Jumping into Modeling

[SaparotRob]

What is PVA glue? Why not the tube of styrene glue from the hobby section? I haven't built a model in years. When I did it was sporadically. Certainly without any of the attention to detail one sees here.

 

[fubar57]

Your basic grade school glue. I use Elmer's Clear to attach canopies and make small windows

 

[Maty12]

Your basic grade school glue. I use Elmer's Clear to attach canopies and make small windows

Yup. The main annoyance has been finding glue that specifically states that it's PVA. I don't have a car so I figured I'd buy it online with everything else. I think I'll just cancel the order and get a friend to drive me to the nearest store whenever they are available.

 

[SaparotRob]

Elmer's glue is clear now? It used to be white. It was utterly useless for building my Aurora models.

 

[Airframes]

It's still white, but PVA dries clear. It's not used or assembling the plastic parts, but ideal for attaching canopies and other clear parts, and for making small windows, lamp covers etc etc.

 

[Maty12]

Wasn't planning on posting WIP shots, but the 17 is proving to be a rather time-consuming build, or maybe I'm just a bit rusty. In any case, here's the cockpit:

I'm mainly basing it on the Britmodeler thread that Wurger linked, specifically the photos of My Gal Sal. (Thanks again, Wurger!)

Bronze green was used on the bulkhead, seats, throttle quadrants and yokes, with copper paint playing the part of the wooden grips on those as I was out of brown. Neutral Gray seemed to match the shades of the floors pretty well, so I used that. Interiors will be finished in olive drab where there is padding (cockpit sides, nose and radio operator's compartment) and silver where there is bare metal (bomb bays, tail section), with bronze green for some metal surfaces that might produce glare when viewed from outside. The photos don't show it very well but that aft bulkhead is very reflective.

The instrument panel decal proved very difficult to insert and ended up ripping in half at the throttle quadrant. They seemed a bit too big too attach properly and shouldn't be very visible through the windows anyway. Not shown here but I've painted the cockpit "canopy" bronze green and will now cover it with silver so that it looks green on the inside and silver on the outside. For all other windows I will only use silver.

I couldn't decide if I wanted the bomb doors open or closed, as I like the internal detail but prefer to have my planes in a "ready for takeoff" pose. I'm considering using tape to make hinges and am open to alternatives.

Thanks for following along,
-Matt

 

[fubar57]

I for one appreciate the WIP. Nice looking innards

 

[Wurger]

 

[Maty12]

I for one appreciate the WIP. Nice looking innards

Thank you!

 

[Maty12]

Update time!

B-17D News

I've finished assembling the interior for the most part, only thing left is the waist guns and bombs, then I can seal up the fuselage. The only shade of brown I had on hand was copper, and I think that works really well for the wooden table. Bombsight was painted black with two tiny spots of silver where the lenses are.

There is one issue with the kit that I've just noticed: the rounded roof of the bomb bay doors is missing (as in it wasn't molded in), and the doors in the bomb bay bulkheads are also too tall. These two bulkheads in the real airplane are also supposed to be angled aft, being perpendicular to the wing chord line. This isn't too noticeable, and in fact I only learned about this looking at some technical drawings on aircorpslibrary the other day. The bombs should hide the missing roof anyway.

I also painted a fake door on the backside of the aft bomb bay bulkhead as I suspect that area will be visible through the radio operator's gun enclosure when the kit is finished.

XB-28 News

I bought Anigrand's XB-28 because I like that aircraft. I was hesitant, because in my previous experience their individual propeller blade approach is a pain to deal with and their quality control on their older kits is lacking. I had also seen reviews that stated the kit did not have handed propellers. The instructions seem to show handed propellers (though mounted on the opposite engines), but I have yet to check as it's hard to tell just by looking. I really wish Anigrand used sprues or wrote numbers on the parts themselves using marker or something.

The kit had no missing pieces and in fact a few spares, but all openings were completely faired shut with excess resin. I had to get at them with scissors. I was partway through sanding when I remembered that I was supposed to wear a mask when sanding resin. Whoops. I had a coughing fit later that day but no other issues. Will wear a mask next time. I plan on having another sanding session after I finish the B-17.


Other than that, the fuselage and nacelle halves were badly warped, so much so that the nacelles barely fit on the wing. They have sat taped together on my desk to hopefully solve that issue. The spinners also seem to fit too loosely inside the engines, so I may have to glue them in place, meaning no spinning propellers .

The most bizarre issue with this kit seems to be that it's not only not in the right scale, which I noticed because the cowlings seemed too small compared to the B-26, but it's also not in scale with itself. After measuring, the wingspan is in 1:74 scale and the length 1:78 (Yes, accounting for the tail guns). I haven't measured the individual parts yet to figure out what is and isn't affected. I suspect that the length discrepancy comes from Anigrand using the measurements from earlier short-tail blueprints but modeling the long-tail version, since the change happened before the real prototype was built. While this would cause a 4 ft difference in length in real life it's not noticeable in the kit unless you measure it.

Other than that, the kit is nicely detailed and I'm a fan of Anigrand's approach of not splitting the wing panels in half, as well as providing so much detail for the engines (you get two rows of cylinders). I've heard that their quality control has significantly improved by the time they modeled the XB-33, so I may buy that kit at some point (though I wish it was in 1:72 so that it would be in scale with my other models, and I don't look forward to dealing with so many tiny individual propeller blades).

I will be painting the kit in the livery the first XB-28 originally wore, NMF with bronze green anti-glare, meatball roundels and rudder stripes. Haven't decided on the propellers yet as they change between photos from what seems like bare aluminum on the front to maroon in the front of one but not the other. I might go the easiest route and just do black with yellow tips, since the airplane did switch to those before being painted in camouflage.

Other News
I talked to my dad a bit more and as it turns out he distinctly remembers building an F4F Wildcat when he was younger, though he has no idea where it ended up. He hadn't told me this before, so I found this neat. I wonder if I can get him back into the hobby.

 

[SaparotRob]

Looking forward to more of your WIP postings, Maty12!

 

[Wurger]

 

[ARTESH]

Keep an eye on this thread, it'll become handy

 

[Maty12]

Looking forward to more of your WIP postings, Maty12!

Keep an eye on this thread, it'll become handy

Thanks, y'all! Will post more when there's more progress.

 

[Wurger]

Looking forward to that.

 

[Maty12]

Hey y'all,

I'm back home for the holidays and figured I'd give an update on how the B-17 is doing. I'm afraid I didn't take photos of each specific phase, so I'll just dump all of them together at the end of the post.

First thing I did that is not documented in the thread already was try to fit the bomb bay doors and figure out some sort of hinge mechanism. However, the kit is designed in a way where you can't fit both the catwalk and the bomb bay doors at the same time. I tried sanding the doors so they'd fit but the catwalk reaches the bottom of the fuselage, which is just not realistic. Given the already bare and inaccurate bomb bay, I decided to remove the catwalk and rack from the section and just glue the doors shut, as I prefer having my aircraft in a "ready for takeoff" configuration.

I then painted the inside of the radio room and tail section (which are not separated in the kit) silver, per my references, and installed the tail landing gear. I painted all the landing gear with black for the tires, silver for the wheels and humbrol aluminum for the struts to give some contrast to all the silver. Oleos were painted silver. Propellers will also be painted aluminum.

I then decided it was time to add all the windows, some of which fit well and some of which didn't. I ended up losing one window to my carpet and decided to replace it with a spare MG I had from the Marauder to pass off as a field mod or something. With the windows in place it was time to glue together the fuselage halves, which went okay but I was not able to fix the gap in the nose, and trying to do so resulted in one of the roof windows falling into the already sealed nose compartment. I tried making a replacement window out of glue but that did not work. Not sure what I'll do on that front. I can't fish out the window as they're meant to be installed from inside, being too big to fit through their holes. I'm really not a fan of how the nose windows were designed and would've much preferred a single large transparent section to paint over instead of individual windows that almost fit into their holes.

I then installed the cockpit and was hoping to use the included anti-glare decal as a mask when painting the nose (since the decal is the wrong color), but like all other decals on this aging kit it broke into several pieces instantly and I had to toss it. I don't know what I'll do to make a new anti-glare panel, as my freehanding skills are not up to the task. I decided to leave this for another time and install the horizontal stabilizers. I don't really like the way they're designed given their size, and would have preferred some sort of central structure to align both with the fuselage correctly. I also don't see why they're separated into top and bottle panels given that they're quite fin and have no hinges. I imagine the wing is going to be a similar pain given that it attaches in the same way: one short tab per side that attaches into a slot of the side of the fuselage.

I then started repainting the engines, though I was using two of them on top of the cowlings as my jig for the horizontal stabilizers. I went with gunmetal gray for the crankcase/reduction gear cover, and black for the cylinders with some dry-brushed humbrol aluminum for detail. I forgot to take pictures but will do so when I'm back in the US. I then moved onto the wings, to fix the rather patchy paintjob I had given them which had very visible brushstrokes. I think that went pretty well, though this kit alone has already drained half my bottle of silver! Once that was done I could finally install the landing gear and attach the two wing halves... or so I thought.

Back when I was removing the parts from the sprues I noticed that the drag strut of one gear was nearly broken off, with just a bit of plastic still holding on. I glued that carefully but thought it might give me trouble later. To my surprise, this piece attached to the bottom wing panel with no issues... while the other landing gear refused to. The landing gear on this kit attaches to the bottom wing from above at two points: the forward drag strut and a big arm behind the main strut. If I attached one, it popped out of the other, no matter how much glue I used or how long I held it in place. There was so much glue I couldn't really see the pin for the forward attachment very well, so I decided to try to remove some... and broke the pin off. The landing gear cannot be attached without that pin. There are no parallel surfaces to glue the drag strut to, and my attempts to glue it to the nacelle were fruitless. I really want to point out that this seems like bad design to me? Why attach landing gear to the bottom wing from above? Surely the weight of the airplane would be pushing the landing gear upwards and away from its mounting point. It's not a heavy kit but this still feels like an awful idea, as is having the landing gear be stretched in the manner required by the attachment points. I tried just placing the wheel inside the wells and found that they actually don't fit, and by a large margin. I'd imagine this is so the wheels can be more easily glued in their retracted position (from above), but that doesn't make any sense given the high number of modifications one needs to make to the struts to mimic their retracted position.

At this point I was tired (and my hands were covered in glue) and I didn't have time to do much else before travelling home. I crudely painted the air intakes on the wings, which I will fix later, and glued on the exhaust stacks and turbochargers. I decided to take a few shots portraying an inverted crash landing before packing up all the pieces so that none were lost while I was away.

When I return, I'll try to either engineer an attachment point for the broken landing gear or more likely purchase metal replacements on ebay, unless there is a way to get free replacements from Academy (I have done no research on this and don't know if the company still exists). I have no plans on what I'll do to paint the anti-glare panels or replace the lost window on the roof of the nose and am open to suggestions. I also have no idea how the tiny air scoops for the engine are supposed to attach, as the instructions aren't very clear, it seems like they're just butt-joined and you have to eyeball their location. I also have no idea why the kit includes 4 since the 2 inboard scoops are located at the bottom of the engines, exactly where a smaller scoop is already molded. I will try to use as few Academy decals as possible given their quality and age and I plan on painting the elevators and ailerons in non-shiny silver grey since they're fabric, with regular shiny silver for the metal trim tabs. The rudder will have stripes painted on it.





Conclusions:
While this kit portrays a rather unique airplane I can definitely say it has put me off from buying any more old kits, as I'm just not a fan of the engineering (parts are very hard to line up properly and attach in weak ways), the detailing is rather lacking (there are no frames in the entire aft fuselage or bomb bay and the bomb bay itself is the wrong shape, the wheel wells are completely empty), there are very limited options for posing (no gear up option, no flaps, no way to position the waist guns for battle) and the decals are falling apart and often too large. This kit however has made me very excited to work on the Airfix B-25B kit, as its engineering and assembly look a lot better to me and I think I'll have a lot more fun with that kit. Whether I'll work on that or the XB-28 next I haven't decided yet. After reading through Dana Bell's Aircraft Pictorial No. 5 I am also interested in buying another Airfix P-40B, since I'm more familiar with the aircraft and its markings and have functional Olive Drab 41 paint, which was quite hard to find. After I finish university I might also look into buying an airbrush as that really seems a lot more fun to me and like a huge time saver compared to paintbrushes.

 

[fubar57]

Today I learned there was no belly turret

 

[Maty12]

Today I learned there was no belly turret

Correct, there was instead a little gondola with a very limited firing arc. I read a bit about the RAF's experience with B-17Cs in combat and man these airplanes were not ready for battle, blindspots everywhere! Pilots had to fishtail to let the waist gunners aim backwards. I remember reading either on this forum or elsewhere that most Es has a remote-controlled belly turret but it was not the Bendix one used in B-25s and in the noses of the late B-17Fs and Gs. I'll see if I can dig that up. I was 50/50 on getting an E or a C to build tbh, I love both.

 

[SaparotRob]

Thanks for the the post, Maty12. I have this kit. I appreciate the warnings. I am looking forward to reading more.

 

[Wurger]