1:32 Trumpeter TBM Avenger Build

[Airframes]

Yep, good stuff.
Always wanted another large railway 'layout'. Had a small village and station,with some fields and other stuff when I was a kid, all in 'OO' gauge. It only measured around 12 x 8 feet, but I had hours of enjoyment making the buildings, and creating the roads, water and landscape.

 

[Gnomey]

Good work so far!

 

[Wurger]

 

[Builder 2010]

Thanks guys! I've been trying to explain why I'm obsessed with building the trains. It's not just as a retirement pastime to wile away the hours. It's the realization of the image I had in my head when I played with my little 13' X 4' layout I had as a kid. Much of that building took place when I was 13 and 14 years old. I feel like that kid when I'm in the train room. (My wife says I act like it also... I deserved that).

Work continues on interior. Masked the upper parts that I didn't want to get any more interior green on, and first gave a primer coat of Tamiya Gray Surfacer. I was finding that the Model Master acrylics were not sticking very well to the styrene. I generally do not wash my styrene before starting to work. I just feel it's more trouble than it's worth and could lead to parts loss and breakage. That being said, I suspect, there's mold release on the parts causing the adhesion problem. The Tamiya primer, on the other hand, has not trouble sticking and provides a good surface for the subsequent coats. Unfortunately, it's solvent based and I have to spray very sparingly as to not smelling up the house. It's way too cold outside to do any painting out there. I'm still lobbying for that spray booth.

I then sprayed the entire bomb bay, the rear radio compartment and the nose portion interior green, then went back and picked out some detail parts with chromate yellow, flat black and knobs of different colors. All this taping and handling broke the control stick off at the base. I waited until all the work was done, drilled it with a microscopic #88 (0.0095") and secured it with a piece of high E guitar string, also 0.010".

I then got to work finishing up the pilot's seat with the PE seat belts that were included in the kit and ended up using medium CA to secure the seat into the cockpit.

Next week, I'll continue working on all these interiors bits. I cleaned off the nubs on the fuselage halves and was very happy with the fit and alignment. Very little filling appears to be needed. Still have to weather all of this since it's looks "factory fresh".

 

[SANCER]

Congratulations on the opportunity to make your train project a reality. What a satisfaction to see what you have always imagined since childhood.
The details of water between the tracks of the model are very well done.

Saludos

 

[Wurger]

 

[Crimea_River]

Looks good.

 

[Wayne Little]

Lookin' good man....!

 

[Airframes]

Agreed.

 

[Builder 2010]

Thank you all.

Late start but still productive. Built the torpedo and sprayed it with rattle-can Tamiya Natural Metal spray. Tomorrow I'll mask the nose and paint it insignia red. I also mounted the little support bracket for this load out option into the bomb bay ceiling. Then I remembered that I wanted to open an access panel in front of the firewall to show off the rear of the enging. I used the new fine razor saw I bought at MicroMark which worked very well to make very fine straight cuts with very little effort. After cleaning up the edges I glued some 0.080" X 0.010" Evergreen styrene strip as the backing edge that you see when these panels are removed. Often they're held with Dzus fasteners. I spaced out and drilled some faux mounting holes with a #75 drill. The holes are not in scale, but they'd be almost invisible in scale.

I test fit the engine in position and quickly found that the .010" thick new plastic held the firewall out of position and would have created a problem when joining the fuse halves. So I removed the same amount of material off the firewal so it restored the proper orientation. I did this by first scribing the offset line with a divider and then removed most of the material with the Dremel and a sanding drum...very carefully since the engine and all that details is essentially a finished product and I didn't want to destroy anything.

And here's the engine assembly test fit into final position... nothing glued. That panel removed gives enough view inside to show there's stuff going on.

The last thing I started was the gunner's seat and its seat belt PE, but didn't get far enough along to be photo-worthy. Tomorrow, I'll be getting into the gun turret full tilt.

 

[fubar57]

Here's a color pick of a Mk 13

 

[Crimea_River]

Nice work.

 

[Gnomey]

Looks great so far!

 

[Tony Hill]

Beautiful detailing.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Capt. Vick]

Brilliant!

 

[Builder 2010]

Thanks guys!

In looking at the coloration of the Mk 13 and especially the rough cast appearance of the warhead, my coloration is pretty far off, unless it was going to be a museum display.

First thing I did was mask and paint the torpedo's nose Vallejo red. I forced dried the first coat and let the second coat air dry. I find Vallejo, unlike other acrylics, flashes off, but is still tacky (and easy to get fingerprints) for many hours (24). Tamiya dries without tackiness very quickly as does Model Master acrylics. Model Tech is somewhere in between. Life Color also dries quickly. So I set it aside and didn't mess around with it. I did place it in the bomb bay for this pic. This should get some weathering to make it a little more worldly. With the new info, I may go back and repaint this critical piece of the model.

Next up was the single Browning 50cal electric gun turret. It surprises me that the Avengers designers spent so much effort on making a fully capable electrically driven gun turret, but kept it at a single barrel.

This is a very nice feature of this model and how Trumpeter likes to engineer them. They don't leave anything out. Since some many layers needed to be laid up, and some of the parts buried in said layers were not interior green, I was forced to hand paint it as I went along so I could actually paint the insides and the differing colors.

First: lets look at the real turret. The motors are black and the cabling and control lines are wrapped with aluminum. The rest is mostly interior green. It's interesting to see the roller path that suspends the turret in the ring. It probably rotated very smoothly.

Here's what I got done today. Clearly, I didn't get it all painted yet.

I tried something new, more or less successfully. I had reported that I bought those micro-tubes from Sprue Brothers and I always like to drill out gun barrels, especially in 1:32. I measured the barrel that was protruding from the heat shield and it was 0.038". One of the tubes was exactly the same diameter, but its i.d. was too big, but the next telescoping tube in the series looked good for the i.d. So I clipped the existing barrel stub and drilled it out in two steps to accept the larger tube, into which I inserted the smaller one. Came out pretty good.

Should have the turret finished up tomorrow.

I found this on the web built by Soren Wolf. Seems he had the same thoughts on the torpedo color as I do. I like how it looks and will probably leave it alone.

 

[Airframes]

Nice work so far.
Note that the colour photos of the torpedoes might be showing training rounds. The main body would still be black, probably glossy or semi-gloss, to aid traction, but the warheads in that pic look a tad too worn to be live rounds. That said, in other pics I've seen, they appear to be a greyish colour., maybe silver-grey.
Here's a drawing which might help with the turret. Note the gun charging cable, which curves inside the cupola.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Builder 2010]

That's a good drawing. There's lots of details to add, but... with the glass on top, I'm not sure just what's going to be seen.

I found that I installed the gun trigger box upside down. I couldn't quite figure out which way was up from the instructions and found the error when I attempted to install the bullet proof glass shield and there was no where to attach it. Another check of the instructions showed that it attached to the gun trigger box which was upside down. I removed it fairly easily, but broke the trigger handle off when trying to remove it. This required a drill job and some guitar string to reinforce it. It was a tricky job all the way around, but it finally was fixed.

All the rest of the parts of the turret were installed and the turret mounted to its ring. I removed paint in the roller path so the turret rotated freely. It does. I went over all the interior green areas with an alcohol/India ink wash to tone it down a bit. I lightened the paint on the armor shield top behind the pilot since it's in the sun all the time. I took a couple of status pics. All that's left to for the interior is the radio operator's seat, some doodads on the walls, the belly gun and then the tail wheel and its attendant apparatus. When I get into the tail wheel I will again be adding Eduard PE since I bought the exterior detail set. Nothing in these pics is glued into the fuse half. The drawing shows the slant of the glazing needed to be much steeper and it should link up with the crosshairs bracket. I'm not sure I want to make that change since regaling that trigger box was not fun and I'm sure if I try to break the glass loose, the trigger box will let go first.

I also glued in the instrument panel since it was time to do that.

Tomorrow could see the remaining interior stuff finished and we'll be ready to join the fuse halves. I do see a problem with a gap between the front fairing and the fuselage. I may fill thise with some styrene strip followed by Tamiya filler.