Erik: are you taking a break here? No updates in over a month.

Finally some progress here Spiros @fiveten and Eric @eb801

undercarriage

It has been a long time since I made any progress on this one, but some is here today

3 months ago I wrote about the resin wheels that had arrived, and I cut the nosewheel from the forward undercarriage.

Well, today I made another cut to widen the fork (inspired by Mornes work on his Avro)

After cutting a pair of evergreen cutoffs were inserted to make the fork look right

I had previously talked about the need to buy two pairs of Vampire wheels to get the right tyrepattern together with the 3-spoked center.

I cut one of the backsides off and trimmed it to check if they were interchangeable

I have only been cutting to avoid resindust

And lo and behold – it fits!

now the fork will have to cure, and I can get all these parts mated correctly – in the meantime there may be some 109 or VW work to take care of – stay tuned for the all to seldom updates here

@eb801, @kalamazoo, @fiveten, @gkittinger, @1corsair64 and @gblair Thank you for the kind words and all during this build. It had been stalled, but now it is moving again, and here you have another update on the build;

Wheels and seats

I have cleaned up the resin wheels and started on some seats

With spareparts for my airbrushes still in the mail, I have time to make some subassemblies, and today I started by CA glueing the nosewheel to the undercarriage leg and cleaned up the resin mainwheels

They look very nice I think, and the centers from one set fitted the other – no problems there

And you may remember I have a set in 1:1 in store

These were used in the grand prize draw – and they look just like the resin ones – well done de Havilland!

Now, the seats have been giving me a headache, so today a decision was made to commence the very nice Whirly Bird combo seats

The PE is rather thick, making them very pleasant to handle and bend

And one seat was assembled to check

Compared to the pure resin seats they are a lot nicer, albeit a bit newer too, but they might have been installed on higher density interiors as this one.

next up – who knows? Perhaps the interior finished and the fuselage assembled? Tune in again to check

Nice wheels, my friend @airbum, and the new seats look absolutely great!

Interior progress

With the mother of all sinkmarks filled attention turned to the interior

I have been adding a thin layer of LqS each day over several days, and today I sanded the excess away

Another trial fitting on the fuselage was the windows. Not that good, and need to be replaced.

In the cockpit one seatpan and a steering column were missing

Some stretched sprue and evergreen took care of that

And the seats are now all assembled and installed on the floor

The 10th seat is left out as there were only 9, sometimes 8 if an elsan were installed. The 10th chair would have been right at the entrance, and I suppose on highdensity versions there may have been a jumpseat there, but for Hotel Zulu it was 9 seats.

Now this will have a rest again as attention shifts elsewhere, and the glue sets

Erik - Bingo! Those Whirly Bird resin/PE seats were worth the wait and look great! Much better than those other thick ones you had. I'll bet these look killer after you paint them up!

@fiveten, it has been a long wait, but here it is
@eb801, ain’t they just looking great.
@kalamazoo, thank you

Out of hibernation

after close to half a year, some progress

Not a lot of progress, but even babysteps gets you moving – right?
After a day in the garden it was finally time to get this bird moving, and I spend some time thinking if I should make new windows. The kit-supplied windows are a bit challenging. As noted earlier they even has FOD.

Well, I went with the kit windows, mostly because I feel a bit pressed for time

After the glueup, I did dryfit the wings and fuselage. There shall be generous amounts of filler/LqS, filing and sanding involved.

next up, all I can say is that I do not hope it´ll be another 6 months before further progress – anyway the CG will close soon, so I guess it will have to speed up a bit.