Barry's Eye in the Sky *Finished*

[Barry]

So, the plan is to go from this:





to this:






using this:






The parts (plus an AeroClub seat I happened to have on hand):

[Arcwelder]

Cool. It's a NQASLUF!

[AndrewR]

Interesting, it looks a lot sleeker than the regular F8

[Barry]

It is Andrew...Smaller pointier radome, no ventral fins, and no bulges on the fuselage for guns and efueling probe.+

[splash]

I like the look of this one.

[airjim]

Neat. Can't wait to see this one in progress.

Jim

[Barry]

This is, like, the most productive first day ever.

Scrape the fuselage sides and trim the tub to fit, then cut the nose gear well out of the donor kit and fix it in place.






Cut the donor kit in half and replace it's nose with the conversion nose (Oops, cut the right hand side a little too short. A 20mm shim filled the gap).





slap the wing in place and add the new 'hump' after first removing the kit 'hump'.





Add Green Stuff as needed






And suddenly there's (almost) a RF-8A!

[AndrewR]

Wow! That looked impressively straightforward.

[Purplethistle]

Fast work! Looks like you've been champing at the bit to get started on that.

[splash]

Is this in the right thread?

it looks like it should be in the blitz thread

Brilliant work so far, keep up the good work.

Regards Splash

[Barry]

right...That was pretty much the easy part. Now I have to decide whether the spine needs replacing (I think it's too high and too wide for an RF-8A), then get it properly fared into the hump.
after that, there are seven camera ports to open up, the nose cone needs to be slimmed down, etc, etc. Should slow the pace down a bit.

[Barry]

Instead of replacing the spine I just sanded vigorously to make it right. Here, a bit of card to mark the top centerline for where it intersects the hump and tape to define the edges. Filled later with Green Stuff.





This area was very poorly defined on the Ventura fuselage, so I replaced it from the Hasegawa kit.





Who knew...the nose of Tamiya's Bell X-1 makes a suitable replacement for the slightly too bulbous Ventura nose cone.

[AndrewR]

Nice improvisation

[Martin R]

Yep, nice going!

Regards

Martin

[Barry]

Steadily pecking away at this. The white instrument panel shape is just a base to support the actual I/P.




This is the right side of the intake lip with a dark grey piece of paper stuck in it (For contrast) to show the uneven edge to be fixed by-...




Sticking bits of 5 thou card on it and filling the irregularities with superglue.





This is a camera housing that mounts just in front of the nose gear bay. The flat part is supposed to be glass.





So, I hollowed it out and stuck in a window which will get superglue all around the edges and then be sanded flush.




I tried to dress up these vents but it wasn't working so I replaced them




with the vents from the Hasegawa kit (one of which will have to be filled in).