It's a wet and rainy day here in beautiful suburban Houston. I salute all of the veterans here for your service. Hope all of you are enjoying the day.
Back to the bench. Engines were assembled and painted. Still have to pick out all the details, but that shouldn't take too long. They're not great, but will look just fine once they're tucked into the cowlings.
I spent a lovely half hour gluing all the exhaust fairings onto the cowling. That job was made more difficult by the fact the the embossed locators in the cowling were faint and very hard to see. I made an installation tool from a toothpick with the end cut off. Then I doubled a piece of blue masking tape on itself sticky side out and stuck it on the end of the toothpick. Take these things off the sprues one at a time and be careful when you cut them off. If you launch one into space, you'll never find it!
Nacelles were next. Fit sucks, and there was a pretty big gap on the upper surface of the right one where it fairs into the trailing edge of the wing. Some scrap plastic sheet took care of that. I'm definitely going to fill and sand these before they go onto the wing.
The landing gear was then installed. I had intended to paint everything before I assembled them, turns out it's a good thing I didn't. The first disappointment was finding out that it would not be possible to install the gear after the model is assembled. The wheel well openings are not wide enough, and it turned out that that would have been impossible anyway due to the way the gear is assembled. It's difficult to tell how everything goes by looking at the instructions, but once you get it laid out, it sort of explains itself, though not very well. One of the side braces on the right broke off while I was trying to cut the strut off the sprue, so I had to fabricate a new one. Use care when cutting these parts off. The sprue gates are huge, in really bad locations and there are a lot of the little nubblies that need to be trimmed off. The installation looks really sloppy, but I wanted to make sure I had some good glue joints as there's not a lot of support and these will be very fragile. I think it will look a lot better once I get some paint on. Fit is horrible, and be careful to get both struts aligned with one another, as when I first laid them out, the right one raked aft and the left one forward. Use slower setting glue here. Super glue will not make you a happy camper.
Now it's time to walk away and let everything dry. I think I picked the wrong time of my life to quit drinking...:-)
5 attached images. Click to enlarge.
