Hi
Thanks guys, I've got the magnifying glass again because this kit certainly gives it's money worth in detail. The side console has fourteen parts, the instrument panel five, not counting the gunsight yet. Thirteen parts in the rudder and stick controls and a further thirty seven for side consoles, rear armour, gun cocking controls, seat, harness, support framing and fuselage frame.
The engine is a mixture of resin and plastic has individual pushrods, inlet manifolds, bearers and exhaust, cylinders, for a part count of around 60. I haven't started that yet.
In summary there are 130 plastic parts, 21 clear parts, 32 etch parts and 31 resin parts. That's, my gosh, 214 parts! And it's a wee bugger too!
Time for another update I think.
Pic 1, 2 3
Port Console details next are reasonably straight forward, though I will not add the console until I paint it. I'm leaving out parts C14 and D17 (x4) as these are the gun cocking controls which were deleted at the end of CA12 production. The machine guns were manually cocked before takeoff in the CA13 (which Grim Reaper is). Tragically I lost one throttle lever in the construction phase and broke another off in the "Great Fuselage Fix". More on that later. I'll scratch up some better ones later, before I close up the fuselage.
Pic 4, 5,
Exploded parts Diagram and pic of seat and etch. I won't assemble the seat with the harness yet. I'll attend to that later, after painting. The cast resin seat is great and super thin. It has a pin hole fault at the top I need to fix. Etch part PP10 seems to be a duplication of the reinforcement plate around the centre slot. This is already well cast into the resin seat, so I don;t see the need to overlay it with the etch (which is also missing the slot by the way).
Pic 6, 7, 8 9
This is the start of the frame work, starting with the fire wall. The ducting has two big holes/ sink holes that should no be there, so they were filled before assembly. There were two big ejector pin marks on the fire wall which I also removed. It was a bit tricky getting that all together and I deliberately left off the cockpit "floor" until after paint and detail. You'll understand why later on when the control stick is added.
While I've been mucking around with all the details, I've also been dry fitting the wings, fuselage sides and both of them together and things are not looking good. Nothing fits well. Canopy is oversize and gaps at the wing root.
Cheers
Peter