Terry, Wayne and Andy - fear not, the color started going on today.
Underside is done. Waiting for it to dry to make it doesn't need a touch-up coat; but it looks good so far. Found one small gap at the trailing end of the starboard engine nacelle that required some putty, but that's been fixed. Giving the underside another once over to make sure that is the only area that needed fixing.
Also re-sprayed the interior of the wheel wells. The problem is that part of the wheel wells is formed by the lower surface of the wings that are inside the engine nacelles. That wouldn't be a problem EXCEPT that the engine nacelle fit is bad enough that almost all of the joins between the nacelle and the wings have to be puttied. And where does that putty go? Into the damn wheel wells. Took some fancy filing using some rifler files to get that putty sanded away. Then it had to be resprayed. Like I said earlier, the design of those nacelles is really idiotic. I don't know why Italeri didn't just mold them as part of the blasted wings instead of making them slip over the wings. Anyway, enough of the rant. Problem is fixed.
Once the interior is dry, I'll respray the puttied area on the engine nacelle (and anyplace else that needed some minor touchup).
Topside gets started tomorrow morning.
No pics until I have the topside done (save for the mottling and white fuselage campaign stripe).
Will these tide you over? There is some touch-up work that needs to be done still and to get a couple of those areas (e.g. the forward lip of the turret, the forward edge right behind the upper canopy and under the rear wings) I am going to have to go to a finer brush nozzle. This was the switchover point and also where I needed to take a break. The port side engine is just dry fitted into place. I just wanted to see how they looked.
Thanks Kevin, Alex, Wayne, Vic, Daniel, Andy and Terry.
Well she's got her knickers on finally. Next comes the dress.
Paint on the white theatre band is drying, so the masking tape is still on at the edges. And yes, I managed to snap off part of that recoil pipe on the upper turret. DAMMIT! Oh well, a little bit of glue and touch up paint should have it back in place. Still that pisses me off.
Was getting ready to start slipping her skirt on, starting at the bottom of course when I discovered that the two masks I had done for the tail were WAY too big. Went back to the original camo plan and found out that the side view in the instructions is a different scale than the top and bottom view!
Going to have to go back to the library, resize and rescan the instructions and then recut those two masks. All of the others are fine, so I'm switching gears and doing the two main wings first instead.