The Hawker P.1086, son of PR19.....

[PR19_Kit]

The Hawker P.1086

Son of PR19

There's been a few conversions of normally manned aircraft into UAVs, this is the other way round.......

It started with an article in a recent Airfix Magazine which was a blow-by-blow account of how a guy built the old 'fit the box' scale Revell kit of the Northrop Snark, of all things! I've always liked the Snark, a more weird sign of the strange times we've lived through (well some of us have....) would be difficult to imagine. A very large, subsonic, jet powered, TAIL-LESS cruise type missile that worked out where it was by using a star tracker of all things! Did they think a nuclear war would only be likely to start under clear skies???

Quite why the Snark was tail-less I've never managed to work out, apart from the fact that it was a Northrop product and almost everything that Jack Northrop had a say in dispensed with tails unless he could possibly avoid doing so. I've had a Snark kit for many years now and after reading the article hauled it down from The Loft for a look-see, not that I intended to build it, it's 1/86 scale or something near, too far away from my fave 1/72 scale for military stuff. After being suitably boggled by the bright red plastic, the zillions of rivets and the vast number of sink holes in the moulds I got to thinking what I could make of it.

After a short while a sort of 'Son of PR19' idea surfaced and was developed after a bit of searching on the Net for a suitable time frame and manufacturer, and thus was born the Hawker P.1086, and my thanks are due to kitnut617 for the research for vacant Hawker project numbers. Obviously for a manned PR aircraft the Snark is significantly lacking in such things as a cockpit and landing gear, but with the stuff in my Loft I figured that shouldn't be a problem and so it turned out. An old Frog Hunter FGA9 provided the canopy, drop tanks, tail and spine and the landing gear was donated by an ESCI F-16B that I was never likely to build, F-16s being one of my least fave examples of modern jets. The Snark needed a wholly fuselage mounted landing gear as the wing is on the top of the fuse and it's very thin indeed!



On looking through the F-16 box I also found the rather basic reheat nozzle and decided to add that onto the rear end of the Snark to replace the somewhat anemic exhaust nozzle provided by Northrop. At the same time a posting on here by The Wooksta provided a suitably powerful engine for the P.1086 in the form of the short lived Rolls-Royce RB106 Thames, thanks Lee. Naturally the wings needed some extensions and I added on long enough styrene tips to look worthwhile but without having too narrow a tip chord. The F-16 landing gear bays were grafted into the underside of the Snark fuselage with much disc sawing, filing and swearing, but they eventually fitted OK. The Hunter cockpit didn't actually exist from the Frog kit so I just cut a suitably shaped hole to fit the canopy and scratched up a basic instrument panel.





After sawing out the Hunter's fuselage spine, tail and canopy fairing I did some trial fitting and found to my amazement that the various 'foreign' bits fitted quite well. The front half of the spine and the canopy fairing provided a basis to support the Aeroclub M-B ejector seat and the rear half of the spine and the tail fitted with some scraping and filing. However the fin looked much too small for an aircraft with such a long nose, the extra side area of the tail mounted  engine notwithstanding. So I chopped off the fin from its base and built a new, much taller one from styrene while still retaining the classic Hawker shape, much as the designers of the 2 seat Harriers did in the real world.

All the while I was adding bits to the Snark airframe I was also doing vast amounts of PSR work as I added each part, the actual Snark itself needing a huge amount of such  work due to the sink marks and mould tags still remaining after all these years. The model needed some nose ballast even though the Aeroclub seat was mounted well forward and so I poured in a dose of fishing shot and topped it off with acrylic resin glue. After painting the seat and the cockpit interior, very basically, and adding the decal panel I glued the seat and spine assembly in place. That left a gap between the two halves of the spine, but then the P.1086 is a lot longer than the Hunter donor kit so I took some Contrail tubing of the same diameter and slit it down the middle. I thought this would be a bitch of a job but it turned out very well, and the spine now ran all the way down the back of the aircraft.







  All the time when I was waiting for glue or paint to dry I was working on the prospective colour scheme and obtaining decals to suit. As you can read in the backstory elsewhere the last scheme that the P.1086 carried was the famous 'Raspberry Ripple' scheme beloved by Brit and other modellers worldwide, and this seemed suitable for my model. I've never done a 'Raspberry Ripple' model before but I had a couple of Modeldecal sheets which included aircraft pf the genre, plus I had a copy of 'Testing Colours', the bible of 'Raspberry Ripple' modellers. A few evenings work with my scanner and graphics software produced a couple of sheets of decals, one clear backed and one white backed, and I had the whole scheme mapped out in my head, a study in red, white and blue. It turns out this is the first model I've ever built where I've produced all the decals on my laptop, a bit of a landmark for me.

The ex-Frog Hunter FGA9 canopy looked pretty good in position but needed a little packing under its frames to get the fit exactly and some Slaters Microstrip did the job and Kristal Klear ensured the canopy wasn't going anywhere. Just the canopy masking to do and we were ready for the paint.

Well that was the plan....

While masking the canopy with the usual Tamiya tape the canopy came off, so much for the adhesive properties of Kristal Klear! So I masked the canopy off the model and stuck it back on again, held down with some tape. So when I took the tape off the canopy came off AGAIN! For the third attempt I used some acrylic glue as I figured the Kristal Klear had gone off. The first coat of Halfords Grey Primer went on but it need a pretty hefty coat, that bright red plastic took some covering. A little more PSR work followed as some sink holes were still visible here and there.

First colour coat was all over white, not difficult with Halford's Appliance white, guaranteed to give a good result, but then masking up for the dark blue undersides was a BITCH! Getting around the tailplane/fin assembly from the Hunter was a real pain but eventually it got done OK. As my Halford's blue wasn't quite dark enough I gave the underside a gloss black undercoat and then sprayed the blue. Amazingly it worked quite well! The red wing tips, tail and spine were hand painted and then it was time for the decals, one of my favourite parts of building a model.

The long red and white fuselage stripes went on first with the rest following on, but the fuselage roundels need to have two decals applied on top of each other to give enough colour  depth. In similar fashion the wing roundels needed a white base roundel as well. Then all the little 'No Step' and ejector seat markings were added and it started to look like my original idea.

At this point the nose probe broke off, for the 2nd or 3rd time, so I left it off while I did the rest of the work. I'd decided that a couple of the Hunter's 100 gal underwing tanks would look quite good and added a Lightning F6 IFR probe onto one of the tanks, just 'cos I liked the idea. The other tank gained a couple of small bump fairings for the same reason....

The landing gear from the ESCI F-16 really didn't want to be removed from the sprues, the gates were larger than some of the struts, and both main gear door retraction struts broke in the process so they were replaced with some styrene tube and brass rod. Worse was to come as on final assembly the aircraft was found to have a hefty starboard wing low stance, presumably due to the difficulty of aligning the F-16 gear bay with the Snark fuselage. The solution was to cut the starboard leg and insert a short plug, much easier written than done! In fact it proved impossible as the ESCI plastic was so brittle the leg broke into many pieces. An attempt to re-build the one leg with rod and tube resulted in the leg refusing to be glued into the correct position and it eventually shot off somewhere in the model room. At that point I gave up and went to think about things as that was the only F-16 kit I had, and nothing else would fit, F-8 Crusader, F-14 Starfighter or anything else with a fuselage mounted landing gear. Luckily our own Gondor here came to the rescue with an offer of a pair of Hasegawa F-16 legs which I eagerly accepted, well done Gondor!

When they arrived I found to my amazement that they were very different to the ESCI legs, being considerably slimmer and also shorter. With the low stance of the rear engine of  the P.1086 this would cause problems so I fashioned a second gear bulkhead and attached the legs nearer to the bottom of the fuselage and even then I had to sort out some larger wheels to get the correct height, and I HATE painting wheels! Even so it was still lower than I wanted so I adjusted the backstory to suit....

Detail decals were added in various places but not too many of them, and a few final coats of Klear finished off the job.

The Streak fought me all the way, especially toward the end with the landing gear issues, but I finally got there!







Backstory is here :- http://www.whatifmodelers.com/index.php/topic,36797.msg593115.html#msg593115

[Go4fun]

A well written back story about a well done aircraft Kit.  I loved the build and the model just shows the worse junk out there can be put to good use by a skilled modeler with an active imagination.

[rickshaw]

Lovely Kit.  Love the Raspberry Ripple.  Looks just like a bought one!   

[Army of One]

Grea work kit....!!! Are those wings long enough.....? 

[Dizzyfugu]

OMG 

Wonderful idea and execution - and I can see that the Presto putty did good work for you... 

Very nice!

[PR19_Kit]

Yes Thomas, about 1/3 of the shape of the P.1086 is down to Presto, thanks yet again, it's TERRIFIC stuff! 

I doubt I could get the wings any longer Hank, they taper almost down to a point now!

[Cobra]

This was a Superb Build,Kit Hope you won't take this wrong but, that Model Almost looks like it could've been Featured in an Episode of Thunderbirds! Keep up the Superb Work Dan

[eatthis]

it was subsonic because the wings are too long 

[PR19_Kit]

it was subsonic because the wings are too long 

If you read the backstory it wasn't...............

And I did have a bit of Thunderbirdism in my head while I built it Dan, so I'm glad it came out like that. The Raspberry Ripple scheme helps of course.

[kitbasher]

Oooooh! 

[The Wooksta!]

Looks good.

[Rheged]

A very elegant aeroplane!  The appearance screams "Hawker" at you...............and of course Raspberry Ripple suits it admirably.        A most impressive build and backstory.   

[TallEng]

What a super looking Aircraft 
It looks every inch a Hawker product.
Impressive back story too
What is this presto putty? can one obtain it in Germany?
As for raspberry ripple; as an Ice cream O.K. but as a colour scheme for Aeroplanes.....
Still each to their own

Regards
Keith

[Alvis 3.14159]

That's awesome!


Alvis Pi

[NARSES2]

Tremendous build Kit