GB-40 1/48 Vickers Wellington Mk. III - Heavy Hitters III

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.....til now.

I finally regenerated some gumption to carry on and concentrated on the F24 camera installation. The only thing provided in the kit was a rather poor-looking icicle thingy dangling from the cabin floor. Though I have no pictures of the camera setup in the Wimpy, I decided to improvise based on the sketch of the Lancaster installation posted earlier. To start with, I tried to locate a camera in my spares and, though I had a pair of really nice German ones, the best I could come up with for the British unit was a "partial" unit from my Revell Mosquito.

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Using the single piece as a basis, I sawed off part of the body on the top and added the film cartridge lid using two pieces of thick plastic card glued together and shaped with a scalpel and file. A strip of aluminum tape represents the closure strap and a length of styrene tube was used to extend the lens body.

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Next, I glued in the clear piece part for the camera opening and added a circular fairing that was obliquely cut from a drinking straw, the inside of which was painted black. A frame for the camera was built using styrene rod.

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With the camera painted a dark grey and the inside of the lens black, I formed the lens using Testors Clear Part Cement which is still drying in the below pic.

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Here's the finished unit, all of which will be seen through the adjacent crew hatch.

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The next step will be to add the camera motor and control box and wire these to the camera. Hope to get to that soon. Thanks for your interest and comments everyone!
 
Great scratch camera Andy, looks great!!
I hope to see the rest of the content (the engine and the control box) of that camera. Let's see if you can show how the lens of the camera looks.

Gran trabajo amigo :salute:
Saludos :thumbup:
 
Thanks Geo. I know now that the set-up I modelled won't work in real life as the camera is trapped in the frame. The Lanc had a diagonal cross piece on the top so the camera could come out on an angle.

I climbed into the Lanc in Nanton today and took these for reference:

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The motor is the small silver cylinder to which the drive cable (beige) is installed. The black cable goes to the control box which I could not find. I will need to add the box on the side of the body to finish the installation off.
 
Thanks guys. Terry, if you ever want any detail shots from the Lanc, let me know. I pretty much have free reign in the thing.

I find there are times when I get in a "zone" and am able to do fiddly stuff without getting bogged down with the boredom of it. Increasingly, I have settled on a Friday and Saturday night routine where I turn on my favourite radio shows and immerse myself in the tunes and in my hobby. Last night, I tuned into Randy Bachman's Vinyl Tap on CBC radio and worked on the below bits. (On Friday nights, I tune into Andy Donnelly's Celtic Show on ckua.com).

There's a complete bulkhead missing from Trumpeter's kit and that is located just in front of the instrument panel and coinciding with the front edge of the crew hatch, so again it's quite visible. The problem is that this thing is, once again, a truss framework and difficult to replicate from scratch. The bulkhead I'm talking about is seen circled in the pic below:

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Fortunately, the most visible part at the bottom is plated over, so presents no real issue. For the truss, I elected to try to cut openings in a solid piece of thick styrene sheet. After making a cardboard template for the curvature, I cut the two bulkhead halves and drilled out the openings. Below is the start of this operation which is rather ugly but, arguably, effective.

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I elected not to go all the way to the top with this as the bulkhead becomes less visible higher up.

With the detail pics of the Lanc in hand, I also addressed the additional parts for the camera. A junction box was fashioned and glued to the side of the body and the control box and motor were also created and glued to locations based on my judgement. The new parts below are clearly seen in white and have yet to be painted.

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The floor assembly remains loose for now so the wire connecting the camera to the motor on its left can't be installed yet. There's also more to install under the floor in the pilot's position. Stay tuned if you want to see all that.

Thanks again for watching.
 
Thanks guys. Next up will be the bomb aimer's equipment, none of which is provided in the kit. Rather than going with the older course setting bomb sight, I'm going to assume that the MkXIV Computing Sight would have been in use on this particular aircraft. I've collected some details of the installation off the net and so should be good to go.
 

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