OK gang, my Jugs are on hold while I wait for Mr. (or Ms.) Postal Worker to deliver some goodies. So, I turned my attention to the Blackbirds to keep me busy.
The biggest challenges were going to be repairing the breaks and chips in the fuselage. The -B had some damage to its boattail and two different areas of the trailing edges of the flaperons. Luckily, the damage to the flaperons extended far enough forward to where the kits plastic was thick enough for the styrene plug to be glued. The plugs and boattails where then filled with Milliput and shaped. The boattails also had some gaps between them and the corrugated areas of the fuselages that needed to be filled. I used some styrene strips to fill those gaps. This provided the added bonus of giving the rear areas of the fuselages some rigidity.
The -A on the other hand, proved to be a bigger challenge. The plastic on these kits is very brittle. The chip on the -A's flaperon was too close to the trailing edge to simply glue in a piece of styrene.
So, as I tried to cut back the chip in an effort to clean up its irregular shape and get to a thicker section of the wing, disaster struck. The plastic shattered and spider-webbed, almost all the way up to the flaperon's hinge line. As a result, I had to cut out all the broken plastic and fabricate a plug to replace the missing plastic.
The first thing I did was use the other wing to make a tape template to use for correcting the plug's and trailing edge's shape.
Then, using thick CA, I glued in the plug and used the tape to trim the plug to shape.
After that, it was a matter of using more CA and Milliput to (try to) get things smoothed and blended.
I have no idea how it looks under paint yet. I'll have to wait until the whole airframe gets primed. However, before that can happen, I had to get the seams squared away. I used copious amounts of sprue-goo, some Bondo, and a dabs of PPP to get the job done. Again, I have no idea how well it all worked. We'll have to see what things look like under primer, but for now, here's what the fuselages look like.
In an effort to give my arm and shoulder a break from all the seam sanding, I decided to rescribe the vertical stabilizers. Doing so resulted in...more...sanding...
I used a template traced onto tape then transferred to a piece of sheet styrene in order to create a jig for that tombstone shaped panel on the stabilizers.
In that last photo, you can see where I had to use some PPP to fill the gap that was left after some panels were installed to the bases of the stabilizers.
I decided to rescribe the stabilizers because I'm going to rescribe the rest of the airframe. All of the seam fixin' obliterated a lot of the raised panel lines. In order to get things looking uniform again, I'm going to rescribe the kits. But before I wrestle that monster, I decided I'd do some easy fixes.
The nose gears had their wheels and some of the mounting pins broken off.
So, I simply used some styrene rod to make some new axles. Of course, I drilled new mounting holes into the actual wheels themselves.
So, the parts for the Jugs are supposed to arrive any day now. Until they do, I'll keep on keepin' on with these two. Like I said, these are gonna be long term projects.
As usual, comments, questions and criticisms are welcome. Feel free to drop your two cents into the bucket on your way out. I'll post more when there's more to post. Until then, stay tuned!
Cheers!
-O