Between a family vacation and upheavals at work, I’ve barely moved this project forward. We’ll get to the build in a minute, but first I hope you’ll indulge me:
The night before we left for Guatemala, my boss announced to my counterpart and I that he was leaving the company, which meant our team was facing an uncertain fate in the big game of Corporate Org Chart Shuffle. Therefore, I couldn’t really check out as things got worked out over many conference calls. One key discussion was with our global CEO, who was in Thailand at the time. He wanted to have the call before dinner, and Thailand is 13 hours ahead of Guatemala, so while I had to get up at what seemed like an entirely unreasonable hour, I did get to watch the sun rise behind a volcano over a beautiful lake.
File under: could be worse.
Getting back home has meant long days at the office. It’s all basically good, even as I have Corsairs flying in my head while I’m meant to be focusing on this or that. Grown up stuff getting in the way of kid stuff, I guess. Anyway, thanks for the indulgence.
And all is not lost, as I have managed to sneak in a bit of bench time here and there, and I’ve even managed to document a little of it, so away we go.
In my excitement over detailing the business end of the wheel wells, I completely overlooked the other end. Holy smoke, that chasm is awful. The illusion of scale is at least as much about the worst bits as the best, and something like that will instantly kill any sense of veritas.
Please excuse the appallingly terrible photo.
Paul Budzick has almost completely scared me out of 'normal' putties, so I first tried sliding in stock styrene, but that didn’t work. A much simpler method ended up being stuffing in some Milliput and smoothing out a little with my pinkie. I was later able to sand, and now it’s all smooth. I don’t have a pic of the end result handy, but it looks like it will be plenty convincing when it gets a coat of paint.
I’m a glutton for punishment, I guess, and so decided to drop the elevators. To separate them with that 90 degree angle in near each end, I first cut the long ends with a JLC razor saw, which is capable of extremely fine cuts (super handy! Via UMM), and then scored the short end and snapped. The elevators will get their leading edges built back up with .040 styrene strip, and then be filed and sanded to shape. More on that later.
One issue I have with the engineering of the whole turtle deck scheme is that it means there’s inevitably an awful gap between the bulkhead and the fuselage. To fill, I first used gap filling CA. But naturally, didn’t sand it all the way down quickly enough, so in the process of smoothing/flattening/feathering, I ended up gouging the bulkhead. To repair, first I tried vigorous filing and sanding. And then I slathered on Mr Surfacer 1000, and gently sanded and buffed, which helped. It looks miserable here, but in the end, it cleaned up okay.
And here we are. Some Mr Surfacer 1500 for checking seams gives it a slightly charred look, but it’s starting to look a bit like an airplane.
Next time: raising the flaps.
-J