Well. Some more progress today. I finally decided to bite the bullet and modify the fuselage to accept the new intakes and then install them. Stage 1 was rather simple but scary. I am not the most coordinated person in the world and I winced with every stroke of the razor saw. But it finally started to shape up the way I needed it. They really understate how much cutting and sanding you need to do on the Intake instructions. I had to take off way more than shown in the image. Here are a few WIP images during the modification process.
I didn't stop to take any while I was doing the majority of the cutting but here you can see the holes opened up in the fuselage before final sanding and fitting.
The fitting took about 45 minutes for each half since I am slow as molasses nowadays, but I like the way they came out.
After fitting I masked the entire outside of the intakes and applied a nice flat white interior to them. I'm still not convinced that the British Phantoms had white in there, but without good images to go by, I decided to just do the white like the US birds have. I used Testors Flat White rattle can because it wasn't worth the hassle of setting up the airbrush and compressor, and then having to clean the airbrush after spritzing 2 relatively small parts. Here they are drying in my desk vise. Oh a word of caution to those with desk vises. If you have your vise attached to a desk which is less than a foot from the edge of your bed, be really careful if you have to get up in the middle of the night for a nature call.... Getting your bells rung at 2AM is most definitely not fun. Anyways... Here's the last image of them drying.
Now all that remains is some CA and puttying, then probably a bit of rescribing to get the parts recessed panel lines to link back up. Wish me luck. The tricky it is next.
Rich
Oh Yeh. My Daughter just ordered herself a vintage Monogram/Revell double kit with a MIG21 and an F4J in it. She would like to do the F4J for the build. I just wanted to check with the powers that be to see if that's OK. The kit should be here by next Saturday. Let me know please.