It's taken me a good bit longer to progress the build than I'd thought in my previous post. I'll try and explain why as I bring you up to date. If you recall, I'd said I'd try to enhance the plumbing under the dorsal turret.
I found a discarded metal bracket from the build that was originally a hydraulic tank bracket but in scale was far too thick. I inserted a hollow plastic plug into it and tacked it to the cross strut. It was fitted and adjusted a number of times before I got the fit I wanted. Then it was permanently attached with Superglue. The pipes are brass wire and again, were eventually fitted so that the turret could still fully rotate.
Here's how it looks with the turret test fitted. I think it does the job.
The next major job to complete this section was to fit the ammunition tracks to the rear turret. This is slightly complicated by the fact that the tracks fit over two sections, 5 6 and the ammo boxes are in section 4 – and everything needs to match up precisely when the sections are eventually married. First, rather than painting the tracks to simulate the shells, I decided I'd achieve a better effect by using Eduard PE .30 ammo belts. Here's how it looks in one of the straight sections.
The most interesting looking parts of the tracks are those leading from the boxes into section 5 of the fuselage as shown in the test fit below.
Each side consists of three sections glued together. Then I added the PE ammo. The motor drive brackets are scratch-built from plastic card and rod, to add a bit of visual difference. I got the ref, below, from a very useful Lancaster walk around by Dave Hollingsworth on the Cybermodeler site. I hope he doesn't mind me using it to illustrate a point. As the ammo boxes can be posed either open or closed, they had a layer of PE ammo added for continuity. The tracks are just resting on the boxes for the photo as, once installed, they'll never be seen as clearly again.
Well, after a lot of dry fitting to ensure the brackets fitted to the formers and careful measuring to ensure (hopefully) they'd fit to the boxes on one end and to track extensions on the other, I positioned them in the dorsal turret section and attached the track motors to scratch-built electrical panels. The turret plumbing had also been painted beforehand.
The ammunition boxes were then carefully fitted in section 4 of the fuselage to ensure a close join when the tracks are attached. I left some excess ammo showing, to bridge any slight gaps that might show.
Here's how it should look when finally joined together. You can see here how busy the dorsal section looks. The cocktail sticks are just to hold the two sections loosely together for the photo.
Here's how the two sections look from the interior, looking towards the front of the aircraft.
The next task was to complete the track run to the rear turret. This section comprises two long sections of track on both sides and these proved the trickiest to install properly.
The instructions require the rear section of track to be inserted through circular holes under the turret and butted up to the bulkhead behind the Elsan toilet. I would have been much simpler had that bulkhead had receiving holes but they hadn't thought to put them in and it was too enclosed to be able to retro fit them.
Here you can just about see the starboard track and the tip of the port one. These were a nightmare to manoeuvre into position with tweezers but after many attempts I forced them into a position that looked right for joining up with the next section of track.
The final installations were the tracks in the front of the section, between the Elsan bulkhead and the crew door.
I had to visually match these to the position where the rear tracks met the bulkhead. Access was better on this side but to get the tracks to meet both ends, I had to move the flare chute on one side and replace the crew step by the door with a wider one as the supports on the original were right in the middle of the track run. But after fixing some tricky brackets they were finally installed. The trick now is to make sure that they meet the tracks in section 5 as I couldn't butt fit them as there are still extended stringers and longerons preventing these two sections from marrying up, so I'm hoping for the best.
That's now the interior for all sections largely finished. There are still a few wires, extinguishers and oxygen modifiers to go in, then that's about it for inside. After that there's still a lot of basic wing and flap construction to complete before skinning and joining the fuselage sections. That's going to take some time and is not going to be very exciting but it has to be done. I will post again as I make some substantial progress.
That's it for now.
Gerry