[AIR] Canopies in 1/72nd...Opinions Wanted

If you were working with the old Lindberg 1/48th kit, you'd have what you needed in the kit. It was necessary to paint the 'razor back' onto the clear part. :) Unfortunately I sold my last 1/72 F4D about a month ago and I can't test any of your candidates. My preference for looks would be the Harrier GR.5.

Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr.

Stephen Bierce wrote:

Do something from the period; F3H Demon, or F11 Tiger. Failing that, make a whole new canopy for it and master and vacuform it yourself. No vacuform machine? Okay, now this gets tricky. You're going to need:

1.) A electric oven. 2.) A burner on the oven set to "medium-high". 3.) A pair of oven gloves. 4.) A balsa or Sculpy model of what you want the canopy to look like mounted on a piece of wire hanger sticking up from a big lock-wrench. 5.) A set of ping-pong balls from your local Walmart that come under that nice piece of transparent vacuformed plastic that is secured to the back cardboard sheet that says "Ping-Pong Balls - made in China - contains no lead - we swear, imperialist pigs".

Any other toys that are also stuck to back sheets by the vacuformed transparent plastic you'll be using for the canopy are also fine, but the ping-pong balls are made of cellulose, one of the earliest plastics, and burn really fast and neat when ignited; so it gives you play value as well as a canopy for your model for your 99¢ investment...but at the same time explains by demonstration why cellulose fell out of favor for clothing - as people wearing cellulose fiber clothing went up like incendiary bombs with even a spark...such as occurred to my late aunt when she was a child back in the 1920's, when cellulose clothing was all the rage. She survived that, but she never looked quite the same afterwards. As far as the Vulcan cannon goes, the Skyray was noted for being unstable in the yaw axis at high angles of attack due to its undersized vertical fin, and sticking a Vulcan and its recoil on it in any sort of asymmetrical manner is going to cause the plane to go into a flat spin when fired*. So stick it dead center on the bottom like was done on the modified F-106's that carried it:

pod mounted, or mostly internal, depending on what space you have in there after it gets modified and modernized. A good place to start would be the F5D Skylancer for ideas: it had gone anywhere, it certainly would have been carrying Sparrow missiles in fairly short order, with a nose radar to match them.

• Flying the Skyray:
  formatting link
  sure was a beautiful aircraft, one of my all-time faves for jet fighters, right up there with the Hawker Hunter.

Pat