I’ve done it before with a 56 chevy model by Revell with a drill and a crochet hook,
tip filed and hot. But it never did look quit right. Has anyone tried it before? what
tools were used and technique. Thanks!
The best way to make bullet holes it so try and thin the fuselage or wing from the inside using a burr bit in a Dremel. I try to make the skin as thin as possible - work slowly so you can check your work and to prevent heat build-up melting the plastic.
Then, I use a new #11 blade to puncture the skin…and I kind of twist it a little try and make the hole a little rough…not round. Most attacks were from an high angle from the side or rear…meaning the bullets don’t enter the airframe at 90 degrees…causing an oval shaped tear in the skin, not a round hole.
Remember to scatter the bullet hole patterns…a machine gun isn’t a sewing machine…it doesn’t make nice, even, straight lines of bullet holes. Both the gun platform and the target are moving independantly in 3-D space, up, down, left, right…the bullets can also spin and tumble a bit - so their trajectory can be rather variable.
All these factors add up to a really random spray of bullets.
My favorite method has always been with a soldering iron. Buy a few new tips from Radio Shack (or wherever you can get tips locally). Take one and file/sand it to a really fine point.
Then heat it up (let it get really hot). Push it slowly (not too slow, you don’t want to melt a hole through your kit) at an angle, so you create a divot and deform the material around it at the proper angle. Practice on some spare plastic to get the hang of it. But once you do, the effect is pretty cool.
-Fred
The type of hole depends on the type of bullet and where it enters. An AP round will leave a small hole where it enters soft skin or fabric. If it hits a spar, rib, stringer, or former it will leave a jagged hole with exposed internal structures showing. A HE round will do more damage with a larger hole, exposed internal damage and torn skin. If it hits a thin area like a wing or control surface it will also have damage on the opposite side in the form of blown out areas. A HEI round will have more damage with exposed burned and damaged internal structures. Thin areas like the HE round will have even more damage where the explosion and fire will do more damage.
Most damage depends on where a bullet enters. Hit a rib, stringer, former, or other such area will cause more damage. Just remember on what you want to do with your project. If you want a crashed damage aircraft then it would have a lot more damage. An aircraft returning from a mission with battle damage will not have any structure damaged that would cause in flight failure.
I have seen battle damaged aircraft in SEA that returned from missions that should not have been able to fly. We also lost a RF-4C in Vietnam that took only one small bullet to bring it down.
It would figure Bernie that one bullet hit a critical piece of equipment (The Pilot). How about during the first Gulf War a A-10 comes back from a bombing run near Baghdad comes back to base missing a huge part of the Port wing and both the Starboard engine and horizontal stabilizer. and it had a shredded Starboard Main gear tire.
Oh and who on this board meantioned the F-105 with a hole in the wing you could almost crawl through.
The RF-4C took a hit in the liquid oxygen converter. It caused an explosion that blew into the number two fuel cell destroying the aircraft. It just turned into a ball of fire.
I have seen many aircraft return from flight with damage large enough for a person to stand or crawl into. When I was stationed at Kadina AB, Okinawa, one of our F-4D jets got too low when TDY to Clark AB. The aircraft hit a tree tearing off the left external wing tank, left inbd pylon, leading edge flaps and over half of the left stab. A tree trunk was imbedded in the left intake, entering from the bottom and coming out through the top of the fuselage. The radome was completely gone as well as the radar antenna. The forward section of the fuselage was bent down. The bulkhead where the forward fuselage mates to the center fuselage was broken. The only thing holding the two sections together was the external skin.
MDD engineers said it was impossible for the aircraft to fly in that condition without coming apart in flight. Someone forgot to tell the aircraft that.
As a flightline maintenance officer at Phu Cat AB, Vietnam, I saw a lot of battle damaged aircraft with everything from bullet holes from small arms fire to what should have been catastrophic airframe damage. In particuar, I remember an AC-119 gunship that flew too close to the DMZ and took a hit in the port wing from a large caliber anti-aircraft round. The blast destroyed the entire outer wing from about three feet beyond the nacelle. In spite of having only half a wing on the port side and no lateral control, the crew managed to bring it back. The factory rep said there was no way that bird should have stayed in the air, yet it somehow did.
This is slightly off-topic, but here’s another story about an AC-119 that lost an engine due to machanical failure. The aircraft had a full fuel and ammunition load, and with only one engine, it began to loose altitude at a rate that the crew felt would preclude making it to any safe airfield. They decided their best course was to call “Mayday” and bail out over the South China Sea, where there was plenty of Navy rescue cover. They set the autopilot and jumped. The Navy was waiting and picked them up almost immediately. The 119, though, once abandoned, began to gain altitude as it burned off fuel. However, it was now headed north toward China at a stable altitude that would allow it to reach the mainland. At this time China was the enemy, and it looked like we were in for an international incident. Two F-4s were scrambled out of Da Nang in an attempt to intercept and shoot down the 119, but by this time it was inside Chinese airspace, getting close to the mainland, and the fighters had to turn back lest they find themselves in a dogfight with Chinese Migs. The Navy tracked the 119 on radar until they lost it shortly after it crossed over the mainland, but no Chinese fighters were scrambled. Presumably the 119 failed to clear a mountain range north of the coast and crashed.
That was the last we heard of the runaway AC-119 – no outcry from China, nothing. For all I know, the wreckage may still be scattered on some remote mountainside in southern China just waiting to be discovered.