Progress, not matter how small is, still progress, right? Well, if that’s the case, I’ve made some.
I had some furlough time away from school a couple of weeks ago but as luck would have it, I didn’t get much done on my builds. Then, last week I went in for an emergency appendectomy. I’ve been off from work and school since the 2nd, but even with all this free time on my hands, little progress has been made. Turns out it’s been uncomfortable to sit upright for long periods of time. All the time I want but no desire to sit at my bench…
Anyway, since my last post, I’ve gotten the fuse halves and wings assembled on all three jets. When I mated up the fuse, I didn’t glue the seam that ran under the wing assembly. I remember hearing from different builders that I may have needed to spread the fuse halves a bit to get a tight seal at the wing root. As a matter of fact, I had to do just that with all three builds.
Here’s what the Hasegawa wing root looked like:
Instead of using a sprue “spreader bar” like some builders had done, I decided to use a small piece of scrap as a wedge…
As I pushed the “wedge” forward, it spread the fuse halves enough to give me a nice tight seal at the wing roots.
I used the same procedure for all three jets.
The Revellogram Phantom had its share of fit problems beyond the wing root. One of its issues was a huge gap just forward of the nose wheel bay, where the wing assembly joins the fuse.
I used some scrap card to fill the gap. Once it was trimmed and sanded, it looked fine.
Another gap I ran into was on the right intake. In order to avoid a step where intake mates to the fuse and wing assembly, I had to fill a void where the splitter plate joins the fuse.
I sanded it flush with the contour of the intake, and once covered with paint it’s hardly visible. What you may notice is that I left the splitter assemblies off the kits until after paint. That way I can get paint coverage in the area back behind the splitters.
After I learned that Revellogram’s stabilators had the strengthening plates molded on, I had to sand ‘em off since the real jet didn’t have ‘em. A nasty side effect was the elimination of all the raised panel lines.
As a fix, I drew all the lines back on with a pencil…
Then used Archer’s details to restore what was erased.
I’m sure that if I knew what I was doing with Archer’s panel lines, I could make it look like the kit’s original detail. We’ll see how it looks under paint.
The wings and fuses were finally assembled on all three jets. Then, I pulled a Homer.
While working on the builds, one of the Hase jets, the one that will be a –B model, got snagged on the sleeve of my sweatshirt and took flight from my bench. Since I can’t make any sudden movements (stupid surgical staples), all I could do was watch the jet fall to the floor. At first I didn’t notice any damage, but then I noticed that the tail had a big chunk chipped out of it.
Since it was the –B version, I didn’t have to worry about replacing the oval ECM pod. So, figuring that I could do without the conical fairing along the top of the tail, I carved out a nice 90 degree corner along the top of the rudder line…
And faired in a piece of styrene with CA and green putty. (Under paint it doesn’t look too bad.)
I tackled one last detail before the jets got their primer coats. On the Hase Phantoms, I trimmed off the canopies locating tabs, and filled in their corresponding slots with some stock.
This helped everything line up a little easier.
Finally, the major assemblies got a coat of grey. The left and middle jets are the Hase –B and –N respectively, and the right’s the Revellogram –J.
Anyway, that’s it for today. Hopefully, since I don’t have to be back at work until Wednesday, I can get a little more done and some more progress posted.
Be sure to drop your two cents in the bucket on your way out.
Thanks for looking!
Cheers,
-O