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Previous Project:
This Project:
Having burned out on the Andromeda, I've decided to tackle a smaller project for my next kit. Unfortunately, this piece is a recast, which I was not aware of at the time of purchase. It suffers, as so many recasts do, from heavy panel lines, warped resin pieces, and lost detail. Overall, it's been a pain in the butt to get it anywhere near up to snuff. So far, I'v had to use almost half a bottle of super glue just to fill the gaps left from undersized pieces, particularly around the wing panels. The landing gear was a total loss, forcing me to completely rebuild them from tubes of styrene, brass, and aluminum. I'm quite pleased with the way those gear turned out, even without the brake lines which I'll be adding shortly.
The cockpit tub is sparsely detailed, and the pilot figure is just so-so. Looks a bit like a blob with a helmet. The canopy is cast in a cloudy transparent resin, and makes it impossible to see inside anyway. I'll position it closed, and hope that lots of buffing and Future floor polish helps. The work to date is displayed above. OK, after a few more weeks of working here and there, I've made some significant progress on the plane. The major assemblies for the fuselage are now together. Lots of filling was requried, and many large gaps were present between the wing surfaces and the removable panels. Since the detail beneath the panels wasn't all that great, I chose to display them closed, which forced me to fill the aforementioned gaps. I used gap-filling super glue for the first time on this kit, and found it quite handy. I also used it to fill the "glass" for the wing landing lights after having painted those lights first. After using the accelerator to hasten the curing process, I was able to sand down the filler flush with the various adjoining surfaces. I went the extra step of polishing the "glass" pieces with Novus #2 for extra clarity. I've been working on the cockpit area lately, and found that the canopy dome was just too ugly to live. I drilled it out and carved a positive mold master over which I'll pull transparent thermoform plastic to form a replacement. I also carved down the two lateral windows to a lesser bulge, and polished those up as well. In the meantime, I painted the pilot based on pictures I found on the Net. Since most of the interior of the cockpit will be hard to see, I'm not going too far in the detailing. Pictures are below.
Just added one new picture -- that of the canopy attached to the fuselage. The windows have been coated with a bit of Future, and the canopy itself was attached with super-glue. A fairly decent amount of gap-filling super glue was used around the canopy in order to get it to fit flush with the fuselage. Looks like the next step is painting.
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