Well, I kind of disappeared with this project... A big part of that is just life getting in the way. In the last few weeks I've had to fight with my insurance company and the body shop that didn't fix my car right to get them to fix it right. I've also battled a colony ants that moved into my bedroom wall. I've had to study for a promotional job interview (I got the job!). I've had to do online traffic school. I took a test in the class I’m taking and I made an "Intro to Mecha Modeling" presentation to the local IPMS club. But also, I'm just to the point of fixing the 20-odd seam lines on this kit and it's not something I look forward to all day at work. I am almost ready to prime, however.
Anyway... I thought I’d be painting the cockpit soon since it needs to be painted before I close up the fuselage, but I started assembling some sub-assemblies and as I began to test fit some parts, I found a lot of small issues that needed attention. Some of these fixes are still in-progress, and I bounced around quite a bit from one small task to another but I’ll try to present it in an orderly fashion.
I test-fit the VF-1D head that tucks into the bottom of the cockpit and found that the head sits too low so that rim of the gun turrets on the side of the head stick out above the actual head. A lot!
To fix this I added some plates on the bottom of the head to shim it upwards (technically downwards since it’s on the bottom of the plane, but...) and now the guns sit flush with the top of the head.
Next was the Super booster packs. The very first thing I did was cut the tabs off the main thrusters so that they could be painted separately and slid into place afterwards.
The booster packs had some fit issues as the main thrusters didn’t fit inside them well without splitting the packs apart at the seams. If you look in the picture above, you can see the bulges on the inside on the right side that house the small maneuvering thrusters on the sides of the packs. These interfere with the fit of the main thrusters so I sanded them upper bulge down a bit and the side of the booster as well.
Next I looked at the way the packs mount to the backpack. The mounts have a really small contact point that doesn’t allow much glue to hold these relatively large structures to the plane. Even worse, there isn’t a positive fit that keeps them aligned, so you could mount them really crooked. I’ve seen Valks with this problem, even some of Hasegawa’s own prototype models can be spotted with crooked booster packs.
To fit this I used a 1.5mm brass rod and CAREFULLY drilled matching holes into the mounts for the booster packs. This rod will go through a plastic rod, which will be securely glued inside the backpack, which should give a secure and straight fit. The downside is that this will all have to be glued in place and aligned after painting is done.
The next fix for the boosters was the gaping hollow spaces visible behind the main thrusters when viewed from behind:
To remedy this I added some small strips of plastic as brackets to mount some plastic plate:
Once these brackets were in place I used trial and error to make a set of upper and lower formers to block off the hollow space and glued them in. I’ll add some detailing greebles to them before painting. I’m also going to add some plaplate or strips around the inside backs of the booster pack because there’s a lot of blank space visible around the main thrusters.
I test-fit the arms and discovered a big hole in the hollow “elbows” that will be visible once the plane is all assembled. It’s not horrible since you would only see it from certain angles, but still, it’s an easy fix so I blocked it off with some thin plaplate.
With the legs glued together, I went ahead and installed the landing gear doors. They still required a bit of filing but I got a pretty good fit. I’ll probably still need some filler here and there but I’m pretty happy with the results so far. The question is how much putty I’ll have to use to smooth them out and how much I’ll have to rescribe the door outlines.
That’s it for now. I hope to post pictures of a primed model with a painted cockpit in the near future. I’ll probably have a decent bit of work to do rescribing the panel lines that were lost in the seam-fixing process, but after that I can get to painting and hopefully the work will go faster.
