This turned into a big update, i promise the rest will be shorter
Okay, I guess I should fess up right away and admit I started on this so long ago I can't remember. For those of you not familiar with Wings48 Vac kits, while not for the total novice, they certainly aren't airplane shaped blobs. I don't have any pictures of the BT-1 kit prior to working on it, so here's a picture of the Wing48 SOC Seagull kit.

The BT-1 is comparable, vac airframe, white metal parts, vac clear parts & decals.

So loaded up with ambition and encouraged by my good friends Al Hoffman & Vic Russell,

i gathered my references and I started cutting out parts. The fuselage halves were a snap and with almost no effort at all went together like an injected kit. Feeling confident after my easy success with the fuselage, I moved on to the stabilizers and ruined them beyond salvage on the first pass.
After a couple of failed tries at scratch-building and/or modifying some SBD parts, i gave up, tossed everything up on the "Shelf of Doom" and moved on to greener pastures

Now we fast forward to last November, when I got an Aeroclub Venom FB1. It's such a beautiful kit I decided that before I laid my big mits on it I was going to practice till I had a reasonable hope of not trashing it.

Which brings us back around to the BT-1. In the meantime I had picked up another BT-1
kit and over the holidays I resumed my research, watched videos on building vacuform kits, and rounded up piles of spare parts. Since I now had two kits I decided I would resolve construction issues on the old kit, and so far this has saved me from any more ruined parts.

Now that I've bored you to tears, I'll get to the build which has been underway since mid January. I've tried to stick as much as possible to a conventional construction plan so I started with the cockpit. After exploring several options, I used a Medallion Models SBD cockpit set as the bones I would flesh out with parts from other sources.

I guesstimated the positions of the side walls and added them to the fuselage sides along with extra parts as well as some rib detail between..


As you can see I had a runaway glue incident, which was repaired enough to insure everything still fit, and that no ugliness was visible.




At this point I finished detail painting and I glued the fuselage together. While that set up I modified the instrument panel to resemble that of a BT-1 and trimmed it to fit the fuselage, cobbled up the butt and charging handle for the pilot's .50 cal MG, then shimmed and shaved the cockpit floor till everything was level, (again) and glued it in for good.
I have 2 or 3 much shorter updates over the next couple of days which will get the article caught up with the build.
Still plenty left to do.
Rick

Thanks Bryan, I'll post more tomorrow.
Rick

I found a picture of the cockpit after the instrument panel was installed, and not trusting my abilities to edit yesterday's post here it is.

I used the instrument panel from the Medallion SBD set, filled the left side MG mount, removed the bottom of the central panel and applied decals to the instrument faces.

I also thought I'd use this post to say a little about the techniques and shortcuts I'm using.

The first thing that causes folks to shy away from vac's is removing the parts from the carrier sheet. There are a couple of schools of thought on the "best" way to do this, and after reading
various articles and watching videos, I came down on the side of the 45 degree cut.

You can see I've drawn a line around the edge of the part. Regardless of how you proceed from here, you'll need to have that line as it will be reference when sanding.
You can also see the white plastic showing in the lines where I've made several light passes with a scribing tool held at a 45 degree angle to the piece I'm removing. Again what particular tool you use doesn't matter, the object is to score the carrier sheet enough that the part can snapped out, or if necessary cut it completely free.

Once the part is free you use line around the edge to remove the remainder of the carrier sheet.

Here is the leading edge viewed head on. Remove all the white plastic below the line and the part is ready to use. I won't go over how to sand parts to get a clean mating surface, its the same as any other model

Don't throw away the left over carrier sheet. It's handy to make locating tabs, building up the thickness of parts, etc. You'll also find having an assortment plastic shapes handy.
For example, I've used tube stock to provide more gluing surface at the leading edge and it adds depth so that sanding thru the plastic is less likely. I've also built up a stack of scrap that will provide a secure mount for the landing gear and used various shapes to provide gluing surface and positive position points for parts to be added later.

Last but not least, don't reinvent the wheel if you don't need to. Many of us are reluctant to try vac kits because of the amount of scratch-building required. It's true that in some cases you will have to make a part, but I'd rather use something out of the spare parts box if possible. You've already seen how many parts I scrounged for the cockpit. Here are some of the other parts I've collected to make the build easier.

It's beginning to look more like an regular kit at this point. Certainly less work than a kit from Hi-Tech or Mach2 right? Never fear though, I'm sure I'll encounter some nightmare along the way, probably of my own making.
More later
Rick

Sorry I didn't make good on my promised earlier update, but better late than never.

After getting the interior installed and the fuselage glued together, I started work on the wing. I decided I wanted to have the lower dive brakes down in the landing/take-off position
and rather than building the parts inside the kit's wing, I used a spare set from an Accurate Miniatures SBD.

The BT-1 and the SBD, in the essentials, have the same wing, the center section being the major difference. Rather than modify the SBD wing, which is the same in span and width as the BT, I gleefully cut the outer wings off both kits thinking I'd saved myself some serious time..
Guess again, when I mated the outer wings to the center section,thankfully without glue, I discovered that the dive flap wells didn't line up. Referring to my drawings, I found I would need to add ~2mm to the front edge of the center section flap well. In another "how did I miss that" moment, I realized the span of the BT-1 kit's center section was ~4.5mm to short.

Sorry for the lack of pictures at this point, but you really didn't want to see me slowly pounding my head on my work bench...:-)

Here again, having a spare kit to experiment with saved the day. My first fix was to add strip stock to the out board ends. I taped my handy work together, offered it up to the fuselage and discovered that the difference wasn't on the ends, but in the middle.
Yikes!, what now. I decided that getting the upper wing to fuselage joint as close as possible was more important than getting the span exactly correct, so I cut the center section apart down the center line.
I made a sliding tongue and slot joint inside the stub wings to help with alignment and strength, and started dry fitting.

At last a picture!

I mated the stub wings to the fuselage and as I was able to use plastic cement, rather than super glue, i was able to work back and forth, trying to keep everything aligned. Once the glue began to set up, I taped everything in place, ran away and hoped for the best.

Here is the result from the top after the glue had dried. Not perfect I know, but workable.

This is the underside.

The area ahead of the wing that has been cut way was the oil cooler scoop that was, well just wrong. After chopping the wing in two, I just couldn't leave it alone.

Once again, scrounging came to the rescue. I made a resin copy of the oil cooler from
the Accurate Miniatures F3F-2. After adding another bulkhead inside the fuselage, I packed the lower fuselage and wing roots with epoxy putty, added the oil cooler,
covered it with epoxy putty, and stated sanding.

This is a head on view after the initial profiling was completed..

This is what the upper wing to fuselage joints looked like after filling and sanding. A lot of rivet detail was lost, and not wanting to risk cracking a joint( can I say that?), using a rivet tool, I tried out Archer's decal rivets, which are the black dots you see.

The rivets are dots of resin on decal paper and come in several size and spacing options. The result is a reasonably tough row of raised rivets. I came to two conclusions about using them.

1st: Watch the video at Archer's website on how to apply them, follow those directions and they work great, and will tolerate some poking and prodding into final position.

2nd: Don't apply them until you have finished all filling and sanding, as you are likely to knock some individual rivets off. Once they are under a coat of paint or future, they are very tough and can be masked over, with Tamiya masking tape at least, and not come off.

This final view shows the center section ready for the next step. The flap well is roughed in, again using parts from the SBD, and the gap between the stub wings has been filled.
Mounts for the landing gear fairings have been added, and the leading edges packed with epoxy putty to provide support for the main gear struts, and to guard against sanding through the leading edges.
After all off that, the center section is slightly over in span & I'm going to call it good enough.
.
Apparently, the modeling gods took pity on me and the stabilizers came out fine, using a tongue & slot joint.

The next update will be more pictures and less verbiage, I promise.
Until then,
Rick

As a bit of info to those of you following this build: I live close to Rick and have been following this build at our club gatherings. It is definitely a labor of love. Everything done has needed a lot of thought and trial & error.
It is definitely a learning experience.

After getting the gear fairings on, I set to work finishing out the flap well and correcting the left fairing wall by back filling with plastic and super glue, then sanding out the bow. I also added structural details to the interior of the wheel wells. and shot a coat of Tamiya grey primer.

and here is a close up off the reworked gear fairing. Still needs a little work.

In these next 2 pictures pictures you can see where I sanded out the rough spots in the gear fairing and the detail added to the wheel wells.

While checking for other flaws, i found that the front of the gear fairings was standing proud of the leading edge of the wing.

I tossed around a few solutions, such as building up the leading edge with putty,
or adding sheet stock to the leading edge. Threw those out as being too likely to come out wrong.
I decided to go the "easy way" and introduced my BT to my little friend, a 10 inch bastard file. A couple of careful passes and here's what we have.

works for me...;-)

And here, boys and girls, is why I've been back filling with epoxy putty.any where I though might need sanding or reshaping.

Imagine what a show stopper it would be if every where that you see green or grey, you saw a hole where you'd sanded through the plastic. I don't remember who gave me that bit of advice, I sure am glad I remembered to do it.

So this catches us up with the actual progress on the BT.
The next stage will be building up the cowling, engine, exhaust, & cowl flaps into a finished "power egg" that can be added after the rest of the model has been completed.