MUSTARD glider

[Weaver]

Well after every damned thing that could have happened some other time chose to happen this morning, here we finally go...    

I'm building Freightdog's 1/72nd scale EAG.4455 MUSTARD glider, straight out of the box: it never saw the light of day, so it's automatically a What-If.
The challenge here is going to be that I've never built a complete resin kit before.

The obligatory bits pic:




For those who don't know, MUSTARD stood for Multi-Use Space Transport And Return Device, and was a very detailed study dome in the 1960s for a British "Space Shuttle". The full sized thing was inspired by a Douglas proposal, and would have consisted of three externally identical lifting bodies, two boosters and one orbiter, which took off vertically and landed on a runway. The two booster vehicles would have fed fuel to the orbiter until they staged, thus leaving it full at the point of separation, at high altitude and speed. Payload to LEO would have been nowhere near that of the US Space Shuttle, but MUSTARD was 100% reusable. It also had the advantage of not using any exotic propulsion technologies, like so many other studies of the day, just good conventional liquid hydrogen+liquid oxygen rocket engines. The only major technological challenges (and they were serious ones) were fuel transfer, and getting the pressurised, cryogenic LH2+LOX tanks into the external form without excessive weight.

Part of the proposed development programme would have been a small glider to investigate the low-speed handling of lifting bodies, which was a complete unknown at the time. NASA conducted exactly such a programme, culminating in the HL-10 (the crash at the beginning of the Six-Million-Dollar-Man TV series was real crash footage of an M1-F2(?) from the same programme). The British MUSTARD glider would have been ground-towed initially, and later towed aloft behind something like a DC-3 bomber, and then glided to a landing. A further option was to fit a small rocket engine, so that if the pilot screwed up and found himself sinking too quickly (by far the most likely scenario) then he could fire the rocket for a one-time go-around capability. The full size orbiters and booster would probably have had to be white on top and black underneath for the same hard engineering reasons as the Space Shuttle, but the glider could, of course, be any colour, but the idea of something called MUSTARD
 being any other colour than yellow is just inconceivable...

Needless to say, MUSTARD petered out in the late 1960s since there wasn't a snowball in hell's chance of the UK government coughing up the money for it, and there wasn't a second snowball in hell's chance of making it an Euroipean project when Dassault had competing ideas of it's own.




I can unhesitatingly recommend Dan Sharp's British Secret Projects 5 - Britain's Space Shuttle for exhaustive detail on all the UK space/hypersonic programmes and on their overseas competitors:

[Mossie]

Got to love MUSTARD.

[NARSES2]

Good resin kits can be as easy to build as good IM kits. Slightly different techniques and small/thin  parts can be "frail", but that's it.

Unicraft on the other hand are a penance sent from somewhere else, but I still like them 

[Weaver]

Okay, everything cut off and cleaned up, and nothing broken, slightly to my disbelief. The bang seat was especially heart-in-mouth, since it's a lightweight Folland Mk.4, whose headrest is supported on an open tubular framework, which means there was some particularly delicate flash to remove. I'm quite keen on making the seat look nice, so I may fabricate a pair of wire headrest ejection handles for it. I do actually have a couple of Pavla Mk.4s with resin top handles moulded in, but when I went to look for them, I found that one of them already had the handles snapped off in the packet, so I think I'll pass on the other one and go for the Freightdog seat plus wire.

A coat of primer is now drying on all the interior bits, and all the non-yellow ones, apart from those that I can't safely mount for spraying.

The upper fuselage is very slightly warped upwards in the middle, such that the trailing edge doesn't meet in the middle. It's been in a camp designed to bend it the other way for most of the day, but it didn't seem to make much different. Once it's cockpit paint has dried, it'll be going back in the clamp, but with some GENTLE heat applied.

Got the vacform canopy cut out first time too. 

I'm impressed by the fit of the cockpit bulkhead and instrument panel. I thought they'd be approximate "fit where they touch" efforts, but no, they slot firmly and unambiguously into the upper half as nicely as any injection kit.

[NARSES2]

The upper fuselage is very slightly warped upwards in the middle, such that the trailing edge doesn't meet in the middle. It's been in a camp designed to bend it the other way for most of the day, but it didn't seem to make much different. Once it's cockpit paint has dried, it'll be going back in the clamp, but with some GENTLE heat applied.

When applying heat I've always found warm/hot water is best, takes longer but is safer.

I'm impressed by the fit of the cockpit bulkhead and instrument panel. I thought they'd be approximate "fit where they touch" efforts, but no, they slot firmly and unambiguously into the upper half as nicely as any injection kit.

What did I say ? 

[Weaver]

Mnay small fiddly things have bene painted, not always successfully, but nothing that can't be fixed. The fuselage now fits better: clamped it up, but the clamp in vice, put the vice on a radiator, went out shopping for a bit, sorted when I came back.

Question: does normal filler work with resin? Suspect it'll need a little around the fin joints.

[PR19_Kit]

Question: does normal filler work with resin? Suspect it'll need a little around the fin joints.

It does for me usually, and it has on the Dragon too. That was fairing in one of Colin's resin noses to a styrene fuselage, so you should be OK H.

[jcf]

The M2-F1 was originally towed behind a 1963 Pontiac. 

What UK automobile could one use to tow the MUSTARD glider?

[PR19_Kit]

An XJ12C would be OK for the period, maybe fitted with the 4 cam engine from the XJ13 if it needed a bit more grunt? 

[Weaver]

The M2-F1 was originally towed behind a 1963 Pontiac.

What UK automobile could one use to tow the MUSTARD glider?

Knowing the MoD, we'd probably start developing some bespoke vehicle at 10x the cost of the glider, then cancel it three years later and pay to hire the NASA tow car and ship it over here, which would only cost 5x the price of the glider and thus be trumpeted as an economy...

There was a great story behind that tow car for the M2-F1. Walter Whiteside, an ex-USAF major working for NASA, approached Cadillac for a suitable tow car and managed to get a Catalina convertable with a "non-streetable" 405hp, 421cu in, 6.9ltr V8 engine and a performance carb. He then used his connections with the California hot-rodding community to get it souped up even further. The front passenger seat was reversed to face backwards, and the rear bench seat was removed and replaced with a raised side-facing seat and a tow rig, plus measuring gear. The fin on the rear left hand side was for an airspeed indicator. The car was mostly painted white with NASA logos, but the bonnet and boot lid ("hood" and "trunk" for Americans) were bright yellow to match other flightline vehicles on the base. It's US Govt licence plate was NA 1059. When not towing, it could do a consistent 140mph, with about 160 being the limit. After a few kinks were ironed out, it used to tow the M2-F1 at about 110mph. Fuel consumption was around 4mpg! The glider's nose lifted at about 60mph, the pilot would climb to 20ft off the ground, then release the tow and glide for 20 seconds to a landing.

Imagine getting a budget from NASA to hot-rod a brand new car, in California, in the middle of the early 1960s hot-rod scene... "Yeah, my car does 160mph: the speedo doesn't go up that far but I've got an airspeed indicator..."    

All info from BSP.5.

[NARSES2]

Question: does normal filler work with resin? Suspect it'll need a little around the fin joints.

I've never had any issues and have used most fillers available to the UK modeller in the past

[kitbasher]

The M2-F1 was originally towed behind a 1963 Pontiac.

What UK automobile could one use to tow the MUSTARD glider?

The Napier Railton.

[PR19_Kit]

The Napier Railton.

Hehehehe, that'd get it into orbit, no probs! 

[Weaver]

Chris and Kit - cheers for the putty info. I've just done it with Halfords knifing putty, which is smoother than the Squadron White I normally use: dont fanvy doing too much sanding in that inside corner.

[Weaver]

Good progress.

Main body glued, filled and now has a coat of white primer drying on it. I made little Evergreen panel with a lip on it which sits in the cockpit opening and is secured by TINY beads of Blu-Tack. I didn't want to put a big blob of Blue-Tack in there because the stick is already in. I didn't trust my ability to put the stick in after the fuselage was closed up.

Last coat of paint on the canopy frames. I've painted it black, partly for contrast, and partly because I don't want to try masking and unmasking the delicate vac-form canopy after it's been glued on the model, and any shade of yellow I could brush-paint it probably wouldn't match anyway.

Seat painting nearly finished, headrest handles made (brass wire) and dip-painted yellow.

Decided not to do the seat pan handle: the headrest handles were fiddly enough, the seat one's even smaller and you wouldn't be able to see it anyway.