Tonight I decided to work on the missiles and pylons that I had glued together some time back. I had used my mix of cement and putty to glue them together, so edge cleanup was easy with some sanding and polishing.
The Eduard PE set for the Flanker's exterior has some stuff for the missiles and pylons, so I spent some time getting that stuff in place. I used slow-setting CA followed by Future floor polish as glues for the PE, I hope they hold in the long term...
The big, pretty missiles with PE enhancements shown with a previously finished version without PE.
A closer look at the decorations... Because of their delicacy, I haven't yet added the PE parts that attach the missile to the PE rails.
The Eduard set has PE for some of the kit's various missile pylons and rails, but not all of them. So either they slacked off, or I'm missing a fret and another page of instructions... but based on what I see, I can easily replicate the missing parts with spare PE. I shaved off the missile-mounting tabs from the bottom of the pylons and replaced them with folded PE parts that actually resemble launch rails. The folded rails are wider than the pylons, so centering them is important. There's also a bunch of tiny PE chips that look like mounting lugs to be attached to the sides of the pylons.
Even without the added attachment parts, I think that this looks pretty trick for the amount of PE added to achieve the effect. And they're certainly an improvement over the kit's default arrangement with the tab-and-slot system.
So that's that for now...