1/48 Aeroclub Avro Vulcan

by Colin Whitehouse

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The mighty Vulcan was the mainstay of the RAF long range strike force for many years from the late 1950's until the early 1980's. Maintaining a high level nuclear deferent, maritime patrol, low level strike/attack and aerial tanker all became roles for the Vulcan during its service life. However it will probably be remembered for the longest operational bombing mission in history (Ascension island to Port Stanley in 1981) and as one of the most spectacular airshow performers of all time. I'll never forget the "Bomber flypast" at RAF Fairford in 1989 with the B-52, KC-135 and F-111 flying past in a level Vic at 500'  and the Vulcan taking off and climbing through the formation at 45 degrees, later to decend and join up in finger 4 on the other side of the field. Fantastic.

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This is the very hard to find Aeroclub kit. Produced in the mid 1980's only 400 were made and apparently it almost sent Aeroclub bust. That would have been a double tragedy. Although I searched Ebay etc for ages I eventually got mine from a simple post on Hyperscale and I had a the kit in my hands within weeks.

As can be expected by such a large vacform, it was a bit more demanding than the average kit. Suffice to say it took me from March to December 2004, a time I would normally have built 6 or 7 other kits. The challenges were typical of any vacform kit only bigger. Minor variations in alignment of the undercarriage bay would lead to huge variation of the wing tip height. Not easy as you have to fit the bays before fitting the wings! Keeping it all square and having 18 wheels on the ground at the end were the main issues. This was not helped by the lack of a spine. Everything had to be measured relative to something else so if one part was out then errors got magnified until something wouldn't fit and all had to go back to square one. If I did it again (!) I would build and internal frame from Aluminum tube and hang everything off that. This would also help from the weight perspective as the final model is over 1Kg. Having all that weight supported on 3 legs meant the structure needed to be strong as well as accurate. A new dimension in modeling.  I won't go into detail of the build as the kits are few and there was a good article in SAM in 1983 (Thanks Darius for a copy). I decided to do the interior for my own interest sake. You can actually see it with the canopy removed although my camera is not good enough to get a picture.

I originally planned to open the weapons bay so cut it out and detailed top, front and rear. However about halfway through, and after much deliberation, I chose the original white scheme based on the original role of the Vulcan in high level nuclear strike. For this I needed a Blue steel missile scheme and a closed weapons bay. Due to age and bad storage, the decals were quite poor so this helped the choice of scheme. The kit got about 3 coats with "Mr Surfacer 1000" spray bombs and then was painted overall with a mix of Mr Colour "Character white" and normal "White". The national markings were masked and sprayed with colours based on those of my Dynavector TSR2. The stencils were necessary to break up the monotony of the white but the decals were printed dark for the camouflage schemes and carrier film had gone brown and looked awful. I hit on a novel idea of using the decals and then spraying lightly over them with the base colour. This toned down the lettering and hid the carrier film. The serial for the fin was printed onto decal paper on my PC.

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There are plenty of photos of white vulcans but the plane tends to be over exposed so weathering effects are hard to gauge. I based the weathering on the cover photo on the book "The Vulcan Story 1950 to 2002"  which was a valuable source of info for detailing wheel bays and determining which planes had the series 300 engines of the kit. The chosen plane XM594 served in the UK and Cyprus before retiring to the Newark Air museum where she sits today in the grey Green scheme.

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Thanks Aeroclub for a superb model and Peter Vanderschaff & Mark Davies for their ever useful contributions.

Reference to "Vulcan Last of the V bombers" by Ken Ellis

"The Vulcan Story 1950 to 2002"  Tim Laming

Colin

Photos and text © by Colin Whitehouse