Forgotten - building an Avro Manchester

[Heather Kavanagh]

At the start of 2023 I thought it would be a good time to concentrate my 1940 building efforts on the RAF bombers. My self-imposed rule about my obsession is that aircraft modelled were in actual squadron service by the end of the year in question, and that I didn’t want to include prototypes. That meant my bomber representatives would be the Armstrong Whitworth Whitley Mk V, Vickers Wellington Mks I and II, Handley Page Hampden (possibly Hereford, though they were more a trainer by the time they got into service), Fairey Battle and Bristol Blenheim MkIV. 

The more canny among you will have noted all those are, or were, in the Airfix range. I duly acquired various kits, and started research. It was then I realised that if I wanted to properly tell the story of Bomber Command at the outset of the Second World War I really should think about the aircraft coming into service at the end of 1940. Previously, I had discounted the likes of the Short Stirling, Handley Page Halifax and the Avro Manchester, because they weren’t truly operational, in other words flying actual bombing sorties, until the early part of 1941. The more I read, however, the more I realised those three were flying as operational training aircraft so crew could be familiarised with the new types about to replace their Whitleys, Wimpeys and Hampdens.

Of the three heavies I now needed to find, only one has never had a mainstream plastic kit produced, and that is the Manchester. It’s all but been utterly overshadowed by its more illustrious descendant, the Lancaster. The Manchester was flawed in a couple of serious ways, but nevertheless served valiantly until 1943. I had to have one in the collection.

Surprisingly, the obvious place to start was to buy a Lancaster kit. Why, you may ask, did I buy a MkII? Well, I had acquired an ancient Airfix Short Stirling kit, and I had half a mind to do some serious modelling and upgrade it using various aftermarket bits. If the Lancaster kit was going to become a Manchester, the Hercules engines might be usable for the Stirling.

(Reader, they did. You can find my upgraded Stirling MkI elsewhere on this forum.)

The next thing, then, was to find a conversion kit. I’ve seen one Manchester that was literally hacked from a donor Lancaster kit. I felt that was a bit too much for me. Eventually, I acquired a cast resin conversion kit from Blackbird Models. That gave me replacement outer wings, Rolls-Royce Vulture engines and nacelles, and parts to replicate the various iterations of tailplane.

How hard could this be?

 

[Heather Kavanagh]

The build began, after a lot of research and poring over photos. 

To suit my "literally the last three weeks of December" timeframe I needed to try and replicate one of the first batch of production Manchesters to arrive with a squadron. The aircraft were updated and modified in various ways throughout their service life, but I needed the first proper Manchester. In the end, I selected Manchester MkI L7279, EM-B, No 207 Squadron, Waddington, November 1940.

If you’re not familiar with the Manchester, and why would you be as it’s often regarded as a footnote in history, here’s a quick outline of the type:

• Twin-engine heavy bomber, the first all-metal stressed skin and largest aircraft yet tackled by Avro. Powered by two Rolls-Royce Vulture inline X-form engines, which were essentially two V-12 Kestrel engines mated together round a common crankshaft. It could carry nearly four tons of bombs. Initially, self-defence was with Browning 0.303in machine guns, two in a nose turret, four in a tail turret, and two in a turret under the fuselage behind the bomb bay. Later variants did away with the belly turret, adding a mid-upper turret with twin machine guns instead.
• Flight trials revealed some instability. Various modifications were made to the tailplane, eventually leading to a central vertical fin. Later modifications saw the tailplane widened with larger end plates and rudders, a design which was passed through to the Lancaster.
• The engines, being a new design, proved unreliable. With the country at war, Rolls-Royce couldn’t afford the time to refine the Vulture, being very busy building many Merlin’s instead.

The Manchester's redeeming feature, if you like, was its fuselage. Once the Air Ministry and Rolls-Royce pulled the plug on Vulture development, Avro went back to the drawing board to create the Manchester MkII, using four Merlin engines like the Handley Page Halifax. The fuselage is why I could use a Lancaster kit for the conversion.

Construction starts in the next post.

[Heather Kavanagh]

The donor kit fuselage can be built up more or less as the instructions. I decided to see if I could make some tiny changes around the cockpit to represent the dual controls the Manchester was fitted with. Some thin brass rod was formed with small round pliers to match the kit control yoke, carefully soldered together, and then glued to an extension arm made of plastic rod.

The Airfix transfers for the instrument panel and flight engineer's panel were used. I did carefully carve the moulded engineer's panel down to better reflect the twin engine nature of the beast. Likewise, the transfer was trimmed to match.

I also scratched together something to represent the folded co-pilot seat on the starboard cockpit wall.

Later I will need to fill the mid-upper turret location, but I also needed to make the belly turret in retracted form. The Airfix kit included parts meant to plug the upper turret hole, so I borrowed that and made some modifications so it appeared like the retracted turret.

I found the fuselage halves had twisted slightly in storage, mainly around the cockpit and nose area. It took a lot of clamping to get things to join up. The nose area around the turret gave me a lot of grief.

With the fuselage joined it was sensible to work out the location for the shark fin at the tail. A slot needed to be made for the resin part to fit in to.

Next, serious surgery. The Lancaster outer wings had to be cut off. The conversion kit instructions were quite clear about where the cut had to be made, but it was still a bit nerve wracking!

The stubs are then glued over the wing spars.

I test fitted the Vultures at this point. My Manchester is coming together.

 

 

[Heather Kavanagh]

Filling the mid-upper turret aperture and making good the fuselage join took a fair while. I got there in the end.

The early Manchester bomb bay had a different profile to later variants and the Lancaster. I went off down a rabbit hole to try and correct things, but decided to cut my losses and just use the standard kit parts. Hardly anyone will notice the error.

I also discovered the resin outer wings were slightly malformed. The port (left) wing was slightly twisted, and appeared to have a bulge in the upper surface. I tried all sorts to try and correct it, ending up with some serious filing with the biggest file I have. It is better, but I decided to just not worry too much before I broke something important!

I turned my attention to the tailplanes. The conversion kit includes the original shorter horizontal surfaces and rounder end plates. The parts are designed with slots and tabs which needed a little fettling to be a nice fit. To be extra sure things wouldn’t break later I engineered some brass wire pins to help with fixing the end plates on. The other nice feature is the horizontal tailplane parts are designed to fit just like the Airfix parts.

Later Manchesters had a wider tailplane and taller end plates, exactly like the Lancaster. The conversion kit instructions explains all this, and says you can use the Airfix parts for later versions.

I took my time fitting the empennage. I wanted to make sure it was straight and level. I use Humbrol 25 Dark Earth acrylic as a brushed-on witness coat to check how my seam filling is going.

There followed an extended hiatus due to domestic and personal life taking over. 

The break meant I had a chance to ponder how to attach the resin wings to the plastic stubs. The conversion instructions recommend making some kind of spar to help support the weight. The Airfix wings are nice and hollow, with plenty of space for spars.

I have a lasercut wing jig from a company called EBMA. If I’m honest, I can never quite make it work as I think it should, but it does come in useful. Here, I’ve set the Manc fuselage up as level as I can get it, supported by the jig and assorted Lego blocks, then taped down to stop it moving. This allowed me to fiddle with placing spars, made of hard drawn brass wire 1.5mm in diameter, and working out supports for the resin wings before I committed to anything permanent.

Scrap wood blocks and more masking tape, supplemented by some blutack, made a quick jig to support the resin wings while I could fix the spars in with five-minute epoxy.

I used standard two-part epoxy to attach the wings on the jig. The longer setting time of nearly two hours allowed me to tweak the joints to get as best a fit as I could. Letting it set overnight resulted in this. The joins are going to need quite a bit of remedial work, sadly, mainly because there is some variation in the sizes of the resin casting. I suspect there’ll be quite a bit of car body filler, some serious filing and a lot of sanding in my future.

That's the story of my Manchester up to date. Now the personal situation is calming down again, I hope to make some more steady progress. Thanks for reading so far!

 

 

[peebeep]

7 hours ago, Heather Kavanagh said:

I suspect there’ll be quite a bit of car body filler, some serious filing and a lot of sanding in my future.

On another forum I was advised to get hold of some Dolphin Glaze. It's brilliant, but funnily enough the first time I used it was to fix a dent I managed to put into Mrs B's car! It's a two pack filler, the bulk is the fill with a tiny amount of hardener. Once it's mixed it sets quite rapidly, so you can't hang about, but it's ready to sand after about 20-30 minutes. I think on plastic you need to be careful with how much you use in one go as it has quite a strong exothermic reaction. It's very reminiscent of David's Isopon, but with a much finer grain that results in a very smooth surface. 

[Dominic Thomas]

Looking forward to the next instalments. I’ve wanted to make a Manchester for many years. Luckily, this hobby has instilled enough patience in me to wait for an airfix kit because I don’t think I could make a success of a conversion such as this. 

[Heather Kavanagh]

Apologies for the pause in proceedings.

So, what’s been happening? Not a lot.

Over the weekend I decided to start to deal with the wing joints. Here’s the port wing after about an hour of serious filing, scraping and sanding. It does look like there’s a step at the joint, but trust me when I say that’s just the epoxy resin filling the gap. Obviously, the panel lines have been sacrificed. My plan is to work on the port wing first, both upper and lower sides, to get it as good as it gets. Then I’ll transfer the starboard wing panel lines and rescribe them. Then I just have to repeat the process on the starboard wing.

There’s that bulge again. Do you see it? I spent ages with coarse sanding sticks and scrapers to try and ameliorate the hump. It’s a lot better than when I started. It’s become more apparent, however, the hump is due to the wing tip being twisted downwards. I am considering my options, which include quietly ignoring it or doing something about it. In the latter case, some careful mounting of the model inverted, with the wing supported at the approximate apex of the hump, and with the wing tip gently forced down and held in place while hot water is applied. I don’t know how much would be needed to have any effect, since the casting is quite thick. So, considering options continues for a while longer.

[SD45elect2000]

Certainly a head scratcher that one. 
 

Im sorry I don’t have a fast effective fix for the bend. 
 

Randall

[Valhalla]

Did Blackbird Models have any suggestions?

[Dominic Thomas]

Now you’ve pointed it out, it does look awful. 
I did what you must have done, looked at photos and plans of the real thing. 

(part of a drawing from the War’tist.)

At first I thought it was a function of the interface with the kits wings, but it’s also the outer wing shape. 
I know this doesn’t help but good luck. 

Edited June 19 by Dominic Thomas

[Heather Kavanagh]

19 minutes ago, Valhalla said:

Did Blackbird Models have any suggestions?

I admit I didn’t ask. I think the issue is partly the size and thickness of the resin casting, and whatever happened to it in storage before and since I’ve owned it.

9 minutes ago, Dominic Thomas said:

Now you’ve pointed it out, it does look awful. 

Bearing in mind there are other major compromises I’m making with this build, I was prepared to accept the problem at face value. However, it is worse than it appeared before sticking the wing in place. I could just leave well alone, and hope the overall picture of the model on display won’t make the problem too obvious. The other issue is straightening the wingtip will mean it will end up slightly higher than its opposite number. That’s annoying, since I spent ages trying to get them both aligned!

I do wish a company like Airfix would bite the bullet and give us a decent modern injection-moulded tool of this important but forgotten aircraft. They’re halfway there with the CAD, since the fuselage is all but identical to the Lancaster. It needs some tiny mods round the cockpit, replacement bomb bay doors, wings, engine pods, mid-upper and tail turrets, and alternative parts for the early tailplane. The final tailplane is the same as used in the Lanc.

[Dominic Thomas]

I agree with you. 
If Airfix planned it properly, they could release the version with the Lancaster fins first, followed by the earlier version with the 3 fins, thus maximising profits from the design/moulds.