discs cut for top and bottom, cockpit hole cut in top disc and reasonably delicate panel lines scored with a craft knife and fear: never done that before! Came out okay though - probably not worth photographing until painted.

Fuselage bits stuck together and various bits of plasticard and filler applied. Revel Plasto is new to me too, but seems like good stuff for fine work. Like the way it sands easily, comapred to something like Milliput that you could make armour-piercing shells from once it's dry....

Got several tins of Humbrol enamel out, that are probably 20-25 years old and havn't been opened for 15, and all of them were perfect...... Just minor interior stuff that need painting before assembly, but it was nice to sniff the thinners again.....

Havn't worked up the courage for the engine pods yet......

[Weaver]

Synchronicity - wonderful stuff, wish you could bottle it......

Here's progress so far:



I was wondering what to do about the flat bit on the front of the boom: just plating it in would make it look like something was missing, but none of the very small stash of bits I've got was really right. Then I went down for tea, and my mother told me that the cable clip on the iron flex had broken. This cable clip:



It struck me that the up-and-down profile of the top bit kind of matched the gap in my model, so I dismantled it to try it out. As it turned out, the bit I was looking at was too big, but the hammer-shaped bit was just right: gap filled:



Only a load more PSR and it'll look half-decent. Don't even THINK about asking me what that black cowling actually does; it's the cooling scoop for the chronosynclastic infundibulum, okay?

[Weaver]

Well since we got suuun shiiiiiine (and NOT on a rainy day....  ), here are some photies. This is one of those builds where you have to make all the bits separately and they don't come together until right at the end.


General arrangement - top side. That dayglow is going to have to have some SERIOUS weathering....




General arrangement - underside. None of this is built yet. Winch hatch in middle, oval dome with hanging pilot's seat to control winching, asymetric undercarriage (doesn't matter on a saucer). The u/c legs will be telescopic, with pads made from screw-blanking buttons used in self-assembly furniture (only used brown ones in the pic so you could see them, real one will be white).  The dome came from a kiddie's stamper/sticker thingy that was near the checkout in Sainsbury's (in packs of four.... )



Engine pod, made from a marker pen cap and a ballpoint pen barrel. Needs an intake cone (bomb, probably) and a boom down the top of the jetpipe (which I've just screwed up.... ) to support a small horizontal tail fin on the outside, and a floodlight on the inside).



Topside - LOTS of PSR yet - it's a damn fiddly shape...

[darkwolf29a]

Looking good.

[Weaver]

Okay, I screwed up good.....

I wanted the wings and engines to have lots of paint erosion on the leading edges, so I undercoated them silver, irregularly masked off the leading edges and flap panel lines with Maskol, sprayed them white, and then pulled the Maskol off. Big mistake: FAR more paint than the masked area came off because it hadn't adhered to the brass properly. Now going to have to strip them and start again. Can't just dump them in thinners/stripper either, because the plastic engine pods are now super-glued on....

Arggghhhhhh!!!!! 

[Weaver]

Right: wings stripped and re-painted, pod booms built and sprayed, hanging seat finished, u/c built and painted, various weatherings done, glass in, decals printed.

Decals and final assembly tonight, photos tomorrow at the latest. I've cut various nice-to-haves out to save time, but it should still look reasonably okay (at least in a photo).

[Mossie]

Keep going Weave, a lot to do by the sounds of it but you'll get there!

[Weaver]

Cheers Mossie! 

I used ModelStrip on the wings and engine pods, and the superglue parted anyway...  I think the pods are that kind a greasy plastic that doesn't work too well with superglue. Anyway, gone for the engineering solution now: lengths of threaded bar up the inside of the wings and screwed into self-tapped holes in the pods at one end and bolted through a hole in the sub-frame at the root!

The Modelstrip did beautiful random acid-etch on the brass wings, by the way: I do have photos. I had to paint over it for this model, but it's worth bearing in mind for steampunk stuff.....

The trouble's been that it's a real Rubik's Cube of a build: every bit dependent on every other bit. For instance, I couldn't put the top plate on until I had the u/c legs to support it, but I couldn't cut the legs until I knew what the internal thickness would be, and I didn't know that until I'd got the wings onto the sub-frame to get the clearance, etc, etc, ad infinibloodynitum........

[Weaver]

It's done! 

Did some quick photographs last night, just in case, but main photography tonight while (if) I've got daylight.

The self-print decals went well. The only problem was that I made them all slightly too small, in fear that they wouldn't fit; experience, I guess. I WILL be doing more of them though!

[Weaver]

FAIRYBRIDGE BG-4 TRISKELION

When the eccentric British aircraft designer Arthur Armstrong Wood finally lost control of his Cheshire factory to his American partners Ford in the mid 1960s, he very publically declared that he was finished with the UK (it was the refusal of the UK MoD to deal with Wood-Ford until he left that forced him out) and would never design anything for Britain again. He then dropped out of sight for a couple of years before resurfacing on, of all places, the Isle of Man.



"Anti" (not "Auntie", please note) had struck a deal with the Manx government and Fairybridge Aviation Ltd. to produce his distinctive "rotorplane" design on the island. The resemblance of the design to the three-legged device (known as a "triskelion") on the Manx flag was citied publically as making it a natural choice for the island, but it was really Fairybridge's desire to get away from licence production of light aircraft and have a distinctive product of their own that drove the decision, along with the Tynwald's desire to create high-tech jobs and Wood's desire to find an English-speaking, non-UK home.



The Triskelion, as it was inevitably named, entered production in 1972. It wasn't a huge sales success for the IoM in itself, but the programme served  an important role in  attracting high-tech skills to the island which could them be diverted into more "strategic" programmes. Despite it's high speed, the machine's noise, conspicuity (the famous "ring-of-fire") and it's lack of agility due to the enormous rotational inertia of it's highly-loaded rotor system meant that it never achieved many military sales. Likewise, civilian noise restrictions and high purchase and running costs kept it out of all but the most individual of private hands, whilst potential flying crane and mountain rescue missions were stymied by it's savage downwash. Where it really found it's niche was in overwater missions, both search and rescue and off-shore support. Here, the noise level didn't matter, conspicuity was a bonus, and the stability generated by the Triskelion's huge "gyroscope effect" made it flyable in wind conditions that would ground any conventional helicopter. The Isle of Man continues to operate a fleet of SAR machines to this day, and many a life has been saved from the Irish Sea by them.



Surprisingly, Wood dropped out of sight again after the Triskelion was in production. It's know that he left the Isle of Man shortly after the launch of the first Skeddan Jiarg class SSBK(C), and it's speculated that he was working on an alternative, aviation-based means of carrying the Manx nuclear deterrent which was passed over in favour of the submarines. Given Wood's history and temperament, it's likely that he stormed off at this point. His whereabouts since are unknown, although he must surely have passed away by now, since the best guesses are that he was born in 1899 or 1901.



The Triskelion's rotor is spun, at incredibly high speed, by three turbofan engines, one on each wing tip, supplied with fuel from the doughnut-shaped torii (which spin with the rotor). Each wing has a degree of variable incidence, but also has a large trailing edge control surface and a blowing slot in the upper leading edge. Furthermore, each engine pod can be be adjusted in incidence too, being "flown" to the desired angle by a small wing at the end of it's tail boom. When the landing legs are deployed, the rotors automatically elevate to the angle seen in the photographs to provide, as the crews put it, "idiot clearance". In normal flight, they are horizontal.



Since the main engines rotate and the cabin doesn't, the latter needs a fourth small turbine to generate electrical power and hydraulic pressure, and this engine's exhaust is also used for anti-torque control, to stop the cabin spinning with the rotors. With four jet engines howling away, three of them rotating at near-supersonic speed for good measure, the Triskelion is phenominally noisy, producing a "high-pitched, wailing, warbeling, whining song" (from The Ring of Fire, by Hector Redwone, Manx Poet Laureate).



The aircraft is normally flown from the main cockpit located on the top of the Triskelion above a spacious passenger cabin with a central hatch and winch. In hovering flight though, one of the crew moves down to operate the duplicate flying controls in the gondola, which hangs underneath the machine and provides an unprecedented view, even when the telescopic landing gear is deployed.



The unique, ring-shaped downwash pattern of the rotor leaves some very odd patterns in crops or grass, leading to some speculation that "Black Ops" Triskelions are responsible for the crop-circle phenomenon. Given their noisy and conspicuous flight though, it's hard to see them being a very attractive choice for the SpecFor community.



"It's hard to keep them looking tidy", says Dexxie Bryant, a Triskelion crew-person. "The dayglow gets a battering from the sheer speed of rotation, and the tube-shaped downwash picks up anything loose when we're in ground-effect and launches it at the underside."



The RESCUE lettering was added after several incidents in which potential victims ran/paddled away from an approaching Triskelion instead of towards it. "NOT ALIENS" is this crew's own touch. Bryant explains:

"There was this bloke who's crappy old cabin cruiser sank in a storm near the island and we responded to the distress signal. What we didn't know was that he'd set out from Morecombe to sail to Tahiti (yes, really) to escape the "alien mind-control rays". When we got there, he was sat in his dingy with his life-jacket on, and a tinfoil hat on his head. He took one look as us, in the dark see, so we're all lights and jet-ring and noise, and started madly paddling away from us! So we're chasing him, with me on the end of the cable looking like a bloody spaceman in a full survival suit and helmet, going:

"COME BACK! WE'RE NOT ALIENS, WE'RE FROM THE ISLE OF MAN!"



"Eventually, Pete (the pilot) got fed up, went ahead of him and switched the loudspeaker feed to Brian, who's got a really deep voice, yeah? So Brian goes:

"PREPARE TO BE BEAMED UP!"

"KEEP STILL!"

"DO NOT MOVE OUTSIDE THE TRANSPORTER BEAM OR YOU WILL BE DISINTEGRATED!"

And the guy froze and cowered, and that gave me a chance to get the harness on him..."



Sources:

AIR Interchangeable, Sept. 1998
IoMDF Flying Review, Spring 1995
The Laxey Centrifuge - a study in industrial camouflage by prof. Seymour Cleerleigh, University of Surtsey, 1987