1/72 Hasegawa B-26 F/G WIP

 Very nice!!!!

I really like the tones in the green

LOL at my manicured paws!  In the next picture you'll see that I've donated more blood to this project.  Note to self, Xacto + digits is NOT a good combo.  Drove the damn thing into my thumb this morning, better than coffee to get your attention. 

And to answer the next question, yes that is a disney princesses bandaid on there.  That was courtesy of my 3 year old daughter.  The scotch tape and masking tape are my own "scrath building".  Here is how the '26 sits now, just hit it with more Solvaset.  Got some decal issues on the letters on the side, and a little on the white triangle on tail.  I'll keep fighting it with the good chemicals today, any advice is most appreciated.  Also love the B-26 story, adds something to my motivation to actually finish it.  Also the darker sections on the upper wing are actually future, it will be gone after the next step.

More to come over the weekend!

satisfaction,

Just checked out your B-26 build, excellent techniques and scratch building of fine details like the seat belts! Your 'model hands' are well adapted to working with 1/72 scale aircraft, hopefully all the shoveling didn't cause too much damage! The band-aid added a touch of humanity to your perfectly manicured paws.

Anyhow looking forward to the completion of your awesome B-26. Thanks for taking the time to share with the community!

Jason

Looking good man!  I lov B-26's!

I just read Jimmy Doolittle's biography and he wrote about how the B-26 earned a reputation as a pilot killer, so to prove everyone wrong he jumped in one, no copoilot, got it airborne and turned the left engine off and made a turn to the left.  Both back on he then turned the right off and made a turn to the right.  At one point he even made a full loop on one engine!  Needless to say that was the last those witnessing that ever griped.   Apparently he had to do this again over in England when the bad reputation started spreading again.

Brian

This project continues!!!!  I got sidetracked by a Zero and P-40, just needed something to cure my AMS.  Can I just say for the record I'm very happy with all I've learned about Alclad, but it was real pain in the @##$ going through the motions.  Wish I had a dollar for every time I had to go back and resand/rebufff/reshoot this thing.  I helped the cause by finally getting out an old Buffalo and practicing on that.  Too bad I did all this AFTER getting the B-26 to the point of being acceptable.  I'm not fully thrilled, but it is good enough.  I reached the point where I just need to move this project off my desk/counter/kitchen table.  The Wife doesn't really care, but it is bugging ME!!!  Ok now on the the pictures, first here is the Buffalo showing that in the end I did learn how to deal with Alclad.

*Obituary*  Unfortunately due to "bad plastic" the Buffalo died after I removed the masking and found that all the yellow/orange paint on the wings peeled off, INCLUDING PRIMER!  Not to be deterred from having a nice shiny metal plane on the shelf I spent an very messy hour stripping all that off.  Then in preparation for repainting the beautiful Airframe Alluminum began to peel off!!!! INCLUDING GLOSS BLACK LAQUER!!!!  No memorial service will be held, the Buffalo is buried in the local dumpster.  Oh well, it was just a test to start with anyway.  Now back to our Marauder show.

 First up were the wings.  There was a nasy little step around the engine nacel that had to be dealt a fatal blow.  Here is an action shot!!

 Well after much sanding and refilling it finally is gone.  Now the next issue was the trailing edge of the wings, if this were to scale that baby would be about 8" thick.  So more sanding....note a theme here?  Here is a comparison of before and after, not too shabby.

At this point I finally put my foot down and decided it was time to move on.  Was there more I could do?  Yes.  But you all know the feeling of enough already, so I locked Research in the closet and moved on.  Here she is with a shiny coat of gloss black. 

Oh yeah, the tail finally finished up in there somewhere.  Good god that was a real pain and really derailed me from this project.  I'll NOT be doing that again anytime soon unless I've got some aftermarket stuff to make it a little less painful.  Now, it was all and good to see some color on this beast but the black turned out to be unnecessary.  After this I shot it in Alclad Airframe Alluminum, which I have learned is not the best paint to starter your metalizer learning experience on.  My pressures/techniques were a little off, which meant I had to go back and sand and buff much of the plane to get rid of rough spots.  (There are a few really hard to get to spots left, but don't tell anybody)  At this point I moved to the Buffalo and practiced there, and finally got it all figured out.  I also figured out that Airframe Alluminum over gloss black is really shiny, so I went back and shot the whole thing in Alluminum instead, with a scattered "shading" of Duralluminum.  When using those colors a black background is not needed, and in the end the color was exactly right.  Too bad I forgot to take pictures before I masked it off to paint the upper surfaces!  Well here are a few more shots with some paint on it.  Did some early shading and fading with light grey and yellow zinc chromate added to the olive drab.

 At this point you will note that I decided to paint the wings before attaching them.  This was really good from a cleaning up and ease of masking point of view.  On the other hand it was really STUPID from a practical point of view.  You see this model weighs more than my car due to all the weight in the radio room and in the engine cowling ($0.06 per wing in small change).  This means that it is very hard to handle without causing more harm to seams and such.  Also coulding "jig" it like I wanted to as I was just too heavy.  Let's just say that one wing went on like a charm and the other I have had to reglue and resand the leading edge seem twice and reattach to the body 4 times.  THE @%@%#@ THING BROKE OFF 4 TIMES!!  Anyway I am very gentle with it now, but this weight stress on the model is causing me to take some shortcuts and do things the easy way (at least in terms of engineering stresses) instead of the right way.  Well enough complaining here she is prior to decalling and with masking still on.

 Stay tuned this weekend as she actually has most of the decals on at this point and am getting ready to turn down the home stretch.  Hope you all can forgive the delay

Pretty brave of you to attack that clear plastic stabilizer after assembly, but it looks like you won.  It'll look nice with the elevators down some.  Nice work all around.

Well time flys when your having fun....or spending endless hours sanding and polishing!  There has been progress though and I'll post the pictures to prove it.  This has been one of those tedious stretches where you feel like nothing is happening and then suddenly all the pieces start flying together.  First off was the gluing of the fuselage halves.  I did this in small sections with tape on either ends of the glued section.  By small I mean several inches at a time, no more than 6-8 in any one application.  This got a good strong fit with plenty of drying time in between.  Despite a good fit, it was not perfect and as we all know NMF means a perfect finish is needed.  Also at this time I noticed a few "dimple" defects in the plastic.  These were in prominent spots and required filling and sanding smooth.  Here are the worst offenders:

 You can also see some of my seam issues here, especially around that circle behind the cockpit.  To fill in these gaps I used acrylic gell medium, the stuff you put in acrylic paint to give it "body".  It is marble based and sands really smooth.  Worked well on this so far, so might need to add it to the long term bag of tricks.  For the seams I used gap filling super glue in about 3 inch segements.  I put a bead down the seam, waited about 30 seconds and then started sanding.  I did all the seams this way and upon finishing had to go around a second time, and in some bad areas a third.  In the end I beat the seams.  Used micromesh up to 12 or 16000.  Once that was done I used a felt tip on the good Ol' Dremel with some polishing compound and buffed the whole thing.  Finished up with a linen cloth tipped Dremel run.  Sucker shines now......but that only took 2+ weeks!!!!!!!  To break it up I built a 1/72 FW-190A8, not too bad and I'll post pictures later.  I just needed to do a shake & bake easy build, and Hasegawa helped me out with that simple little baby I picked up for a few $$.

Now I'm into the major subassemblies.  First off I finished the bomb bay and all my detailing.  Of course I didn't take a picture of all my hard work while it was easy to see, but here is a shot of the finished bomb bay.

 You can't see it in this shot, but this thing is fully wired inside.  Pretty proud of that, be it is fairly hard to see.  I thought of leaving the bombs out, but it just looked wrong.  So to I built up the bombs (4 pieces each x 4 bombs got a little old but what the hell).  Having seen a good many of these in person and in pictures having them just plain green would have been wrong.  Bombs have some great color blending, a little like little tanks.  Also research told me that photos of these later war B-26's showed no yellow bands around the bomb....woo hoo!!!  no masking!  I base painted them Field Grey, then shot a random thin coat of OD over the top.  Looked pretty good, but there is always this brownish/yellowish dirt and streaking on these things.  So out came the oils (Tuscan Yellow i think) and some dot filter action.  Just put a few dots of yellow oil in random spots, then streak it out with a turpenoid laden brush until happy.  I'm happy with the result.  Oh yeah and a flat coat over the top with a touch of Buff mixed in to even everything out.

Now something that Research pointed out to me (with a 2 x 4 to the head as is his style) is that in about half the pictures the elevators are cocked down just a little bit.  I'll admit that this would be an attractive touch, but Genius here had already assembled the tail section!!!!  So I figured, ahh what the hell and started out with the scriber.  This took a full 2 hours and there is still work to do, including replacing the little tabs that were just too small to work around.  Here is the damage:

*Note those instructions in Russian are not for this kit*    So I'm cleaning up the tail area and that will be going on shortly.  There will be a few more little gaps and seams to deal with there.  Once that is done then the windows will go in, and all the while I'll be working on the engine/wing assemblies in between.  These are actually pretty far along.  I'd guess that there will be a mostly assembled B-26 in about a week, ready for the real make or break step.....painting and the NMF.  Until next time, thanks for reading.

Time for the weekly After Action Review....oh and there has only been 1-2 inches of snow this week.  Isn't it Spring yet?  Hit two IPMS shows in the last 8 days; Columbus OH and Richmond VA.  Must say it is nice to see so many completed models and talk with other builders.  Anyone else hit those shows?  Anyway we're on to a pretty boring stage of building as far as pictures are concerned, that being putting together the wings, fuselage and other big goodies.  Makes for some boring pictures, but is really important and a hell of a lot of work.  I'm not on to sanding just yet, but that is coming starting tomorrow.  First off I had to finish off detailing the rear area.  Research totally flaked out here (no good pictures), but he did find a good schematic of a B-25.  I know, hold your horses; this is a B-26 build but it gave me some ideas for this foresaken area.  Most importantly I saw that there were a pair of ammo cans and storage racks plus a heater.  So it was time to carve out some pieces from the spares box.  Used 1/72 biplane struts, cut way down to make the supports.  Then used simple styrene to make the shelf.  The heater in the schematic was a dead ringer for a spare biplane prop shaft, so in it went.  Here is a shot of the work:

Now the best part of all this was that Research thought he saw a pound of human flesh in there, or maybe just some blood.  Now before I could tell him we didn't need blood (that is a little too real) he conspired with my Xacto blade and went after my finger.  Bastard cut me good while trimming down one of the shelves.  So after a good amount of blood sweat and tears (well maybe not tears but a lot of really colorful language that will get me banned) here is how the weathering on my finger looked:

Well enough violence.  While this all was drying I set to work on the tail section.  Hats off to Hasegawa again as they mold the entire tail section in clear plastic for the sake of two tiny windows below the vertical stablizer.  Really cool to see this attention to detail.  Here is a shot of the horizontal stab. with the preliminary gluing together:

Now my main reason for jumping to this was to check the balance and too see if I had enough weight up in the radio room.  So off to the radio room we go.  Now I must say physics can be a real pain as just a little weight in the tail (far from the fulcrum) must be offset by a ton of lead in the radio room (right next to the fulcrum).  With the snow off the Metro tracks it was off to the sporting goods store to buy some lead, in the form of fishing weights.  On a side note, while in Columbus I bumped into a fellow B-26 builder who said he didn't get enough weight into the nose.  So I filled that little radio room I had so badly wanted to detail full of lead.  Sounds like Dirty Hairy...awesome.  Here she is; first in the raw and then with all the interior stuff I didn't want seem painted black.

Now with all that inside it was time to glue her shut!!!!  I'm doing this very methodically.  First was basic model glue on the alignment pins, then taped to hold her tight.  Then I did section by section with thin liquid cemet (Plastruct this time).  This is where she sits now, with only CA along the seems to go.  This will be applied then quickly sanded smooth, so it will be both filler and putty.

While in this form I decided to test weight the thing by taping on the tail assembly, which was also taped together.  Duct tape for everybody!!!  Here are my balancing tests:

 She's a nose sitter!!!!!!  For insurance I've found that there is plenty of room to stick about 6 pennies behind each engine before the engine firewall.  This area looks to be at least as far foreward as the radio room so that is my ace in the hole.  This got me to thinking I might need metal gear, so off to Squadron I went.  So no *poop* guess what I found?  I know I said no aftermarket here, but these are just molds of the Hasegawa parts!!!!  A metal cockpit floor and rear bulkhead!!!!!  This would make the thing a nose sitter without extra weight, HASEGAWA PLEASE ADD THIS SET!!!!!!!!!  (Bought a 1/48 Tamiya He-219 Uhu in Columbus, it has a metal cockpit floor included to act as the nose weight which is BRIALLIANT)  This kit is pricey enough, another $10-15 is not going to turn me away.  Damn wish I saw this a few weeks ago.  May still need those metal gear, but I'll "weight" and find out.

During this time I got a few more odds and ends glued together and created a miny Aircraft Graveyard here on the table, this is how she looks now.  I figure this will change dramatically in the coming week as I get the seams strong and smooth.  Hopefully next week I've got primered shots of the wings and fuselage.

Well I'm back in the saddle again.  Took a little vacation and sat out a pair of monster blizzards in the dark, but now back to the grind.   Just for fun here are two shots of the snow outside:

Looking back on it now it almost seems funny, we've got 70+ inches of snow this year...old all time record was 54.  Now on to the B-26.  I've got the interior almost done to the point where I'm beginning the process of closing up the fuselage halves.  The next round of bomb bay detail will take place after, as many of the wires and other detail "wrap" around from the bulkheads to the sides.  I'm going to leave the back windows/gun ports/crew access hatches open.  In all the pictures Research dug up, they were open in better than half of them...and it will serve to show off more interior detail.  Along these lines I've put in a crew walkway along the bottom, which covers up the huge seam line found there.

 All that's missing is some weathering and two ammo cans/boxes I'm going to put in.  Need to scratch build these and paint em up still, maybe tomorrow.  Once those are in then it will be time to close this baby up.  Here is going to be my first challenge.  I've spent a lot of time trying to get a clean fit, but as it turns out this issue is not totally my fault.  Here is the problem:

In this shot I'm putting NO pressure against the sides, so this looks worse than it really is.  On the other hand this is a natural metal finish and the seams need to be perfect.  Oh and I don't want to have it split on me at the last minute as I finish my final clear coat (yes that has happened before, on my only other NMF build).  Here is the bottom, which lines up perfect.

Research thinks I should be a hand model....

I had The Wife double check my sanity here, and yes the fuselage is slightly warped!  So my plan to address this seam goes beyond just gluing in together.  I need to reinforce the glue and create a little force to counter act the force of the warp.  (Force of the Warp, what is this Warhammer 40K?)  My first step in doing this was to cut into the wing supports here:

My plan is to tightly pack styrene between these two...for example I'll cut out some sprue sections and create an "H" with the cross bar being the sprue.  By tightly packing this area it will create force against the warp.  You can see the cut out sections go "into" the wing root, this is where the tension will be as I pack it in.  As a final force balancer I'm going to wedge toothpick tips into the gaps where the wing support goes through.  I'm very interested in any other ideas from the audience here!!!!  Oh and on the subject of the rudder petals...I spent about 30 min or so scratching them and set them out to dry after painting.  Was just getting ready to put them in and they got eaten by The Warp.  Well not really, but I can't find them for the life of me!!!!  *Report Me*  As they will be damn near impossible to see I'm holding off for now.  Might get motivated and get em redone yet, but that pissed me off.

First off good to hear/read some other voices besides the ones in my head.  Made a little progress today and hopefully got it to the point where I can put the fusealge together and do some serious seam work.  Will need power to do my detailing (for reference photos), so here's hoping for a little electrical karma.  92 hours has got to be worth something right?  Yard funny you should ask that, as I have no idea.  They are not in the kit so I'm going to have to make him some before I close her up.  Going to try and find a picture or two here now before I get shut down again.  Stay tuned and hopefully I can work through the blizzard part 2, nothing better to do that's for sure.

It's looking better all the time.  One question.  Which little grubby green gremlin stole the co-pilot's rudder pedals?

Darwin, O.F. 

Sweet job so far. I like the amount of detail your adding to a 1/72 scale model. I'll be hanging on for the duration of this one.

Solid work on the office.

Just checked the weather and they have upped it to 1- - 20" in your area.  Yikes!

Sure do wish I had a progress report, but some of you may have heard about a touch of moisture we had here in the DC area.  Well let's be honest, we got our butts KICKED.  I've got 29 inches outside my door, measured with the good ol' fashioned measuring stick.  This being in the city where 3 inches is a national emergency.  The B-26 is sitting unloved at the moment, since the power was off for a little over 90!!!! hours at my place.  No lighting, no heat and no compressor = no modelling.  Except for a little 1/72 190 I busted out and have been sort of putting together in bad light and with no airbrush.  My apologies to this nice little kit, but no way I'm working on the Marauder in these conditions.  I'll throw up some pictures of that another time.  Well there is another 6-12" expected tomorrow (this keeps getting bigger every forecast) so who knows what is coming.  Looking forward to getting back on the Marauder bandwagon.

Oh yeah and to answer the decal question, not sure yet.  The kit ones look good with some fun nose art.  Also have some good ones from a "B" that hasn't been built so might tap into those too.

Time for another UPDATE!!!  I know, let's try and keep the excitement down though.  It's too damn cold here to get that excited.  So the last week has been one of tedious and not very dramatic progress...until yesterday.  With that in mind here is what has "gone down".

First let me say that Research is really *report me* upset.  You see his favorite website was down for the last few days before and during the weekend.  This slowed us down, and forced me to put him in the penalty box.  This site (I'll find it again later and post it) has many great interior shots from multiple angles and has been key in my interior detailing, especially the wiring and such.  But no amount of techincal difficulty was going to stop me from pushing on.  So I whipped out the good ol' Iwata and went to work painting the whole interior fuselage (except bomb bay) in Field Grey.  Grey?  Yeah, I'd think that too except that obviously the Wermacht officer who designated that color was color blind from squinting into the snow in Russia.  That "grey" is actually an OD greenish color, that is a little darker and greener.  It was a really good match for the interior insulation (I think that is what it is) that is stuffed between the aluminum fuselage ribs.  With that finished I hand painted the ribs aluminum...or actually Citadel Mithral Silver which I find to be an awesome paint for that natural metal look.

Now I know I promised excitement in this post, so I glued in the cockpit!!  Please stay seated until this post is finished, then you can jump up and down in excitement............

Went in like a charm, and again hats off to Hasegawa for some really nice locator tabs along the sides to make sure the alignment is perfect.  I'd love to have gotten all this together and then noticed the cockpit was slanted to one side.  All kit makers please note this, it is really simple and solves so many potential future headaches.  Here is another shot looking up through the crew access hatch, also shows the good fit around the wheel well (will still be a little work here but not bad).

With all that in place and FIRMLY superglued in place I moved on to the bomb bay detailing after the website came back yesterday.  Oh yeah, I said FIRMLY because that empty radio room (*Research cries*) is going to be full of fishing weights.  To bring a smile back to Research's face I started adding some wires, cables, metal poles, cinder blocks and dirt....well maybe not the last two.  Interesting thing about this is that much of this work will need to be done when the fuselage is closed up due to wires and cables crossing multiple bulkheads and going down the side of the bomb bay.  Should be a real blast.  With that being the case the bomb bay was put together and detailed as much as possible at this point.  Here she it...

Still need a little touch up painting, but that will go on at the very end of detailing.  At this point there was nothing stopping me from putting the bomb bay in too.  Again very nice locator points and a smooth fit with plenty of strength at the point of attachment.  On a side note I'm working on a little Eduard 1/72 triplane (one of those low stress builds with minimal modeller crazyness...if you want to know what this is just look this post!).  Great to break up the attaching of tiny wires and poring over photos of old bomb bays, but you talk about vague connection points!  A tiny dimple in the plastic does not count as a strong attachment point, especially when the whole weight of a wing will rest on just two of these.  It is a fun kit and that is my only gripe.  So here is the bomb bay inside!

Oh yeah, it was just not worth it to go after those ejector marks.  I did a few and the area looked worse due to difficulty sanding between those ribs.  As you'll need a dental mirror to see them, they'll just have to stay in place.  Should be pretty well hidden under wire and cables once all that is done.  Now we'll conclude here, but I'll bring up my issue of the day.  When I test fit the halves together I'm getting a very slight gap along the bottom, which did not appear before the bomb bay went in.  This is not a big deal and would be very easy to fill, but I don't want any necessary "tension" on my seams....especially with a NMF going on this thing.  Don't want a busted seem to pop up right as I'm putting on the last clear coat.  (This has happened to me before).  Also any tiny issues seem to grow exponentially over the build so I'm going to find this right now.  It is something I did not do 100% right in installing the bomb bay, seriously it was about 98% right but I'm not risking that 2% becoming 10% by the end and popping that seem.  So I'm off to very carefully look, sand and trim if needed until it fits.  Might take a day or so, but hey what the hell.

nice work so far, what decals are you going to use?

Looks great.

Brilliant stuff, mate.

Well I figured you all would be blown away by a surprise update, especially as I was a little productive today.  Before I get into all that good stuff, just wanted to say thanks for the comments.  I've enjoyed writing this and it actually seems to make my work a little better.  So now back to the good stuff.

Did I mention that I hate seatbelts?  Well this could have easily turned into a deal where I just simply look at the nearly finished cockpit and think about how much I'm NOT looking forward to making the seatbelts.  Or I could just grin and bear it, well I'm still grinnin'!!!  First let me show you fine folks what these seats looked like to start...

Honestly not much to write home about there, never mind the fact that Research was whining about them not having armrests.  So I set about shutting up Research by building armrests out of really small styrene rod.  Nothing really fancy, but they did make that other voice in my head happy.  Next came those *(&)&^%)ing seatbelts.  Now you all remember that bottle of Shiraz I used to comfort myself after the radio room debacle?  Well I just want to go on record as saying that wine just keeps giving.  It gives you a good buzz, a dehydrated brain and really great seatbelt material!  Here I am showing my approval of the foil cap from that lovely vineyard in the Land Down Under.

No I'm not going to jab my thumb into that blade, although I did take off a little piece of my finger later trimming down the control wheels.  Anyway back to the belts.  I really like the Eduard belts so I used some Luftwaffe 1/48 ones I have laying around as a template.  First I cut into strips and then added the middle buckle on the shoulder straps.  I was inspired and did this by cutting the strap in half, and then gluing a small piece of styrene in between the two halves leaving what looks like the outline of the buckle.  Still proud of that.  On the lower end of the staps I just used a bit of styrene and a little bit of wire...nothing too wild there.  To make a long story short on the lap belts I did a lot of foil cutting out and wire gluing.  Finally painted everything up and here you go...

I'm pretty pleased, even Research was happy.  They don't even look that bad under the high magnification of this picture.  After the seats went in I touched up the rest of the cockpit and then stabbed the whole thing with a fork!  Well not a real fork, but still "put a fork in it, it's done"!  Here are some more shots of the Office...

I don't have anything in there for scale, but it is less than 2 inches from bulkhead to bulkhead...pretty tiny.  But as "They" say....size doesn't matt....  ah hell with that saying lets get back to the model.

Now the Office has been put aside and I've started to pull together the materials for the bomb bay and the fuselage halves.  Here are the primary parts to the bomb bay, there are a number more but they will be added post detailing.

 Please remember I've already painted them NMF (Alclad Dark Aluminum) in my shiraz induced stupor last weekend.  I'm even more pleased with the molded on detail here than I was in the cockpit and wheel well.  This secondary office, or should we just call it the Janitorial Supply Closet, might just be worth seeing.  I needed to shut up the whining coming from the bombs after that last comment...who needs 'em if I want the interior to be seen.  But if I really mess this up, then into the Janitorial Supply Closet they go and nobody will be the wiser.  Finally here is a shot of the fuselage half showing some sink marks that will need to be cleaned up a little bit.  They will not be all that noticable, but will need some light cleaning no the less.  Won't go crazy, but just take the edge off so they can't be seen without a scanning electron microscope.

That's all for this edition, stay tuned.

Now that is some seriously intense work.  The scratch built detail that you have added is a big improvement.

Darwin, O.F. 

I was all primed to come running in here to warn you about the kit being a tail sitter once I read you were gonna detail the radio room but I see you have seen the light.
Good catch!
Build on. Looks fun.

Nice job so far.  Love the wireing detail and the office looks superb.  Funny thing about the nose weight thing...Once you make that mistake once you never do it again.

BTW, you're a fun read. 

So I promised an update today, and you shall have one!  Funny thing happened this weekend.  Being all fired up about posting about this build has pushed me to just keep adding more and more to the build, including my really bright idea to totally scratch build the radio room!  Now this was to be exciting stuff, even Research got into it for about 2 hours on Saturday afternoon.  We got all the pictures, and all the ideas together and started building it out.  You know the little stuff like measuring and starting to fill ejector marks.  Now a funny thing happened on the way down this street that ends in a steep cliff (only I had no idea of this sudden problem ahead and was going forward at 90 mph).  First let me say I have built mostly WW2 single engined planes, with a few WW1 biplanes thrown in.  Planes like the SB2C, FW190, DO 17 and Nieuport 23 are sitting my shelf right now....notice anything in common here?  Weeeelllllll I'll be *report me*, but they are all tail draggers. 

Now this pretty B-26 has tricycle gear, but hey I can handle that they're just GEAR.  Well yes that is true, but it seems I'd missed the tiny detail that comes along with this.  NOSE WEIGHT! 

DOH! 

Now I know why Hasegawa did not detail the radio room, as they had the rest of the interior.....you need somewhere to put weight.  This isn't in the instructions, but there is nowhere else to put the stuff.  So I set Research off onto some other builds and what do you know.....weights in the radio room and behind the engines.  So I just laughed that little detour off over a bottle of Shiraz and shot a bunch of natural metal onto the interior bulkheads for future use.  So not a total waste of most of the weekend.

So after recovering from the Shiraz I figured that adding the bulkheads to the cockpit area would be a good way to get something productive out of my Sunday.  As I'd already painted them the day before it was just a matter of brush painting the details.  Didn't have a good reference picture for this, damn that Research.  But what the hell, it's deep inside and most of the colors were self explanatory.  Also not sure why my hand is painted natural aluminum but I think if might have something to do with my wine making friends in SE Australia.  So without further adieu here are some shots of the mostly done cockpit section (still have a few little things to touch up like on that O2 bottle)

So all I'm missing are the seats, touch up a few things and make up some seatbelts.  The seats are going to be a little work as they need armrests and those #$%#^%^ing seatbelts.  I hate making seatbelts, but I"ll just have to bite the bullet here and get em done.  Also 'bout time to move back into the bomb bay for some more detail work; as I've got good pictures and this area will be open to look up into.  Have to be a little more focused than on the dark recesses of the cockpit.  Oh yeah and watch out for any more bright ideas that waste a day or two.  Well stay tuned this week for more fun.

Nice job on the wiring. Looking foward to seeing this one finished.