My thanks to you all again for your kind words. I have managed to do a bit more on this kit since Saturday, mostly assembly and seam work.
The misaligned cylinders must have been a real pain.
You're right Andy - the clean up on these took forever. At the end of the day I think it was worth it. The only real issue is that if you look really closely at the width of some of the cylinders, they are about 0.8mm narrower than those that had a lesser alignment issue. Thankfully it is pretty hard to see it, but I know its there!!
I must also thank Geo (
fubar57
) for some additional information on the colour schemes used by the 94th PS that I will be representing. It confirmed that this squadron used the blue/yellow combination for some of their general paint schemes, this makes me more comfortable to use it with the special Air Race scheme I am doing.
So, onto the work done to date. Some of you may have noticed that I had already attached the wings to the fuselage sides before closing it up. I did this for two reasons:
(1) The tabs on the wings were quite a bit smaller than the holes in the fuselage. To get them to position anywhere near correctly I had to add some plastic card to either the top or bottom of the tabs to ensure both a snug fit and a reasonable alignment.
(2) I said reasonable alignment because I had some real issues with the wings. When test fitting the two halves (for both wings) I noticed that the edges had gaps. This was more noticeable on the tip and trailing edges. Investigating this revealed that the inside molding of the wing edges was bulged a little on the inside away from the edge and caused the issue with the gaps. Fixing involved much scraping and sanding so that the edges mated without any ugly gaps apparent.
When fitting the wings I also found another issue. The length and profile of the wing root on the fuselage did not match the width and chord of the wing. I'm pretty sure the fixes to the wings in point 2 above contributed some to this, but the difference between the two was about 2mm which I think is way too much to be just caused by my corrections to the inside of the wing panels. Anyway, after much re-profiling I managed to get the wings lined up with the wing roots and keep a reasonable panel seam line that I can be happy with once cleaned up and painted.
From underneath the biggest issue was the lack of working room next to the undercarriage spat panel. The fuselage piece did not properly match the convex curve of the wing underside so a bit of scraping and sanding was required to make it match up properly.
From the top side the issue was more about making sure the wing root panel was the right length to properly match the wing width and then cleaning up the chord so that it matched evenly all the way across from front to back. It was quite a bit of work, but to leave it without fixing would have completely ruined the look of the finished product.
These shots also show that I have buttoned up the fuselage and attached the nose panel which immediately backs onto the engine. The fitting of the cockpit to the fuselage and the two halves together went surprisingly well, with no real gaps or misaligned panels/seams to be found. Given the wing issues I was pleasantly surprised.
At this point I had a choice. I could go back to the engine and drill out the individual exhaust pipes (7 teeny weeny single ones and one longer dual port pipe that goes across the top of the engine) or fit the horizontal stabs. Obviously I chose to fit the tail feathers, only because I couldn't think of a good way to hold the exhausts whilst drilling them out (Hobby Craft thoughtfully attached them to the sprues by the ends - means you have to remove them to be able to drill out the ends, grrrrrrrrr......). If anyone has ideas on how I can fasten onto curved exhaust pipes that measure about 3mm long and 1.5mm across I am all ears!!!
So - tailfeathers it is...
Of course I couldn't make my life easy and just go with the kit part as-is!! I have some good close up shots of the elevators on the extant P-26's so I thought I would have a go at cutting them in two so I can fit them in the slightly drooped position. I even checked all the period shots I have to make certain that it did happen - some showed a droop and some not. Drooped elevators it is then.
I did the usual job of cutting the elevators off, filing out a convex curve at the back of the stabiliser and gluing a half round piece of styrene to the elevator and making sure it all fit back together in the right dimensions. The biggest challenge here was to make some "hinges" to represent the three found in real life. Some notches and plastic card later we have what you can see in a bit more detail above. I think the only real issue with the job is that the thickness across the hinge tabs is a bit too wide, but I went with the only thickness plastic card I had on hand (1mm) as I was too scared to try to freehand sand the pieces thinner. It looks a bit clunky but I can live with it. RHS done and LHS ready to add the hinges.
That pretty much brings me up to date with progress in the past couple of nights. It's not looking likely that I will be able to do more over the next couple of days as the week long festival that is my beautiful wife's birthday is about to commence!
Once again, thanks to everyone for looking in on my musings.