I have progress to report! Over the past 3 weeks I have been trying to grab a few minutes here and there to work on this kit.
In the first post of this thread I mentioned that I anticipated this kit would require a fair bit of fiddly test fitting and adjustment to make everything look right. I can confirm that this was indeed the case. Having buttoned up the fuselage I did a test fit of the lower wing to find that:
- The lower wing was bowed downwards at the tips, giving some anhedral, and
- The wing root had some substantial gaps that would require some filler.
The next couple of photos confirm the gaps did need some plastic card to get it right. I was reasonably lucky in that the downward bow of the wing was able to be corrected without too much drama, and this contributed in a small way to reducing the gaps to the fuselage.
If you look closely at the fuselage seams you can see that it was a little bit of an issue to get it lined up as well - a fair bit of twisting and pulling was required to get it to be anywhere near straight. It's not 100% perfect but I can live with that.
These next shots are the issues that I found with the lower wing insert, the engine top cowl and the radiator. Firstly the engine cowl was a right palaver. It was both too short and too wide to fit properly onto the fuselage. The white arrows indicate where I had to pare down the width of the panel and you can see the white styrene card shim inserted at the end of this panel. I've also highlighted with the yellowish arrow where I had to do quite a bit of filler work in both wing roots to get them to look anywhere near accurate. I probably should note at this point that I think the wings are too thick in profile - but given the age of the kit and the fact it's from a short production run I am not bothering to try to correct this.
The shot of the underside shows where a great deal of filler was required to fix where the fuselage panel moulded with the lower wings was just completely wrong. Looking at this aircraft in profile shows a pronounced bulge/curvature to the fuselage under the wing. The part I have resulted in no bulge and the panel had a pronounced lip where it jumped back out to the fuselage halves a the rear joint. I thought about using styrene cards layered to fix this issue but ended up just using Tamiya filler finished with Mr Surfacer 1000 to get the desired profile shape. I think this would have been marginally quicker than using plastic card and then shaving that down to shape. This shot also shows the radiator housing panel. Unfortunately I neglected to take any shots of this housing, but I took to it with the Dremel and shaved it down in thickness so it looked much more to scale. This also meant that the radiator blanking panel as supplied was the wrong shape/size, but I intended to replace this with thinner card anyway. You can just see the revised panel poking out the front of the housing.
These two head on shots show both the revised radiator housing and blanking panel and the additional holes made in the upper nose panel. All the reference photos I have show clearly the two vertical slots (I think mine are fractionally too far out to the sides). Less clear are what appear to be a series of four small slots along the joint with the upper cowl. At least I am hoping they are holes, my other thought was that they could just be shadows from something like hinges at the front of the cowl (I considered this to be less likely).
Finally, I have also done quite a bit of work on thinning the trailing edges of the lower wing and horizontal stabilisers, along with reshaping the leading edges to remove some nasty mold lines and general messiness. For the lower wing shot if you look closely you should be able to see where I have filed and sanded back into the wing ridges to help thin down the trailing edges - they were over 1mm thick and looked really shoddy.
The last shot shows a whole bunch of smaller parts that I have separated from the sprues and spent some time cleaning up and re-scribing in preparation for fitting the fuselage. It's been a bit tedious and the quality of some parts is pretty bad but I still think I can get this model to look pretty smart by the time I've cleaned everything up. It certainly has been a bigger challenge than the latest kits available from the big manufacturers!
With luck I will get a bit more time at the workbench tonight. Another big weekend of triathlon training is coming up but I do hope to have a few minutes of down time here and there to keep the progress going. As always, thanks for looking in on my latest project, cheers!