Hello!
Sorry to revive this thread, but I have unfinished business here. I fully intend to complete my Whale! So after a long time, here's an update!
We're talking about this part:
It's the main landing gear wheel, which would be correct for the so called "versions" variant of that aircraft, but not for a "bomber" - and the EKA-3B belongs to the bombers.
It's wheels should look something like this:
That means work. First I got to my trusty lathe and took the unnecessary part out. I really needed to man up on this one for fear of destroying something:
What I got was a very clean wheel:
Now I had to add some detail. I designed my own custom PE part in CorelDRAW! and let a small company etch it for me. That's what took so much time. After I got the parts, I had to shape them. I have built a matrix out of two pieces of iron and turned a brass punch on my lathe. One gentle tap of a hammer and the part was shaped, like on the photo below - on the left - BEFORE, the original part. On the right - AFTER the shaping. You can see the heat discoloration on the part on the right - that's because I heated it with a gas torch to make the material softer and to prevent it from cracking:
Now the easy part was to cut the parts out and glue them to the styrene:
Now I'm going to paint and weather them. I hope you liked it so far - thanks for reading and have a nice day
Paweł