Closed up the fuselages on the Yak and La-5 last night. Overall things went swimmingly, and putty use should be pretty minimal.
I didn't really notice until last night, but the Yak's plastic is surprisingly hard. It was also a bit resistant to Tenax's charms, but finally melted in the end.
One curious thing, the kit includes a little mounting pin for the prop spinner that you're supposed to install from the inside of the fuselage before you glue the gun deck/upper cowl in place. The instructions state very specifically DO NOT GLUE, but it's basically just a pin that sticks through a hole with nothing to keep it from falling out and getting lost in the fuselage. I ended up just gluing it down, but the ridiculousness of it had me chuckling for a few moments.
The Zvezda La-5 went together with very few problems, but for anyone who's considering building this kit, I highly recommend starting with the mission critical seams first. I started by tacking the very forward strips of the fuselage ahead of the exhaust ports to the wing root from the inside. A lot of stuff has to mount up there so that alignment is probably the most critical. Next I did the fuselage/wing seam aft of the exhaust plates. The fit was good enough that I left the seam alone between the wing root and the steel exhaust plates so I wouldn't lose any of the detail there.
From there it was on to the upper fuselage haves and so on. There are a few areas that are going to need putty, but nothing bad and most of it far away from any fragile surface detail.
Once everything had a bit of time to firm up, I finally got to test fit the forward bodywork. This all kind of comes in place around the engine (and various bits can be left off if you want to show off the engine and guns) in four pieces - the upper gun access panels, left and right cowl panels, and the forward cowl circle. Even with the great fit so far, these had me worried.
Fortunately, they all lined up pretty well. There's a protrusion coming forward from the lower wing that supports the engine and ends up butting up into the forward cowl ring. This is cocked up a millimeter or two too high and sort of throws things off, but it and the upper gun panel piece both join up with the cowl ring, so it should be easy enough to weld things into proper position and then mount the engine access panels from the side.
Something else I noticed...as this plane goes together it's becoming VERY obvious that it's basically an older, smaller airframe with a big honkin' engine shoved onto the front. Kinda makes me want to find some scale duct tape to finish it off with!
