1/48 Hobby Craft Boeing P-26A

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My thanks to Geo for some great references on the tail wheel!

Andy - you're right about the black making it difficult to keep the yellow bright. I was thinking that perhaps with a black undercoat the yellow might have a bit more "depth" - a bit like the effect with metallic car paints. The downside would be I'd have put down a lot of yellow coats - probably destroying any depth effect. Thanks for your feedback, much appreciated.

So! White undercoat it will be. Once ready for the first splash of paint I'll try to upload some more photos.

Cheers all.
 
It seems that life always interferes with this hobby!! Unfortunately everything else gets priority and that makes progress slow and me into a grumpy old codger!

The good news (for me at least) is that I got time at the bench in the last couple of days. Enough to make some solid forward progress and equally to screw something up. I managed to lay down some undercoat this afternoon as below.

So that was the forward progress - I added the undercarriage bracing covers, replaced the engine fairing panels I made, cleaned up various rough patches and panel lines. While I was painting the undercoat I thought to myself - "Why do the inner braces point backwards when they link to the opposite side forward of their position???"

That question then resulted in an extended period of alternately swearing and trying to work out what the hell went wrong. I double checked the instructions and I am almost certain that the part numbers are recorded back to front, with the LHS part number applied to the RHS spat and vice-versa. I could be wrong, but I know I was very careful to do each one separately from tree removal to gluing to the spat. Either way - the way they're attached is definitely wrong...

The red arrows point the direction the pieces should face and the orange lines indicate where the bracing wires should run - definitely wrong (arrgghhhh... ).

The question is - how to fix without destroying the undercarriage. At this time my solution is to cut the pieces off about half a millimetre up from their join to the UC and make the cut parallel to the angle of the end of the fairing. In theory - if I cut it clean and at the correct angle I should be able to swap them over. What can possibly go wrong .

Might have to sleep on this one. I am still quite annoyed with myself on this one so it might be better to walk away for a bit rather than attempting a fix without thinking it through.

If anyone has other possible solutions I welcome them.

Thanks again for checking in on progress.
 
Patient is out of surgery (I think that's enough of the medical analogies now...).

The job was pretty tedious but I am pretty happy with how it turned out. Once I had the aircraft securely mounted in my jig, I started out by pencil marking where the cuts should be on both sides, then with a nice sharp scalpel blade I traced a cut along the lines. This gave the new razor saw somewhere to bite, stopping it from continually slipping down the side of the panel.

These two shots show the pencil mark out and where I am about half way through the first cut. I said the job was tedious simply because I didn't want to put too much force into the saw, just letting the weight of the saw & handle do the work. It did take longer to do it like this, but I really wanted to make a really clean and straight cut.

Here I have cut both parts away from the spats and I have fixed the starboard one into what looks to be about the right position.

Final shot - both pieces swapped and fixed to the spats. The angles are not quite right when comparing to photos but I think I can work with it. It will need a tiny bit of filler around the joins - just to smooth the base to new piece transition but I think it should work out OK.

So - I think I can say crisis avoided. I anticipated that this fix would create an absolute mess of the spats but in the end it was a pretty clean cut and change process. I'll try to remember to take some more shots once the filler has been added and cleaned up.

My thanks again to those offering advice and guidance, as well as those dropping in for a look at my project. Cheers!
 
Filler added and cleaned up, another layer of undercoat put down and we're back to getting ready for colour.

In an effort to make sure it all looks smooth I've sanded back the whole aircraft again and cleaned up a few spots where the first undercoat did not seem to stick as well.

I laid the second layer down a bit thicker - not thinning the undercoat down quite as much as the first layer. I'm hoping this way when I do the next light sanding I can avoid any rubbing through on the raised areas.
I did also add some more tiny details to this kit. When browsing through various photos I have accumulated I noticed that not all the access panels fit nicely, quite a few sit a bit proud of the fuselage. At 1/48 this impact would be quite subtle so to do this I added some tin foil cut to the shapes of the panels and CA glued them in place. The following photo has been tweaked a bit to help highlight the panels on the LHS.

As they are a bit hard to see I've circled them. The fuel access hatch down near the wing root has been replicated on the RHS. It was very tempting to do this for all the hatches but photos don't show this to be the case, so I've just limited it to three.
The undercoated brace wire fairings look the part I think. I know that the angles and alignment are not quite correct but I am happy that at least they now face in the right direction.

Finally, undercoat is on all over. I was hoping the raised panels would be a bit more visible in the photo. IRL it's a bit more obvious but with the white undercoat it just gets lost in the glare. I hope this will be more visible under the blue gloss coat.

Thanks for looking in on my ramblings.
 

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Been a bit quiet with this one of late, but managed to get some paint on in the past two evenings. The yellow has had three very light coats laid down and is just starting to look like it's true colour. Another 2 light coats should be enough to make it look right I think.

Really looking forward to getting the blue on as well now!

Cheers!
 
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