He 162 - silk purse from a sow's ear

[kgambit]

Here's a little reclamation project. I started a He 162 Revell (based on the frog mold or vice versa).

Here's a shot of the kit parts:

There's a bunch of problems with the kit:

1) The Air Intake is unfinished with no "bullet"
2) Main landing gear bay is totally open to interior of kit
3) Cockpit interior is ridiculously void of detail including
3a) No rear bulkhead. Canopy pivots are not present
3b) Front wheel bay exposed to cockpit
3c) No Instrument panel and gunsight is badly formed
4) Seat doesn't even begin to resemble the ejection seat of the He 162
5) Canopy is designed to pivot on TWO points not the single pivot provided
6) Front wheel is slightly undersized?
7) Rear wheels are definitely undersized and torque arms are badly molded

So why bother with this kit? Well I actually started this kit before we moved and I wanted to finish it. Which explains why it's already partly painted. LOL Thanks to some great help from the members I found I way to finish it AND test out some skills. SOOOOOO, here's what I decided to do:

1) Fabricate a new air intake from 9/32" plastic-tube / cannibalize a Lindbergh kit for the "bullet" - DONE
2) Fabricate bulkheads (fore and aft) and new gear floor from 0.20 plastic-card - DONE - Fore bulkhead is installed
3 and 4) Utilize the Pavla resin kit to replace the seats, add side wall details, add front wheel bay, and rear cockpit bulkhead
5) Fabricate new hinges and cut out new pivot points for the canopy
6 7) Will pillage spaes kit for new torque arms - may replace the entire wheel gear and wheel assembly.

So here's what I've done so far:

The three white pieces in the left front are the plastic card for the main gear wheel well before they have been cut. You can't see the sketch of where they need to be cut - user error on the pics - sorry. The pieces on the right are Pavla Resin bits except for the white cylinder. That's the new air intake housing.

The old instrument panel has been cut out completely, and the opening for the rear cockpit bulkhead has been enlarged.

The Air intake has been fabricated.

Now here's where things get sticky. It's impossible to ram those bulkheads into place WITHOUT cutting out the lower traingle form of the gear bay. SOOOOOO, here's what it looks like AFTER I've cut out the outer gear frame, and put in the front bulkhead. The white plasticard on the "triangle" is to take up the space caused by the cuts. The wheel bay floor and aft bulkheads are shown on the right.

The little white extension on the aft bulkhead is to allow me to position the bulkhead in place and to act as a stop brace for when I slide the gear bay floor into the kit.

Note: I never would have DREAMED of even attempting this before joining here. Since this kit came in a pack of 5 for 1$ at a kit meet I figured I could afford to bugger one up.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Maximowitz]

This is great stuff. I love to see a great model built from a poor kit.

 

[Lucke.stz]

Great job !

 

[Airframes]

Great work mate! I love this sort of thing, and get slightly irritated when someone remarks that an extremely old kit (in modelling terms) is rubbish, or very basic. That's what kits were like back 40 or more years ago!
I always look at a kit, no matter what the age or degree of finesse (or lack of!) for what can be done with it - given the basics are more or less accurate, then who cares about the rest, especially if they don't cost a King's ransom, like many 'modern' kits?

 

[vikingBerserker]

Nice kg, you're doing a pretty dam fine job on it!

 

[Heinz]

Great stuff man!

I agree with you Terry in regards to old kits, I have one or two and I just like them for their reflection of when they were made. For example my father restores old Dinky and Corgi toys, which are quite basic for the earlier ones but they so great to finish and display.

 

[Wayne Little]

Fine work there KG, looks great so far.

 

[kgambit]

Only one new pic at the moment. I decided to modify the old gun ports - they were simply dreadful. I scraped them out, sanded them, and redrilled new gun barrel positioning holes. I'm going to add some new gun barrels cut from hypodermic needles thanks to Wojtek.

Here's a shot of the new gunports..

You can see the rear wheel well bulkhead in position to the left of the picture.

I've also cut rough guides for the canopy braces and sawed the pivot slots for them into the fuselage

BTW, those white plasti-card strips still need to be cut to size. I just stuck them into the pivot slots so you could see where they go.

I'll post a shot later with the engine intake in place and the wheel well floor in place. I'm still working on getting the cockpit bulkhead cut to size and working on getting the resin parts fitted into the cockpit. Turns out the forward cockpit and forward section of the fuselage are actually shorter than they should be. That is making it tough to fit the forward resin wheel well, the cockpit bulkhead and the ejection seat. I'm probably going to have to sand off the extreme forward bulkhead on the forward wheel well to be able to get the wheel well and the ejection seat into place. The rear cockpit bulkhead is going to be problematic. I may have to leave it out - it's going to be a close call. The ejection seat does do a pretty good job of closing off the rear of the cockpit - so maybe it won't be that big of an issue.


Progress has been slow as I've been juggling time on this build with the two MTO group builds, the Arado Ar 240 AND a Me 262 A-1, a Fw 190 A-8 as well as a He 45 that is having some serious issues with a warped set of lower wings! :LOL:

 

[vikingBerserker]

Nicely done!

I know that a prior pic was primer, but it did look pretty sharp being in black.

 

[kgambit]

Nicely done!

I know that a prior pic was primer, but it did look pretty sharp being in black.

Thanks VB.

The camera is playing tricks on us. The topside color in all the pics is identical (RLM 80 actually). The underside is still the original plastic. I photoedited the second pic (the first one on the cutting board) to darken it. That's why it looks darker. I'm still have trouble getting the lighting right on the pics so the colors aren't QUITE coming out right.

 

[Airframes]

Nice work mate, keep it coming.

 

[A4K]

Great work Dwight!

 

[B-17engineer]

Very nice!

 

[Wayne Little]

Doin' great mate!

 

[Heinz]

Great stuff!

 

[kgambit]

Thanks guys.

Sequencing is a key in this project. I had to add the engine intake first before adding the wheel well floor otherwise I wouldn't have been able to adjust the intake position it once it was in. The intake was crafted was 9/32" Evergreen tubing with a small piece of scrap plasticard added at the back and then sanded. I grabbed the engine intake spinner cone from one of the Linbergh He 162 kits. Still needs a bit of putty around the edge of the intake and a tiny bit of sanding / filing with a small rat tail file. Here is a pic;

Getting the main wheel well floor in was easier than I thought it would be. I was able to slide it in from the front of the cockpit and then just gently nudge it back into position and glue it in place. Here is a shot of the main wheel well after it has been all closed in:

Just needs a little bit of clean up and it's ready to be painted

Now it's on to the cockpit.

 

[A4K]

As I said before, great work mate!

The He 162 is tiny in 1:72, not easy what Dwight's doing!

 

[Wayne Little]

 

[Airframes]

Great work Dwight.