OK gang, I took advantage of a few free evenings I’ve had this past week and got some modeling done. Not much, but some.
Since all three cockpits are pretty much done, I started to glue fuse halves together. I began with the -111 jet. It was the one that was missing the cockpit structure. It was an easy fix once I decided that I wanted to use one single piece, versus two halves like the original molding. (Thanks for all the suggestions!) First I glued a small piece of 90-degree styrene to each fuse half. This gave me little shelves to rest my replacement “part” on. Then I cut two scrap rectangles matching the kit’s parts profile and glued ‘em together, then onto the shelves. The mounting hole for the canopy’s actuator was added too. Even though I’m building this jet with the covers closed, I’m still gonna add the actuators for visual purposes.
Before:
After:
It was mentioned to me that I should paint the pilots “bare hands” because pilots never flew without gloves. (Thanks for the info Berny!) I gave it some thought but decided not to because I liked how the bare hands broke up the monochromatic (green) look of the pilot’s uniform. Who besides the hardest of the hard-cores is going to know anyway? Maybe he took ‘em off because his hands got sweaty…
The Sundowner jet is the only one of the three that won’t have the intakes capped off with FOD covers, so since I couldn’t use the resin intakes that were supplied with the kit and my budget doesn’t allow me to buy replacements, I decided to fudge it. No IPMS judge is ever gonna peer down the intakes with a pen-light, so I didn’t bother with replicating the trunking.
Instead, I thought I’d try a little forced-perspective modeling (Thanks Janne!). I painted a black spot on the back wall of the intake area then feathered it outward until it faded into the surrounding white. Hacking up a donated fan face (Thanks Ken!), I glued it over the spot.
I haven’t glued the intake sides onto the -111 jet yet, because I wanted to try something a little different. The intakes are glued onto my -84 jet, but since the -111 intakes won’t have covers, I needed to mask for paint first. I figured it’d be easier if I did that before gluing the intakes to the fuse. I dry-fitted the assembly to the fuse to make sure I could do it and still get away with minor/no seams. It looked good, so I proceeded. I did some minor assembly of the intake interior and exterior, and finally laid some tape. Now that the intakes are taped, all I gotta do is glue them on, plug the intakes with some foam or tissue, then spray some paint.
Then I turned my attention to the Revellogram –J. The pit was installed and the fuse halves joined. One thing I noticed was an ugly gap at the back of the cockpit area. It seems that Revellogram intended the rear deck of the cockpit assembly to fill this void, leaving two small gaps at the edges for the tabs on the canopy to fit in to. Well, it didn’t work that way for me. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get my parts to line up the way they were supposed to.
I knew leaving that huge hole was going to be a little obvious, so I came up with an idea on how to fill it.
First, I took a little Milliput and pushed it into the void. While it was still really soft, I took my canopy and pressed its tabs into the putty.
I removed the canopy to allow the Milliput to dry, but once it did, I reinstalled the canopy to begin shaping.
Using a bit of tape to hold the canopy in place and protect it, I began to sand the Milliput to match the contour of the spine and canopy.
After a couple of minutes of careful sanding…SUCCESS!
Now all I gotta do is replace all the raised detail I lost during the process. Luckily, that won’t be as difficult as it sounds.
I have another free night to model tonight. Hopefully I’ll have another update soon.
Thanks for looking and please feel free to comment!
Cheers,
-O