The real world needs my attention for two or three weeks so I can write an article about the Pacific War. It's the kind of work I like because I get paid for it - not much, but a couple of year's worth of kits anyway.
But I really do intend to finish the Sunderland by April. So I have completed the construction. The clear parts are painted but not attached. Ditto with the wheel fittings required to move the beast around on the land. And I got the engines and nacelles put together. On this task I was once again underwhelmed by the fit quality provided by Italeri. The instructions called for assembling the engines and nacelles together and mounting them on wings. The fit was much too imprecise for that - it was necessary to trim every part along the way - attach the engines to the wings and put the nacelles on top of them. It worked and the fit is decent, but I'll have to trim the prop shafts considerably to get a good fit for the props. I have dry fitted the clear parts and they do appear sound - I hope I won't find out differently toward the end.
I primed it with Duplicolor black auto lacquer from a spray can fitted with a fan cap. The fan cap gives a very good spray pattern. The stuff is terrific and the many seams I had to deal with are in pretty good shape. Lacquer kind of melds with the paint, so sanding is a breeze and fine detail is not at all obscured. I do have to go outside which is not convenient. On armor I'll use Stynelrez and an airbrush. I did find something out though. I used the diagrams in the instructions to see where the seam lines were supposed to go. That proved to be a mistake. The kit includes a little booklet about the plane with several good photos. One of the seams I removed should have been left alone partially. It's also clear that there are some seams on the leading edge of the wing. I could simply blame this on Italeri and remind myself to buy Tamiya from now on. But maybe this is an issue we should all be a little wary of. On Tamiya's new tool BF-109G-6, the instructions remind builders that the 109 has a seam on top of the fuselage and to leave it alone. (Tamiya is good with that kind of thing.) But in future I'll be looking for pics of museum examples of every plane I build and look really close. Judging from my Sunderland pics you can't trust the instructions nor examples of other model builds. Until I've proven it otherwise, I'm going to admit the possibility that real planes had more seams than diagrams indicate.
With luck the kit will work. But it's been what Doog calls a "destination" kit, not a "journey" kit. In other words you build it because the subject is cool or maybe what we used to call "funky." You don't build it to glory in the model's detail and fit. Italeri does have a place in the modeling world. Italeri has reboxed some cracker-jack kits: there an excellent AMT P-40E/N, and the formidible 1/48 Accurate Miniatures SBD come to mind. Academy reboxed the AM TBM and B-25. I've got an original AM B-25 and think I'll go with it. But it's a big kit in 1/48 and AM kits were over-engineered in the late 90s before the technology was really there to make it work. So the AMs were both splendid kits, and a real challenge. As it happens Airfix is in the process of releasing a 1/72 B-25 C/D and that's very tempting. A sure buy, however, is a new tool Airfix 1/72 Wellington - one of the war's ugliest planes but also one the best. And one represented by flawed kits.)
Here's Darth Vader stage of the Sunderland construction. Kind of neat. When I return to the build it will be heavy duty black basing and lots of fading - might even do some mega chipping along the water-line. We'll see.
See you sometime next month.
Eric
primed by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr