One for the Nephew!

This one is for my nephew Bradley. He was with his father, my brother Andy when he passed away just five days before last Christmas and was a wonderful help for his mum and sister during that terrible time.
I only found out afterwards that he was a great fan of Wallace and Gromit and I decided to try and get hold of one of the old Airfix kits that were released when the Wallace and Gromit films first came out. These old kits are now definitely ‘collectors items’ judging by the prices they command on ebay (especially that Pesto van kit – we’re talking well over the £100 mark for that one!)
Eventually, after getting beaten in the bidding a couple of times I managed to grab a kit of the Sidecar airplane that Gromit flew in the “A Close Shave” movie. The kit had been ‘started’ unfortunately as you will see below, but with a little extra work I managed to bring it to a pretty reasonable conclusion.
Photos 1 and 2 illustrates the box in which the kit was released. This is one of Airfix’s ‘all in one starter’ type kits complete with glue, paints and a paintbrush as shown on the box in Photo 2. As I mentioned, the kit had already been started with the majority of the airplane and Gromit himself already glued together but nothing yet painted (which was just as well!) The first job was to try and remedy a couple of beginner’s mistakes, namely the wings. This kit uses the same parts for the ‘fuselage’ as the motorcycle and sidecar kit uses for the sidecar itself. According to the instruction sheet you have to remove a pair of pieces from the sides of the sidecar which then gave the wing root ‘cavity’ for the wings to be glued into. The wings had been attached all right, the only trouble was that one was angled up and the other angled down! I was just able to pass the brush on the end of the liquid poly glue bottle in through the ‘cockpit’ to liberally soak the inside of the wing root area. This softened the plastic enough that I could then gently force the wing up into the dihedral angle required using a ratchet vice as shown in Photos 3 and 4. With the port wing corrected I left it to set hard overnight and then repeated the operation on the starboard wing the following day. The corrected position is shown in Photo 5.
With both wings firmly fixed the next task was to remove the ‘ahem’ excess plastic from the wing edges seen in Photo 6. I shouldn’t be too hard on the original owner, I can remember my own early modelling career when I too would remove parts from the sprue by simply twisting the bits off it! Whilst I was sanding those down I also took the opportunity to sand away the mould lines from the edges too. The tail assembly was also not quite ‘level’ but in that one’s case it was too firmly set in position with no way to alter it without completely marring the surface of the plastic beyond repair so I left that alone. By the end it wasn’t that prominent once everything was painted.
Next in line was to repair Gromit’s Porridge Cannon as seen in Photo 7. Apart from some glue seepage along the joins which I could sand down during construction, the main defect was in the ‘barrel’ which had a nasty split along its length. Rather than try to repair that I decided to simply replace the whole thing with a series of styrene tubes. These are shown in Photo 8. The long thinnest one was glued through the hole left by the damaged original, right to the back of the cannon body where it slightly protrudes from the front as shown in Photo 9. The small collar standing upright was then glued over this as seen in Photo 10 and once that was dry, the larger tube was glued over the top of that one (Photo 11). All these styrene tubes came in a set with each one fitting over the one below and inside of the next one up! Jumping ahead quite some way to Photo 12, we have the cannon all painted up. You’ll notice the gun sight is missing here. I actually bought a DVD with all the first three Wallace and Gromit films (A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave.) to see as much as I could for the close up details and that’s when I learnt that the gun sight is actually much lower down than the kit has it so off it came for shortening!
Talking of those details – one of the best scenes in the movie is when Gromit’s sidecar comes adrift from Wallace on the motorbike and plunges over a 1000ft cliff forcing Gromit to press all the buttons on his dashboard to instantly convert the sidecar into the plane. The kit doesn’t have a dashboard!
Photo 13 shows the first stage of adding said dashboard. I managed to get a rough idea of the curvature of the panel by using a profile gizmo (the one with all the little strips that take up the shape) across the top of the sidecar, but even then it needed some alteration to get it to sort of fit under the top. The six little buttons were sliced off a styrene rod and glued onto the raised panel at the bottom of the dash. Watching the DVD I could make out four instrument dials above the button panel. These were constructed not from more styrene tube but from a sheet of mirrored plasticard with the discs punched out using a multi sized leather punch. The instrument dials themselves came from a search on the internet to find a selection of aircraft instrument faces which were printed onto inkjet sticker paper and then themselves punched out and pressed onto the mirror surface trying to leave a thin ring of ‘chrome’ around the dial face. The edges of the instruments were then painted with Vallejo Chrome acrylic before being glued onto the light grey painted dash, each one also had a second mirrored disc glued onto the front of the dash giving the impression that the instrument was passing through the panel. The dials were then given a drop of Micro Krystal Klear PVA to form the 'glass' with a further drop of gloss clear varnish later to seal it on. Finally the six buttons were painted (true to the movie) from left to right – red/green/red/green/yellow/blue, (Photo 14).
Photos 15 and 16 show the dashboard in place, by these shots I had painted the interior in matt black with the seat frame in aluminium. Between Photos 15 and 16 I masked off the cockpit and cannon bay and finally repaired the broken propeller blade (this was unfortunate as the photos of the kit pieces on ebay showed the prop was all in one piece, by the time it arrived it wasn’t any more! ) The masked plane was then given two coats of car spray grey primer followed by two coats of a really nice Parkside Ruby Red aerosol from Aldi. This was a lovely quality paint, went on smoothly with a good glossy finish too. The finish is shown well in Photo 17.
The fiddly painting came next. The Vallejo Chrome was used on the prop, the side trims and the cannon mounting frame (I also added a pair of resin cast ‘bolts’ on the frame to simulate the screws seen in the movie, although mine are a little oversized! The wing flaps were picked out in MiG panel ink, the seat was Vallejo Saddle Brown with shadows and highlights and the edging to the cockpit was painted with a new paint I discovered at the local DIY store called PlastiKote, Fast Dry Project Enamel Flat Black. Why it’s called Project Enamel I have no idea as it’s actually a water based acrylic! This was the same paint I used on the interior and despite the flat black label it actually produces a really good rubber (or leather) effect (I also used it on the cannon tubes and ‘bellows’) as can be seen in Photos 18 to 20.
That was virtually it as far as the plane was concerned so the last section was dear old Gromit. I did some plastic puttying around his shoulders and tummy to disguise the obvious joins and managed to remove some (but apparently not all) of his mould lines in the process. I decided to prime the figure using Vallejos’ Desert Tan Surface Primer. This proved to be a very close match to the supplied Airfix paint which was really fortunate as that paint turned out to have gone rock hard many years ago! So I gave Gromit a couple more coats to be sure and added some brown ink shadows and white/desert tan highlights. The white, also used for the eyeballs was the white equivalent to the Plastikote black. Photo 21 shows Gromit underway, his nose and helmet was the same black as before with the chrome added on the goggles. Seen in the tweezers are two bits of green plastic coated florists wire which have been bent into shape and ‘chromed’ to represent the buckle which is seen in the movie on his right helmet strap. This is seen added on in Photo 22 along with his goggles frame and strap, both Vallejo browns. The goggle lenses were given a coat of Vallejo transparent blue with panel line ink around the edges. Photo 23 shows him from the rear – the indentations on his bottom fit onto the profile of the seat cushion (if you were wondering!) The paintwork damage seen in Photo 24 came from wriggling Gromit in and out of his cockpit under that added dashboard, I did repair it before gluing him in permanently but to be honest you couldn’t see it when he was in anyway! One thing I didn't realise until watching the movie again was that Gromit's helmet was the old fashioned motorbike type. I'd painted both the helmet and the chin straps in the same black but in actual fact the helmet is a slightly shiny black and the bottom portion with the straps is leather! That was improved by painting the helmet section with a clear satin varnish. The rest of the photos from 25 to 32 are of the finished model. Note that gun sight is back, lowered down to its proper height and the base has been sprayed with gloss black car paint.
Although this was the end of this kit, it won’t be the end of the Gromit story! I managed to get a second kit on ebay. Not only was it a few pounds cheaper than this one, but it is completely new and untouched! One day I will get back to this topic, I wanted to try and get another one because you may have seen that triangular base it sits on before – it’s the same one that the Airfix 1/24 scale aircraft series came out with – and its got a place for batteries underneath! Anyway, I thought, built from scratch, easier to add the instruments and other ‘enhancements’ this time (and to paint the interior red with rivets not black as I found out from the movie) and as for batteries how about a micro motor for the prop!
So anyway, Bradley finally got his Christmas present on a visit in April and loved it! Hope you enjoyed watching this one come together and in the future, who knows!

Robin.