Steve McLaren

I attach a few photos from last weekend's event on the Lleyn Peninsula. All are of one of Chris Collis's big Lancasters I'm afraid - there weren't many other photo opportunities! Preparing 3 Lancasters The launch And the flying Thanks very much to Phil Cooke again for all the organisation. Whilst the flying was often a bit challenging, we had a great weekend in the sun!

Hi Phil, I'm using Isopon P38 car body filler on top of the glass so that I can spray the primer directly on it. Heavy I know! But I'm hoping it will only be a few thin slivers here and there! Obviously it would be better to have spent more time getting it right with lightweight filler before glassing, but I found it very difficult with the pattern and texture created by the planking.

As I suspected, when I applied a coat of primer to the fuselage, I found quite a few flat spots and ridges and all sorts of other defects in the shape! However I have found that off-cuts of 3mm depron make quite a good filler spreader which you can form to the general curvature of the fuselage. I'm hopeful that this will allow me to achieve a reasonably smooth curve over most of the fuselage. Its certainly easier to do this after the glassing/priming when you can see the shape a lot better. But I think I've got a few more cycles of paint>fill>sand to go yet.

That's a beautiful model Dirk. I look forward to seeing it close up. Hopefully soon!

Lovely neat building Steve. It's good to see so many different ways of doing things. Now that's a better way to do the wing seat. I should have done that! Have you created a little fillet fairing at the same time?

Almost a month since I made an entry on this blog, and I'm still on glassing! It's a slow process ( the way I do it!). I did the wing first, and I used the foam roller technique as recommended by Dirk. I found the rollers excellent for spreading the resin without dragging the cloth around and for making sure everything was well stuck down. Since all the advice seems to be about not adding too much resin and making your model heavy, I was quite careful in using what I thought was just enough resin to get everything to stick down and look uniform. But when I came to put some primer onto the surfaces later, I found that I hadn't used enough resin to fill the weave, and so I was getting this 'pin-holing' effect. I tried on one of the tailplanes to just keep adding primer and sanding back, until the weave was full and the pinholes disappeared, but it took 6 coats! I figured that was going to get expensive in paint, on the bigger surfaces, so I asked advice from the regular glass cloth users. The solution was to apply another coat of resin - again with a roller, but scraping off as much excess as possible with a credit card. I found it was necessary to roll a bit more after scraping to get a uniform finish, but this seemed to work. The resulting surface would take the primer with very few pin-holes appearing even on the first coat. So now I have done most of the fuselage too. There are a just a few fiddly little bits around the nose and tail-pipe to sort out before I can get onto painting that. I did the fuselage in 4 operations + 2 more for the fin. Hence why it takes a long time to get this far. I found it very difficult to get the planked fuselage smooth enough, so I am expecting to be doing quite a lot of skimming with filler on top of the glass cloth.

Thanks for the tip Dirk. I'll try that on the next pieces. I'm hoping to do a bit more today. But I've only got 4 of those foam rollers and I'm struggling to find a supply during this lock-down! I was saving them for the main panels, but maybe I'll try to do more parts in a single batch.

So, I'm into my first tentative trials at covering with glass cloth.

I have most of the main parts made now. I just need some work on the fairings between wing and fuselage and between fin and fuselage, then I'll be on to the glassing and finishing

Very Nice Dirk. It makes me realise that I've still got a long way to go!

After studying most of your build blogs, this is what I've ended up with at the tail end. It's not perfect but it's the best I think I can do. So i thought i would move on to cutting the canopy. Then I need to rebuild the fuselage the fuselage sides at the wing seat (having cut a little bit too much away). So I pinned a piece of 1/8th strip to the wing and tack bonded it back to the fuselage side. My plan is then to re-build the fuselage side to this level by adding an extra strip and then sanding back. I will then remove the extra 1/8th strip and tidy up whilst sanding the outside of the fuselage. (Well that's the plan!)