So...... it's been a while since my last post. Spring means a new triathlon season with a new coach & training regime. Back to training 6 days a week with 2 or 3 days doing double sets, which means that, outside work hours, any spare time I had has pretty much disappeared. Not complaining, it does feel good to get fit again, but it has severely limited time at the workbench. I actually miss being able to work on a kit - I think it is almost therapeutic for me!
Over the past week I have made a concerted effort to spend 10 minutes here and there just getting the final touches done to this kit. To securely fit the air intake I added some small polystyrene rod pegs which allowed a more positive fit to the fuselage.
After taking the shot above I did a whole bunch of other work finalising the little bits and pieces to add. Unfortunately I did not take the time to photograph any of this work. Below are shots of the finished kit.
Overall I ended up being a little disappointed with how it turned out. Those of you with great attention to detail will note that the vac-formed canopy pieces seem to be just that little bit too large, almost like they are bigger than 1/48 scale. Certainly when viewed side-by-side with the kit part they are at least 10% larger. This resulted in a whole bunch of issues trying to get them placed correctly on the fuselage - they are in place but they don't fit snugly to the fuselage in quite a few places.
The other thing that I was let down by was the final clear coat. I think that because I thinned the final satin coat and blended in a bit more gloss to make it almost shiny it ended up being almost soft and sticky. Certainly any dust that had settled on it whilst still on the workbench is pretty much impossible to remove now.
Finally, the undercarriage is a missed opportunity. The kit parts are poorly designed and result in a huge joint down the front of the oleo (above the wheel) that is not there on the real thing. If I had realised this would not be a great fit once finished I would have gone about the assembly of the undercarriage very differently and allowed some work to remove this joint earlier in the process.
I still ended up finishing this kit in record time - a touch over 4 1/2 months. I am keen to get started on the next kit that I have already picked out and I suspect it will be even more challenging than I found this kit. With any luck I hope to get a new thread started this coming weekend.
As always, my thanks to everyone for their kind words, advice and encouragement. In doing this kit I learned quite a lot, picked up some new skills and got to research a lot of other techniques that people use in building their models (irrespective of whether I used them or not).
Cheers!