1/144 Revell British Airways Concorde

by Darren McGuinness

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Hi everyone,

This is my 1/144 scale Concorde in British Airways markings. This project started quite some time ago, when all the UK news channels were showing pictures of Concorde's last flight into Heathrow airport in London, my good friend David shot me an email asking if I could build him a model of the beautiful aircraft. So saddened was he that "Our Concorde" would not be roaring over the British skies again, he wanted something more than a photograph to remember it by. So a week later, we chatted over a cup of tea and sorted out how David wanted his model to look and what kit should be used.

At that time, not many kits were available to choose from as the big 1/72 Airfix kit had not been released yet. This left us with a choice between the 1/144 scale offerings from Revell and Airfix. After asking around, the general opinion was that the Revell kit was the better of the two.

Click on images below to see larger images

I bought the Revell kit in November 2003 and started work on it in January 2004. Building the kit, at first glimpse seemed to be a simple enough task, until I realised just how much filling and sanding this kit would need. When I put the fuselage together, the seam was very prominent and needed a lot smoothing out. The worst bits were yet to come, the wing roots just do not fit at all-lots of filler and sanding here, the same goes for the engine nacelles too. Eventually some weeks later, I started to make progress and primed the entire airframe.
Next I started on the nose and landing gear.
David had asked me to pose the aircraft on a base as if it was coming in to land on the runway, so the nose and supersonic windshield would have to be posed in the extended position-no problem here, Revell gives you this option on their kit. However, all they give you for the inner windshield is a flat, rectangular transparency. Yep, more work! It isn't so difficult to rectify this problem actually. All I did was cut the kit part in half and build a frame around it to resemble two separate windows. Any gaps were soon solved by adding a little PVA glue around the edges.
The next step, was to put the nose and supersonic windshield onto the model. The nose went together fine, unfortunately, I did a terrible job on the windshield, whilst I masked up the clear parts as best as I could, I still ended up with paint all over the glass. Now this piece of plastic is smaller than the nail on your little finger, if your not too good with clear parts (Like Me!) then you'll have problems. After much swearing and pacing up and down my workshop, I decided that I would sand everything off and start again. To be honest, my skills are not that great and I could not make the windshield look any better-in fact I ended up sanding all the frames clean off! In the end I had to send off to Revell for a new one.............................

............Three months later, the new windshield arrived in the post. By then, I had been given some thin adhesive white strips that were perfect for the windshield, no paint needed-Phew!
Now all I had to do, was modify the landing gear to look as if "hanging in flight" and reposition the flaps for landing configuration. This was done very quickly, they were cut off and glued on again and the actuators underneath were cut and repositioned. After 4 coats of Humbrol semi-gloss white, I was making progress! Next the engines were masked off and  painted in metallic black. All I needed to do now was gloss this thing and add decals. Guess what? Revell didn't supply the livery that my friend David had wanted! So I asked around some of my kit-bashing buddies and my friend Greg came through for me with decals from the rival Airfix kit.

Once all the decals were settled down, another coat of gloss was sprayed over the entire model. Next, I drilled a hole into the underside of the airframe and added a small aluminium tube, that would support the model when attached to it's display base. The base was a piece of MDF cut to the dimensions of the top of David's wide-screen TV (Well......that's where he wanted to display this model......) It was given a runway paint job and varnished and the model was mounted into the base with super-glue. At last, it was finished after 14 months of trial and tribulation!!

I presented the model to my friend a week before Christmas 2004, He smiled and said it was worth the wait. Now it sits proudly on top of his TV so he can always see Concorde fly everyday. I hope you like it too,

Darren

Click on images below to see larger images

Photos and text © by Darren McGuinness