Over the past years I have been very fortunate to have seen the restored Collings Foundation B-24 "Witchcraft" on many occasions. Each time I see her, I snap some photos... I even have pictures of it when it was painted as the "All American".
The last time I visited my friends, I took these photos of her.
You see where I'm going don't you ?
The original plan was to build this plane as "The Dragon and His Tail". I changed it up a bit, and decided to use another set of decals for "Tubarao". One thing I wanted to do as part of the original build, was to scratch build the details found in the main landing gear wells. These details are cast into the lower wing half by Monogram. For it's time, they did a good job.
Since I was cutting away the rear of the engine nacelles,
These places are open on the real plane. You can see it in these photos I took a few months ago.
I'll have to add some plastic to fill in the lower wing section, since the flat wing surface extends under the nacelles.
Since I was cutting plastic, ...and using these photos I took at the last visit as a reference,
I decided to take the plunge and I cut away the main gear well.
I left a small portion of the plastic in place, since Monogram got this correct. I'll have to strip the green paint off now...
Next I placed the top wing against the bottom half, to see how much room I had fro scratch building... and I like what I see.
Here you can see the difference the cutting has made so far. The box stock wing is in the bottom of this next picture. The cut one is on top.
Having been inspired by my good friend Marc Barris,
@marc
with his marvelous scratch building skills, and after receiving a lot of good encouragement by another good friend James Robison,
@jamesb
I'm happy to say that I will be going into unchartered territory and scratching a new main landing gear well for "Tubarao". This will let me break out the Waldron punch set too... It's been a long while since I have used this tool.
If I have enough time, I just might even consider trying out the new "Rosie the Riveter" tool on the wings here. I had to sand away some of the raised panel lines when I accidentally slipped when I was cutting out the inner engine nacelle "closed" end.
I have practiced with this tool some on my last 1/48 scale Monogram B-25 build, and it works like a charm. It makes adding rivets a breeze. The hardest part is sanding away the existing lines...
I plan on making templates of the landing gear well parts, such as the wing ribs and main spars, for future use when I get around to building up "The Dragon and His Tail"... These parts should also fit the other "D" model Liberators n the stash.
A word of caution here: If you decide to do this on your kit, please be very careful. I almost cut myself on several occasions, even though I was being extremely careful. Using razors and saws to cut plastic can be dangerous... cause you a lot of pain, lost time from work, and possibly an expensive hospital visit if you cut yourself bad enough to need stitches... Plus you just might get a good earful from SWMBO if you do a numbskull trick like this. Safety first !
Now having said this, I'll most likely slice myself tomorrow accidentally. I know, I know, practice what you preach right ?
As always, comments are encouraged. Thanks for stopping by.
