Nice work done, Carl @clipper

Nice cockpit, Carl @clipper. Detail is great! Are you going to rough it up a bit? Looks factory fresh. I recall that’s a pretty good kit over all.

Thanks Eric (@eb801) and George (@gblair).

I won't be doing anything else to the cockpit. Mainly because this project is really about the external foiling and I wanted to get moving on that. The cockpit has a mild amount of weathering which is not showing up in the photos. But I didn't go into any great effort on the weathering. Mostly just some dry brushing using lighter shades of the base colors.

I was somewhat curious about trying out a technique where lighter shades of the base colors are painted (not dry brushed) in certain lower areas. So I did do that to see how it might look. It does appear to make things a little easier to see.

As for the kit, I feel like it is probably a good enough kit, certainly a step up from kits produced in earlier decades, but I have read several reviews stating how it was difficult to build. My only experience with this so far was the lack of positive locators for the cockpit. It's too early to tell yet how difficult (or not) this kit will be to build.

I will also say that this project, because it is involving foiling, something I've never done before, is going to be treated like a long term build like my USS San Francisco build. I mainly want to explore this technique and say that I did it at least once. At some point, I am going to start another model aircraft that will be a normal build, but not yet as I am far too busy with other things besides modeling. But I do want to have something I can do that doesn't require extra effort to accomplish, something that I am more used to and comfortable with. If for no other reason, than I want something that is stress free. 🙂

Cockpit looks excellent, my friend @clipper!

I glued the fuselage together and cleaned up the major seams. When I went to restore panel lines across the seams, I started noticing some discrepancies between the two molded halves of the fuselage. It looks like each halve was done by a different person.

Some of the panel lines didn't line up. Others were missing on one side. One horizontal panel line running a good length of the fuselage was lower on the fuselage side than on the other side.

And on the underside aft belly, there is a curved set of panel lines that form a sort of an oval triangle. One one half, the lines were fine enough. ON the other side, they look like they were created with a shovel!

SO I filled the appropriate errors with black CA glue and sanded that down. Then I carefully added the correct lines into place. I had to make a template of the curved panel on the underside.

Another thing I did was open up an air vent aft of the supercharger on the underside of the fuselage by the tailwheel opening. This was molded closed on the kit.

These discrepancies are somewhat par for the course for pre 21st century model kits of course. Many of these kits were made by hand and I am sure the molds were manually machined as well. So it's all in a days work making the corrections.

Thanks Spiros (@fiveten). I am about ready to start the first foiling. I'll post something when I have enough to show.

Thanks John (@johnb).

And to respond to that last request, here is the first work on the foiling. I'm starting on the simpler areas to begin with so I can get used to how this works. But I wanted to add in one slightly more difficult section at the same time. So I did the right hand side vents on the aft fuselage, the area where the stars and bars will eventually be placed.

There is a ramp there which was the slightly trickier area to foil. In fact it took me two tries. There's a few minor boo boos, but I can correct those easily enough.I've only applied the foil at this point and burnished it down. I will need to go over it with a fine grit sanding sponge, probably 3000 grit. But I am going to wait until I have the aircraft covered before I do that to avoid having any dust contaminate the surfaces. The sanding will be wet sanding, so real dust probably won't be an issue, but wetness finds a way into places and can carry dust so, I think it will be better to wait.

This is ambitious as can be @clopp[er. Looking forward to seeing your progress. I have one of these in the stash, but I think I will stick to Super Metallics when doing it.