well, i finally did some more work on the lancaster again last night. and this time it actually involved glue! i'm hoping to get started in earnest over the weekend.
had a major disappointment this week ... some kits that my brother and i ordered from greatmodels finally arrived, and what i was expecting to be a nifty vacuformed kit turned out to be a "conversion" .... not sure what you're supposed to convert since it was a totally new design, but there you have it.
the airmodel ju288 (kit 235), and pretty much all you get for your $34 is the vacuformed sheet containing the fuselage, wing, and tail bits; a clear sheet containing the canopy and side bubbles; and what appears to be a small injection moulded sprue with a few spinner options and the raw plastic to create prop blades i.e. flat rectangles. and that is it! no cockpit whatsoever (despite the huge transparent canopy), no interior detail on the vacuformed fuselage bits, no landing gear, not even any of the guns.
the instructions even tell you that you might want to consider using the bmw radial engines from the italeri ju188 kit (since ju188e-1 and the ju288 shared that engine)!
talk about being dumped into the deep end of scratchbuilding! at least the included scale drawings appear to be scaled correctly and include 2 views of all the components required for building the landing gear. no such scale drawings exist for the cockpit or interior detail unfortunately.
ah well, after getting over the initial trauma, i must say that i'm really looking forward to my attempt at scratchbuilding the undercarriage for starters. the cockpit detail is bound to be far more "interesting"!