This next post is about some of the mostly external detailing work. This is a bit out of order from the actual build but I wanted to post some of the other stuff together since it is similar work.

I used Ammo Migs ultra glue (first for me) to glue in the clear parts. Fit on these was fair, but I managed to make them work. I am not sure how I feel yet about the ultra glue as it is nearly the same as PVA glue in use. It sands better than PVA, but doesn't appear to be much stronger bonding.

Since this is an inflight model, I had to deal with gear and bomb bay doors that were designed to be opened and didn't fit well at all when closed. Some plastic shims of various thicknesses filled the worst gaps, then CA glue was used for all the seam filling. I have switch over to CA for a lot of my seams because it scribes better than putty.

The A-20 has some sort of light at the very tail which was open to the interior. I closed it off and built in a simulated light bulb, then ultra glued the cover on. That glue gave way when I was sanding and I had to re-apply the clear part. The second effort at blending managed to get completed without knocking the clear part off again.

On the nacelles, there are openings on the inboard sides for what I believe are oil coolers. Reference photos of these are pretty hard to find, but I found enough to do a bit of detailing on this area. The shape of the openings on the kit is incorrect and I filed them a bit to get them closer to how they should look.. I also added some interior ducting and a small "fence" inside the opening.

On the wing tips the aft wing tip is supposed to have a clear cover and another set of lights but the kit just has a mold line on the grey plastic. I cut these away and replaced them using a trick I learned for a good friend modeler many many years ago. Take a small piece of acrylic rod slightly larger than the opening and flatten two edges at 90 degrees to one another. Then at an appropriate distance from the flat area, drill a small hole in one flat surface and place a bit of paint in the hole (white in this case). This simulates the light bulb. Next glue the acrylic rod to the wing using a strong cement. After it has cured for a couple of days, cut away some of the excess acrylic and then blend the remaining portion into the wing using a file and progressively finer grades of sanding sticks. Later it can be polished and future coated.

THe IFF lights under the fuselage were made by drilling a very shallow depression, painting it silver, applying a very small drop of UV cure glue (clea nail gloss) and curing with a UV light. Then coat with Tamiya clear yellow, green and red. By the way, these should have been done after the model was painted, because they were hard to properly mask.

And finally on the rudder and elevators, I made some small fairings from tubing and glued them into position. These fairings were for the trim tab control rods. They were pretty small and hard to hold while shaping, but they look okay.

Other than the use of the Ultra glue, the only other new technique was using the UV curing nail gloss. This gloss also works great for instrument panel glass.

Amazing progress made, Carl @clipper.
All the extras, work on the nacelles, the UV curing, the wingtip lights do add a lot to this Havoc.

Intermixed with the detail items previously shown was a continuous effort to rescribe panel lines, add riveting, and adding fabric detailing to the flight controls. The rescribing and riveting was quite tedious and I had some hiccups along the way.

The model comes with recessed panel lines, but they are not very well defined in some cases. Additionally, because of fit issues, there was a lot seam filling (using black CA glue) and sanding, requiring panel line restoration. This was especially true around the nose because the kit requires a separate nose piece to be installed. I had installed each half of that nose piece to its respective fuselage piece before assembling the fuselage, but the seam still required a lot of work.

The fit of the nacelles to the wings was not great either and of course there was the closing up of the landing gear doors and bomb bay which all required clean up and panel line restoration. I made a special template from a soda can to rescribe the nose gun access panels.

I had also decided to that I wanted to try riveting the aircraft. This was a first for me and as hard as I tried to keep the rivet lines straight, there were the inevitable times when the riveting wheel strayed a bit, requiring filling and correction. Many of these only became evident later after applying primer. IN the second photo you can see all the white areas where fixes to panel lines and riveting was required.

The flight controls on the A-20 are fabric covered but the model has no representation of this. The drawings I used as reference showed the underlying structure for these and I wanted to have a hint of this structure showing on my flight controls. I tried another new technique which I came up with on my own, but which I later found was used by others on their models.

The way I did it was to use the drawings in my vinyl cutter software to create masks for the areas between the ribs and underlying structure and then paint these with a coat of primer. Afterwards I removed the masks and lightly sanded the primer to reduce rough edges. When I later painted the model this gave a nice fabric effect.

All of this external detailing and cleanup and riveting took several weeks and although I liked the effect of the riveting, it is a technique that requires you to steel yourself for a fair amount of tedium. All the effort was worth it in the end.

Excellent performance, Carl @clipper
Nice approach to create the fabric looks.

So this post will be about the remaining external detailing before I started the painting process. I really had a lot of fun adding all the extra detail. And I am thankful that there are aftermarket accessories such as engines to make models more detailed. I'm gradually improving my ability to detail and paint radials. I've always liked the way they look and I wanted to try and get them right.

I used Quickboost engines because the kit radials were pretty poor examples. But the QB engines still needed some additional details. So using some thin copper wire I made some pushrods for the cylinder heads and wire bundles for the spark plug wires.

Then I carefully trimmed the wires to length and fed them into small holes drilled in each cylinder. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of trying to tape each pair together before doing the bending and this didn't work out so well. So next time I'll add the wire wraps after the wires are positioned. Engines were painted with stainless steel and other colors, then washed with a dirty brown wash. I find this far more effective than painting the cylinders black and dry brushing with silver.

The canopy was glued on but needed some seam work. I was concerned that using CA glue to fill the seams would fog the plastic so I used Tamiya putty. I had to be very careful when sanding that. In this photo, you can also see an initial attempt at adding armor plate to the model. I used aluminum tape for this example, but when I tested painting it on a test mule, it looked bad, so this came back off and was replaced with very thin plastic styrene in the second photo.

There were a few other details I wanted to add, fuel dump tubes on the end of the engine nacelles using micro brass tubing, navigation lights on the wing tips using the same technique I described earlier for the IFF lights on the underside, and something I wanted to be sure to include, a pair of underwing bombs. The bombs were Eduard 500 pounders. The bomb racks were scratchbuilt using a decent reference photo I had.

And finally, something I wanted to get right that I felt was necessary for an inflight display, simulated spinning propellers. I've tried a variety of different approaches in the past, but was never satisfied with them. When I was researching the acrylic support idea, I also came across some pictures showing props done with the approach I used here. These seemed the most realistic of anything I have seen. I have not painted them yet in these photos but it gets the idea across. The blades are made from thin clear plastic and the prop hub has been shaved down to only show the cylinder itself (assuming the prob blade connections would be essentially invisible). The clear prop blades were sandwiched between the the hub after it was cut in half lengthwise. Later the seam was filled with putty and cleaned up.

Excellent building, Carl @clipper
Those engines are indeed a pleasure to look at, so much detailing.
Also the work on the bomb racks is incredible.

The base is really wonderful, my friend @clipper! Thanks for sharing the techniques in such a concise manner!

Thanks Spiros @fiveten and John @johnb. I've wanted to do an ocean base forever and it was very satisfying to have this work out. I neglected to mention in the post that before applying the wet toilet paper and PVA I had coated the MDF board with a light coat of PVA and then varnish in an attempt to prevent the board from warping from the larger amounts of water that came when I applied the toilet paper. I was mostly successful in this but the board did develop a slight warp, not enough to be a problem, but next time, I will coat it with epoxy first.

One interesting tidbit. This is only the second diorama base I have ever made. The first was as a teenager when I made a crashed ME-109 scene. I have made bases since then, but never seemed to get around to making a diorama. However, now that I know its possible, I will be doing more.