OK, on to completing the cockpit floor to the fuselage. You insert the tab on the front of the floor at the base into the slot at the bottom of the firewall. The tab was way to thick to fit and had to be sanded down in order to slide neatly into the firewall. There is plenty of room at the opening along the bottom of the fuselage, so no need to worry about the fuselage halves being joined together first if you wish. I used Scotch Blue and wrapped them together just in case I needed some extra room.
<iOnce the floor tab is inserted and glued into the firewall, you are hit with a bit of a problem. The top of the seat wants to be a decent distance behind the front of the opening. Now I should say that this may be due to my skills (or lack thereof). Since I did not have the fuselage sides glued together this could have been part of the problem also. I decided that if the fuselage sides were glued and the seat would still not fit properly at the top I would be stuck so to speak. So I left the fuselage sides unglued and use some good old fashioned finger force to push the seat forward so that the top (or at least where I had glued the seatbelts to the top of the seat were forward of the back edge of the cockpit.
I have been using Robert Grinsell's book on the 109 as reference and could not really get a good idea of exactly where the seat is supposed to rest along the back of the cockpit. I am OK with the small gap as I can fill and sand out the gap later. It is worth noting that I did check the rear canopy section and it fits very nicely in place. The gap in the picture is actually larger than it ends up after gluing the fuselage halves together.
You can see from the top down shot that the seat looks about right. The seatbelt buckles are glued to the edges on each side of the gap, so I am not sure what I can do? With the canopy on and unless you are getting within about 4 inches of the thing you won't really notice it. this is one of the things with most of the 109 kits I have built that seem to be a recurring issue. Probably just me though.
I then proceeded to glue the fuselage together. I use the mini clothes pins that you can get in a pack of fifty for $2 at WalMart and they are great for a lot of things like this. I got too much thin cement along the front line of the tail section and it melted the plastic.
It is worth noting that the plastic in some areas of this kit is so thin that you are almost helpless if you need to do anything with it. See the photo below for how the light shines right through after the two halves are glues together.
It is also worth bringing up at this point three things about this kit that are "different" (at least from what I am used to and I am no pro at this)
1. There are NO locater pins anywhere on the parts. this can help if you need to really ensure two sides are perfectly aligned, but it is also tricky as the slightest nudge and things can slip kind of like a fault line in the ground.
2. There is flash on almost EVERY piece of this kit. I finally took all the parts off the trees and trimmed and sanded each of them before I did most any assembly. This is an ICM kit and I don't know maybe the molds are old? Having build some Eduard and a Tamiya kit or two, this was much different than what I was used to. But hey, it is about a $20 kit also.
3. In reference to number 2, there are NO part numbers on the trees, so make sure that you refer to the tree drawings at the front of the instructions. I used a #2 pencil and made small numbers on some of the parts that were not obvious.
Once I had the fuselage glued together, I noticed that the top line was really nice, and the bottom line was a bit off. Again without any pins, it didn't take much to move things. I also see this raised portion along each side of the center line. I can't find a reference photo anywhere that shows that..
I then glued the wing tops to the bottom main wing section. I did some dry fitting, and realized that the bottom of the firewall was hitting the bottom of the lower wing section and that would keep me from getting a good fit with the wing when trying to join to the fuselage. I sanded and scraped out along the bottom wing section and sanded some at the bottom of the firewall until the dry fit looked good.
Lastly for now, make sure that the trailing edge part of the wing at the fuselage side is glued to the bottom part of the wing on each side. It doesn't look like much, but if you don't glue it, I was seeing a tough fit with the dihedral on the wing. Here is the port side before I glued it down and you can see the small gap.
That is all for now. Next will be getting the wing section glued to the fuselage.
John