Hey junkie, your Tomcat's looking sharp! Keep up the great work!
Mongoose, I like your idea of painting my door. Except, my office door's in a funky spot. It wouldn't really work. I thought I had a place for it, until I realized that this beast is too big for the space. *sigh* I'll figure something out.
Anyway, I've made some progress on this monster. Let's take a look, shall we?
Talk about warping! This thing has some major warpage! I thought adding some bomb bay structure would help straighten things out. Um...nope! The upper fuselage was warped on two axes. The joining surfaces, especially along the blended body area forward of the wings, wouldn't be enough to hold things straight. So, I had to come up with a solution, and I think I did.
I drilled some holes through the fairing above the nacelles all the way through to the nacelle attachment point. I ran some plastic rod to help hold things together. The benefit is that these "posts" will also hold the nacelles on, since I drilled into the upper nacelle assembly.
I did the same thing at the wing pivot point, drilling through the upper and lower fuselages.
These posts ran through the middle of the wings' pivots, which happened to be molded hollow.
To hold things together and straight forward of the wings, I cut some grooves into the fuselage and installed some styrene splines.
You can see that my additions seem to be keeping things together nicely.
Looking at the nacelles, I decided that I would skip dealing with the intake seams. My plan is to scratch some intake covers and close things up. This allows me to build up the nacelles without the intake trunking, which will save a little weight. That means, I won't need as much weight up front to keep the kit off its tail. It's not much, but every little bit helps. I'm hoping to add the covers to the insides of the intakes then add the intakes to the nacelles later.
After I got the center section and nacelles together, I turned my attention to the forward (cockpit) section. The aft (tail) section is already assembled and waiting to be mated to the center section.
I started with the pilot and copilot windows. I polished and Futured the inside of the windows. I only did the interior because I sanded the begeezus (Is that how that's spelled?) out of their exteriors to get them blended with the fuselage. I had to cut the small overhead windows from the side windows because left together, the gaps and steps were worse.
After everything's assembled, I'll sand and polish their exteriors.
I also got the flight deck done. I didn't spend a lot of time detailing this area, since little will be seen once everything's closed up. I'm building an early B-1, so my references show the red seat cushions. I like that because it will give a hint of color to the dark interior. You might also notice that I glued in some pine car derby weights here-and-there.
Did I mention warping? The cockpit pieces were all twisted. Nothing is plane, square, or plumb. As a result, during dry fitting, I found that the whole NLG and flight deck assembly doesn't sit well between the forward fuselage halves...which were also warped. So much so, that when the rear of the assembly was held together, the gap between the two halves at the nose was about half an inch! Anyway, I wanted to check the fit of the windscreen and found a small problem. Because of the twisting, the instrument coaming was not centered, and as a result, did not let the windscreen sit in its opening. I ended up with about a 1/32" step between the windscreen and the fuselage side. I figured that since the clear parts are tinted, it wouldn't be too obvious if I scraped away some plastic from the coaming.
That worked like a charm! Now all I have to do is touch up the paint and install the windscreen. Well, after I get the nose assembly wrestled into submission...
So, that's where I'm at with the kit. Next is assembly of the forward (nose) section. Once that's together and drying, I think I'll work a bit more on cleaning up the nacelles.
Thanks for stopping by! Feel free to leave your two cents on your way out. Comments, questions, and criticisms welcome. Until next time...
Cheers!
-O