06002-4 1/72nd Short Stirling

[Heather Kavanagh]

I have this obsession about 1940. I’ve dedicated a good part of my hobby life to seeking out kits to represent aircraft that flew operationally, from all over Europe, during that year. 

Aircraft like the Avro Manchester, Handley Page Halifax and Short Stirling should fall outside my obsession. Technically, they didn’t begin true operational service until 1941. However, it’s my game and my rules, and I decided to bend the one about being “operational” a little bit so it could encompass the new generations of bombers that began to be delivered to RAF squadrons towards the end of 1940.

The dear old Stirling falls neatly into that loophole. Very early MkI airframes were being delivered to No 7 Squadron, Bomber Command, at the end of August 1940 with the aim of converting crews from the Handley Page Hampden they’d been operating until then. Some conversion!

Once I’d decided I needed a Stirling in my collection, I had the choice between the fairly recent Italeri kit and the venerable Airfix one. Having read around various builds of the Italian model, it was obvious some people were not enamoured of the apparently overdone panel lines. If I was going to spend a fair bit of time fixing that, plus other changes likely needed, why not spend less on an older kit?

The Airfix Stirling kit was first issued in 1966. At a large model show, I found a 1970s boxing, the contents still in the glorious black plastic, for £15. Into the stash it went, while I pondered what else might be required to make the old kit look something nicer.

Eventually, some brass machine gun barrels, a vac-form canopy set, and a photo-etch sheet intended for the Italeri kit’s cockpit, were added to the box. I also formulated a plan to give me some decent Bristol Hercules engines and cowlings. My loophole allowed me to have an Avro Manchester, and the only way to get one of those was to buy a conversion kit meant for an Airfix Lancaster. As luck would have it, our favourite kit maker produced the Lancaster MkII, which was powered by Hercules radials. Bingo!

I decided 2023 would be the year I fleshed out my Bomber Command collection. Having cleared a Valom Hampden and the lovely Airfix Wellington MkIc (you’ve already seen that) into the display cabinet, the Stirling was making siren calls to me from the shelf. I gathered the reference material, and started to make a list of the work I’d need to do in order to produce an early aircraft. This included such things as removing the dorsal turret mountings, rearrangements of various fittings, making a better cockpit, scratchbuilding turret interior details, and seeing if the donor engines could actually be fitted. 

The plan always included scribing panel lines and removing the battleship rivets. I sprayed the main plastic parts with grey primer so I could see what was what. The fuselage and wing span were not a million miles off the correct scale. The fuselage had a nasty twist near the nose, which I hoped could be sorted out when the parts were glued together. I noticed the fuselage was short of a couple of windows behind the wings, and the window shape was incorrect. 

It took me a day of concentration to scribe the panel lines. Perhaps I am a bit mad. I hoped sanding back the rivets might leave a ghost impression, but in the end that didn’t happen. To fix the lack of windows, I literally traced around the shape from the opposite fuselage half and cut the shape out. Because there were insufficient clear parts, to glaze the windows I bought some clear epoxy resin that sets under ultraviolet light. The idea was to fill the apertures, then create masks of the right oval shape. 

Filling the crater from removing the dorsal turret ring.

Clamps were needed to glue the floor in place.

I found both the kit and vac-form canopies were narrower than the fuselage. To counter this, a lot of tape was used to bring the width in and boiling water carefully poured on it. Happily it worked.

That will do for a first instalment. Once the mods have had a chance to approve or otherwise, I'll prepare another instalment.

Thanks for looking!

[Hurricane Boy]

Very nice work Heather. I have not built this kit but it appears to have its challenges to bring it up to your standard!

I do love your resourceful approach to improving the detail, particularly the donor engines and cowls.

Thanks for sharing with us.

Awaiting your next instalment,

Tim

[Heather Kavanagh]

Thanks Tim! While it's nice to have fancy new kits around, I do enjoy some proper old school kit bashing every now and then.

The next instalment, then.

The Airfix kit missed a couple of fuselage windows. I scratched the shapes, after referring to several photos to get the location and spacing, using the opposite fuselage half windows as a guide. Chain-drilling and some filing followed. I opted to replicate the incorrect shapes, for no better reason than it matched all the others if my masking plan to correct the shape didn't work.

I invested a few pounds in a UV epoxy resin moulding kit, and spent a while experimenting to find the best way of filling the window apertures. Once I was happy I could achieve flush glazing, I filled all the windows on both fuselage halves.

Pretty happy with the end result.

The server seems to be playing up now, so I’ll do another update tomorrow.

[Sailorman]

Very interesting Heather. Looking forward to see the rest of this build.

[Hurricane Boy]

Heather

That is a neat technique for the glazing. They look really good.

Tim

[Heather Kavanagh]

The glazing was done by sticking Scotch Magic Tape over the inside of the fuselage opening. The resin could be carefully dropped into the aperture from outside, trying to avoid air bubbles, until it was just proud of the surface. The whole depth had to be filled to avoid a meniscus effect. The UV lamp is USB powered, and the resin cures in about 10 minutes. It can stand sanding and polishing, and I've definitely got more jobs I can use it for!

Now, where was I? Ah, yes, cockpit details.

The cockpit detailing occupied me for a while. The PE set provided a nice instrument panel and various boxes and things around the navigator’s table. The table itself, although part of the original kit, was too low and too small, so I made a new one.

I was fortunate to find some good reference photos in a recent publication from Wingleader, and I was kindly offered detail photos from the archive of the Stirling Project. They’re a group building a full-size replica Stirling front fuselage section as far back as the wings. With that I was able to modify the kit’s pilot and co-pilot seats to better match the real thing. I also added strip styrene stringers.

I ignored the radio and engineer section behind the bulkhead, and eventually also ignored the bomb aimer station in the nose, as virtually nothing can be seen in there.

One feature I wanted to try to replicate was blackout curtains in all the cockpit area fuselage windows. The curtains are quite obvious in many prototype photos. Some very thing tissue paper, the sort used to wrap expensive trinkets, was stained black with a felt tip pen, and scrunched up a bit, and carefully glued in place with PVA. It worked really well, but you have to know it’s there to see it!

Eventually, the fuselage was glued together, and yes, it did fight me. Work could now begin on cleaning up the seams and hole for the dorsal turret.

I also glued the wings and tailplane parts together, and couldn’t resist the stalky undercarriage.

With hindsight, I ought to have glued the ailerons, elevators and rudder into their respective locations much earlier, and filled all the gaps. Instead, I attached them with brass wire pins, leaving rather large gaps. 

A dry fit of all the major components. Looks like a Stirling to me!

Finally, I got to the point where the canopy could be masked (the hard way) and all the fuselage windows likewise. I scanned the fuselage sides earlier in the build, and used them to make my own masks from vinyl film using my Silhouette Cameo cutter. The rectangular windows were covered with oval masks, so the process of painting would correct the shape. That was the hope, anyway.

Typing here is now worse than running in treacle. I wonder why replying to my own thread goes like this? Very annoying when it takes five minutes for what I’ve just typed to actually appear on the screen. This has been copied and pasted so I can get it out of my system! 

Anyway, another update tomorrow.

[Sailorman]

Hi Heather, There are many of us who love to follow your build ..... so please keep the posts coming. I'm waiting with bated breath to see the finished model!

[Hurricane Boy]

Heather

Thanks for sharing the added details of the window replacement process.

The model is coming together quite nicely!

Continuing to watch this unfold

Tim

[Ratch]

It's much easier to copy from your PC and paste into here - then you only have to wait for us to approve the pictures. Interesting project. I plan to convert one to a glider tug.

[Heather Kavanagh]

It's much easier to copy from your PC and paste into here - then you only have to wait for us to approve the pictures. Interesting project. I plan to convert one to a glider tug.

 

 

I was doing that, but at a section at a time. After a couple of images, everything slows right down - and if I want to make an edit, well, put the kettle on for a brew!

 

 

Another instalment tomorrow. I like to keep you all on tenterhooks! innocent

[Heather Kavanagh]

Now my attention turned to the engines. Grafting modern onto ancient actually worked well.

A feature of the earliest Stirlings was the exhausts on the cowlings were located outboard on each side of the aircraft. Later marks had all the exhausts on the left side as you looked at the front. Happily, the Lancaster was like the early Stirlings, with exhausts handed. 

I couldn’t use the Lancaster propellers, but the original Stirling ones were easily cleaned up, given a replacement brass shaft, and fitted with the Lancaster spinner fairings - another feature of the first batch of Stirlings. 

A little bit of packing was needed on the inner engines so the cooling flaps cleared the bulges under the nacelles. 

The carburettor intakes on the top were the original kit ones. I cut the Lancaster exhaust parts down, and made my own short exhausts to fit. The port engines have ended up rotated a little too far from true, but I will live with that.

Time for paint. I opted to paint the fuselage and wings separately, which could have been my undoing as I later discovered the wings had quite large gaps where they met the fuselage. That needed quite a bit of filler, and repainting went horribly wrong - though I managed to recover the situation in the end.

I’ve mentioned the Cameo cutter earlier, and I’ve made it my habit to use it to create my own markings stencils. Painted markings, done well, beat waterslide transfers hands down, in my opinion! I applied the masks, and painted the markings first. Once they were dry, I remasked them, and set about applying the camouflage colours. I’m afraid, after a messy effort at masking and painting the dark green on the Wellington, I chickened out and brush painted it on the Stirling! I wasn’t able to paint the aircraft serial numbers, so I made a custom transfer for them. That meant a final acrylic matt varnish coat before the final assembly and unmasking. The wing root escapade happened about now, which set me back a day or so.

I scratched some aileron actuators from stretched sprue and styrene strip. These were left till last, as they were vulnerable to damage. 

Turrets. Yes, well, I had been leaving that particular elephant in the room for as long as I could. In the end, I failed. I was all geared up to make interior details, but found I couldn’t make the vac-form parts work with the kit bases. In the end, making the decision to get the model as finished as I could so it could be cleared off the bench, I opted to use the kit transparencies. Each was fitted with a basic block drilled to take the lovely brass barrels, and then painted inside and out matt black. I later applied a gloss varnish over what were the clear parts to give a little glint of light when views at the right distance. My hope is I may revisit the turrets and do the job properly at a later date, though it may well be I find an Italeri kit and build that instead!

Meanwhile, I have finally got a reasonable rendition of an early MkI Series 1 Stirling, in a rarely seen combination of markings and camouflage, in the display cabinet.

I haven’t done any fancy photography on a scenic base just yet. I am not entirely happy about the turrets. Then again, I’ve finished the model apart from the defensive armament, so perhaps I should do it justice.

Thanks for looking, and I hope you enjoyed reading about this kit bash as much as I enjoyed doing it. Sometimes, despite being blessed with amazing modern kits, there’s a lot of fun to modelling the old school way.

[Dominic Thomas]

I’ve enjoyed following this build. It’s been an education as always. Thank you for sharing it.

[SD45elect2000]

One takeaway I got from Heathers build is that my three Sterlings are going to be the last ones I build.

Randall

[Heather Kavanagh]

I caved in and did some glamour shots of the Stirling.

Short Stirling MkI Series 1, MG-D N3641, No 7 Squadron, RAF Oakington, Bomber Command, late 1940.

[Sailorman]

Very nice indeed. It was a rather ungainly looking plane wasn't it?

[Hurricane Boy]

Beautiful job Heather

It looks like the donor engines & cowlings fit quite well.

Did you use the original kit wheels and land gear assemblies?

Once again, thanks for taking the time to share with us.

Tim

[Heather Kavanagh]

Very nice indeed. It was a rather ungainly looking plane wasn't it?

 

 

Ta. Yes, it wasn't the prettiest plane. It did, however, handle really well, albeit a bit of pig to land properly. I’ve read that pilots loved flying the Stirling, and if needed could out-turn a Ju88!

 

 

 

 

[Heather Kavanagh]

Did you use the original kit wheels and land gear assemblies?

 

 

Thank you. Yes, all original undercarriage. It’s basically all there, but could be detailed further if needed. There’s nothing up inside the gear bays, but I figured you can’t see into them normally anyway!

[peebeep]

It did, however, handle really well, albeit a bit of pig to land properly. I’ve read that pilots loved flying the Stirling, and if needed could out-turn a Ju88!

 

 

I've read elsewhere about the handling qualities of the Stirling. Approaches were made difficult, as I understand it, due to the height of the cockpit above ground level and being so far forward of the main gear. Allied to this, the Exactor throttles fitted to the Stirling were not helpful.

 

 

Cracking build, very nicely executed.

[Dominic Thomas]

I haven’t seen a model of an early Stirling before. This is a particularly good example. Well done.

Just needs a 1/72 Winston Churchill giving an admiring look to recreate that period photo I think.

This came from the IWM.

[Heather Kavanagh]

I haven’t seen a model of an early Stirling before. This is a particularly good example. Well done.

Just needs a 1/72 Winston Churchill giving an admiring look to recreate that period photo I think.

 

 

Thanks Dominic. The early camo and marking scheme is unusual and didn’t last long. Like you, I've never seen another model like that.

 

 

I'm sure there’s a Churchill figure about somewhere. I’d need the press corps figures, too. smile

[Matthias Muth]

It is an impressive build, thanks that share this with us.

Matthias

aka modelldoc

[paul71]

enjoyed looking and reading this heather you have done a great looking model.

paul

[paul71]

hears N3641 at oakington in 1940

if you are thinking of doing another one there is some pictures of early stirlings with a similar scheme and a light coloured under side. numbers iv got for them is N3635 and N3638