Jaime, this will have the Erco turrets fore and aft. They're supplied with the kit, resin and metal parts, and the vac nose and tail are formed to accommodate them.

To answer Bernard's question, the vac parts are pretty thin and very flexible, but when joined at the seams you get a form of panel stiffness and strength. It has been recommended that I pour a river of epoxy down the centerlines, top and bottom, to stiffen them up. Before doing so I'm going to roughen up the surfaces to afford a mechanical bond as one does not get the weld one gets with styrene cement.

The real fun started last night. I sanded down the fuselage halves and horizontal stabilizer and added alignment tabs. Moved on to glue in the engine nacelle halves and tabbed (after dry fitting) them as well. Looks like I'll be able to glue together the wings halves shortly.

Sanding wasn't as big a pain as others had expressed, and really improves the progress outlook as well. 100 grit wet and dry taped to a piece of glass, with a sheet of 320 grit alongside worked well, although I could have gotten away with 220 if I had some.

4 attached images. Click to enlarge.

At this point I have managed to get the fuselage put together, at least in halves, and wings put together with most of the necessary fairing of the vac nacelles complete. The flight deck is fairly rudimentary at this stage. Locating it in the fuselage is going to be an exercise to be sure, starting with the Mk. ! eyeball, as no dimensions are given for the scratch-built parts that are necessary.

No big surprises so far and has been really enjoyable-a great kit to work on accompanied by a couple of great baseball and football games.

3 attached images. Click to enlarge.

I haven't posted an update for a while, as it's been slow going. I finally got all of the sub-assemblies completed, not without some difficulty. As one can imagine, copious amounts of test fitting, sanding filling and the like are required to make it all come together without issues.

The high point of this build was a two part affair. Most importantly, I was invited by a friend to meet Bill Koster himself at his home and "factory". A spry 87 years old, he's still active in IPMS (Flight 19, based in Pompano Beach, FL), and attributes his youthfulness to his young friends in the modelling world. I intend to do a full scale write-up on that experience in the near future.

Having been re-energized by the visit, I managed to get the turrets fitted and finally closed up the fuselage. The top turrets drop in, but the tail turret needs to be placed inside before gluing the halves together. The nose turret goes in next, as I left the lip beneath it unglued. It's a flexible section, so will be gently pried apart for access. I "did my own thing" with the two Erco waist turrets as I felt they needed more structural support behind them, lest a glue bond let go, allowing them to fall inside the fuselage Although there is a lot of filling and fairing to be done, it represents getting over the hump, at least in my mind. This really has been a project!

6 attached images. Click to enlarge.

Somehow I have managed to maintain the momentum on this build. In the last few days I have gotten the wings and tail feathers in place, and discovered a problem. Somehow I managed to induce a tilt into the vertical stabilizer, and the horizontal surfaces were askew as well. It took a while to figure out a remedy, but I decided that splitting the tail and re-gluing (despite creating an offset in the halves) was the best way to approach it. I scrounged around and found an old pair of wooden shelf brackets and some other scraps of wood to create a jig and supported the fuselage with taped-down paint bottles lest I make worse the issues. I shimmed one of the horizontal stabs at it's root to try to make up the difference. Once strapped down, I inserted a piece of plastic sheet vertically to stiffen her up. After leaving the whole assembly in place for twenty four hours it appears to have gotten her close to symmetrical. I filled and faired the offset created in the vertical stab and modified the rudder slightly and called it done.

Affixing the resin engines inside the cowls took some fiddlng-every bit of this build requires thinking somewhat outside of the norm if you are used to having the kit fall together perfectly right out of the box-and they all ended up in the right place. Further "tuning" of the firewalls was required to assure they all lined up in reasonable fashion once the engine/cowling assembly was ready to be CA'ed down. I managed to get them pretty close.

5 attached images. Click to enlarge.

Way to go, Man! Mee Likee!

david

Man - this thing is huge! You guys who build big multi-engine 1/48 aircraft must own oil wells to afford the real estate needed to display such beasts! (oh wait - oil is still dropping...)

Since last posting, I've found that the dark primer is nice, but the details (or lack thereof) became obvious after shooting a thin coat of flat white on the undersides. Several spots that I had missed had to be addressed, which is becoming routine. Two steps forward, one step back, or something to that effect.

After the white coat and repairs I decided that a heavy pre-shading, at least on the undersides and sides of the fuselage might be a good idea. We'll see. I'm headed in to shoot the undersides now.

3 attached images. Click to enlarge.