It's been one week I try to find out something witty to introduce that new diorama of mine but can't think of anything.
It’s going to be slightly smaller than Tsushima II, will be probably turn a few stomachs by the completion.
Let’s start as usual with some shapes printed on paper , cut out and glued on some plastic. What looks like cross-sections will be glued on 1mm thick plastic, 2mm for the “support”.

Hi Nico.
Cool to have another topic of yours to read.
Count me in.

Regards,
Alexandre.

Hi Nicolas having just visited your web site and seen the photo i am really looking forward to seeing you put it all together a very interesting build,but like you suggest a bit stomach turning.

Yo Nicolas,

Nice! A new diorama on the stage. Indeed not a nice ref pic...pore guy.

I'am hooked up.

Greetz Nico

[edit]
Thanks Alex

Thanks Andy. Honestly Vietnam war is really interesting ALSO because there was no censorship of sorts. terrible images exists from this era. More Modern conflicts don't have this "chance" that the public could really witness the extent of a war's horror.
My diorama will certainly be influenced but that special picture but I don't intend to copy every bit of it of course.
That being said, that particular picture seems somewhat "staged" to me.

Yep Nico, poor guy indeed. Thanks for following

Though i don’t want to hurt anybody,I have to say it’s been 25 years i didn’t see a diorama about the Vietnam war that I actually liked.
All the usual clichés are shown in dioramas, but all the ones I saw miss their point, the most important I think, the *whole spirit*. Ah, if I say “25 years”, it’s because I saw one great one once on a French mag.
Technically it was just okay,it showed a couple of M 113s, big puddles and a couple of yanks in one corner with Coke bottles. Why did I liked it? Because of the whole color scheme which was very orange-red and those big out of balance puddles. I have been reading countless stuff on Vietnam War when I was younger, all of them tell about the red dust and the big puddles, but what I see in dioramas is well, some anonymous bits of jungle and no light.
That's the whole point of that diorama actually: to create some light.

Back to the diorama.More cutting on the way, here all the pieces cut, and me starting to do some sort of canopy out of various thickness bits.
ah, did anybody found what plane I am using? Hint: half of all the number built ended up in flames, one of the great success of the Eisenhower’s Military Industrial Complex I suppose.

At a guess a f4 phantom ?
Thanks for the info and up date Nicolas,looking at the photo again i can see why you think its staged i myself am wondering how he got there its a strange place for him to be.

Looks like another 'soul searching' diorama in the making.
Nicolas, you and Jean Bernard are the two most intense builders I've seen. The dust barely settles on your last diorama and you are fully engulfed in the next!!
Kudos to you guys!



If it has to do with the title "Rolling Thunder" then it would be an F-105

Cheers,
Charles

Hum

Rolling Thunder
Then B-52 ?????
30 B-52 lost on 744 build far away from 50 %
then F-105
Of the 610 single-seat F-105Ds built, 283 were shot down and 52 lost operationally. Closer to 50 %

I vote for the F-105 also

I look forward to seeing this progress!

Interesting what you said about the pic on your website. Had the same effect on me. My dad bought me a load of 'nam' magazines when I was about 16 and I remember flicking through and coming across this pic and another gruesome one of a pilots helmet with the remains of a head inside, very powerful and shocking photos that had a profound effect on me at the time.

Nope Andy, F4 are real winners as far as aircraft are concerned, i needed something more dubious for my diorama. I think you are right abiout the pic, I suppose the guy was dragged there for the picture

Thanks Charles, honestly I have been borrowing his heat gun and vac form material to JBA. Intense, yep thanks also for that, that's totally true.
Yep, a F-105, always loved the plane, biggest one seat fighter bomber ever built, was shot down a lot over North Vietnam. Hope to see you here often!

Totally right Seb. Other numbers? 28 Migs shot down, 23 F-105 shot down by Migs which is an appalling result concerning the level of training of American pilots compared to the one of Vietnameses.
And of course F-105D which is the coolest version I think.

Thanks Rob, Indeed I saw this picture in a Nam issue back in the 80's, it was a British publication that was translated in French for domestic release from what i saw. I didn't see that other picture you mention, but this one is really powerful in its own right!

So that's still the boring part of the SBS, Gluing all the cross-sections of the fuselage together as well as preparing plaster for filling it later..



here we are let's fill the fuselage with plaster!

You are right concerning the number but I didnot want to turn your post into a wikipedia article

You're pretty right there Seb, now where did i found my stats uh...

More plaster modelling, basically, i work and work the plaster until it is set -in the end I smooth it will water so that i can save a bit of sand paper!
here is the canopy

and the front fuselage -everything except the radome. Of course no way i would buy the Trumpeter kit. I read it was not that accurate, the problem is, will my won version be *more* accurate than the trumpeter one? hmm, i doubt that

sanding time!
I have been breaking the nose before the radome so I had to use some Squadron putty to rectify the shape



Time to do the glass canopy -not much will be left by the end of the build but I still need it.
I used some kind of eraser that was lying there to glue the canopy on it


I pinned some transparent plastic on a wood shape and next picture for tomorrow will show my attempts at vacuforming the canopy.
Important note: I undersized the canopy form so that the final result would get the right size..

interesting update Nicolas,starting to see things from the picture starting to take shape in your build.nice work.

Thanks Andy,
now i can show my vacuformed canopy, not bad, and on my first try too. I slightly burned my hands by actually pressing the plastic on the bottom of the form so that I was sure the shape would be perfect, those are the risks of this kind of work.

Anyway, now I will try to fit the canopy with the plaster base, and i have one really good reason to do that.

This is a really interesting looking project. I'm looking forward to see it progress!

I know what you mean about Vietnam dioramas, while I love the Bravo 6 figures they also stick to the cliches a little too! Characters from Platoon and what not

Thanks Jon -I agree with you about Bravo 6 figs. Actually there is something brutal about some of them that I like pretty much, otherwise it's also for some figs a Vietnam war phantasm, closer from Apocalypse Now than anything else, but that's okay really.

So i have been tying the plaster canopy on the fuselage and have been putting some mastic –in case you wonder what’s the weird tar like colour, it’s some Black Apoxie Sculpt that I sometimes use on the base of my diorama.



So the reason why I needed that sort of plaster form was to draw all the panel lines with some pen..
I used a flexible ruler for knitting for this one.

It may or may not be staged--but the tragedy is most real: The guys' right arm is horribly busted.

Jenseits [regarding an observed Vietnam diorama]: "Why did I like it? Because of the whole color scheme which was very orange-red and those big out of balance puddles." -- I can tell by this comment, plus the fabulous groundwork of "Womb," that you are one of those great artistic modelers from the European continent. Thank-you for showing up and sharing what is so necessary for moving us all forward.

Thanks for this Rick. Actually the "staged" thing somewhat makes my head spin, can you imagine the guys dragging back the pilot to the plane so that they can make a picture? That's seriously sick.

I see Vietnam war this way : not very interesting military speaking, few events, the politics I don't think are very interesting too. But hugely interesting for plenty of other reasons , SOCIAL reasons.
-what it did to the American population, both to the guys that were sent there, and the social struggle it produced at home (see 'the deer hunter")
-it was the first time a war was that much publicized with no censorship which turned the people against the war, some images from the Vietnam war are amongst the most heartbreaking ever done. and then plenty of studies were done after that on post traumatic stress disorder etc.. because..
-it dragged some normal occidental guys -to which I can identify myself- into complete insanity for one full year.
-the fact that I feel that everything USA had to learn about a war far from its frontiers in an "alien" land was somewhat forgotten 30 year later -except that authorities didn't forget to put a complete blackout on deranging pictures.

But well those are personal reasons for a fascination for a war, my diorama itself just wants to sum up in 30cm² a "look and feel" for Vietnam, redish and greensih colours, ricefields, water, sun, the silver from the death machine, and a dead body, and with that I hope people with have pity for the guy and feel the greater picture.
Now that's the aim, a bridge too far maybe..

Now what you see represents literally hours of work in front of a computer with a vector drawing software
Thanks to the great pics at Primeportal as well as a few reference I found inbook, I think *this* fret should be enough so that I can get areasonably good representation of a downed F-105 at the end.
You can amuse yourself by trying to figure out what goes where!

Once all this work is done you have to actually print the fret on some transparent paper, glue both sides together on the edges (where the drawn targets are on the pic) and insert a special photoresist coated brass plate 5€ which is figured here still with its stickers attached on both sides.

I know 2 companies in Europe that do these plates: a French one which is overexpensive, and a British one whose mailing charges are true rip off. And both brand don't react the same way to the photoetching process, so beware when choosing.
All in all, once you have all the material such a plate would cost me somewhat 5€.Then you have to insulate the brass under a specially done machine. I am about the worse craftsman imaginable and yet I managed to build that thing so YOU can.
that's 2.30 minutes on each side no more. Then dip the metal in some developing material liquid for printed circuits (you find that in electronics shops), and soon enough you have something worth..
Re: printing the photoetch fret

You and JBA are killing me with this homemade Photoetch. I was happy recently to find an alternative layout to a need of making a lot of photoetch railings, otherwise i would have been forced into this stuff also.
I do not want to take the time to learn that for the moment. Not even talking about the vectordrawing stuff!

Congratulations of being so versatile with your scratchbuilding.

This will look great again

Cheers
Claude

Inspiring stuff Nicholas, like JBA! There so many similarities with JBA that it's hard to believe that your not the same person.

Primož

i've been lurking here for awhile, following the amazing work, but i just can't help wondering--absolutely no disrespect intended--why you don't use a kit for the plane. surely one must be available, and there is so much other stuff to scratchbuild, given your dio plans.

Claude, look at what you learned all by yourself since the beginning of Clervaux! hey you even learned to do a website and publish a book, photoetch should be no trouble for you. Thanks for looking anyhow.

yep Primož , looking back at yesterdays' entry, I sort of find out i have amouth as big as JBA's too

thanks Wes. You know what today? A friend offered me to send me as a gift Aires superdetail set for cockpit and seat.
but then I turned down the offer. not because of any proudness stupid reason, simply because if I was getting that one, i would have been tempted to *show* it more than what i intended to do. And that's the problem with modelkits, you pay for them so you want to show them.
So I could have but Trumpeteer's F-105 in 1/32, get the superdetail sets etc etc, but in the end I think i would have been too much tempted to get BEYOND the simple idea I had.

Furthermore There is one thing that wouldn't have match -sorry for this, but please go on my website, look at the picture I will use which is on page 2. You may notice that the plane that fell from so high got most of it's plates disjointed. No way i could have done that by cutting through plastic, thinning stuff etc etc. No, I would have had tio make the plates again -suing the kits parts as template but not ACTUALLY using the kit parts if you see what i mean.
I don't have much time to work on the dio these days, barely enough to post 2 lowly pics a day, but everything is planned in my head, and hopefully by the end of next week, you'll see why I needed to do everything by myself

So here I am back to this photoetch plate. I have to reckkon that the French product is -well-somewhat better than the British one, more sensible, but has a great downside it's that the varnish it uses is also way more fragile (look at the big cutv traces on the plate), so what to choose?..
I have French stuff right now, so i'll use it, but how I have to be ultra careful with it when handling!



Sorry no pics here, but i had to dip the fret into an etching tank of my own build, and after 1 hour in the ferric oxyde, I got that:

yep, that should be enough for my f-105

So now i try to mess up a bit with the photoetch -first you may have noticed that none of the parts were attached, they tend to go here and there in the acid bath so you have to be careful and filter thoroughly, but then after not much trimming to do.
here are the parts for the cockpit, i'm going to solder it over the week-end to get stronger bonds and add a shattered canopy for good measure as well as adding some rivets

So now that plaster template takes all its sense! i did it so that i could position and shape better all the metal bits


But then I have to build another support for the metal parts, so here i am doing exactly the same work all over again, drawing some cross sections, printing them, gluing the paper on the plastic, and then cutting all the parts...

ok Now I do understand the plaster stuff.
Great up date
Cheers
Seb