**** DONE: 1/48 Hurricane MkI "Willie McKnight" - Defense of Britain/Atlantic.

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Thanks guys. This one will be relegated to the shelf for a while along with my Me262 so that I can focus on finishing off my CF-104. Too much on the go and I need to simplify!
 
Thanks Dave. I've now circled back.

The cockpit has been assembled and was ready, more-or-less for mating the fuselage halves. I say "more-or-less" because I was having a hard time properly locating the instrument panel. The instructions imply that the IP sits atop a pedestal on the frame (see circle). The problem is that, when doing so, the IP with the visor and gunsight glued on prevents the fuselage halves from coming together, leaving upwards of a 5mm gap! Moving the IP down off the pedestal, as shown in the circled area, puts the IP too far away from the canopy opening.

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The PE seat belts supplied with the kit are actually 2 layers thick but, with careful bending and once painted, look pretty good.

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To rectify the IP situaiton, I finally settled on a compromise and left the IP loose, gluing it in place from the outside once the fuselage halves were mated. I know from our Hurricane restoration that the IP and windscreen frame are arranged such that the IP lines up with the front of the windscreen as seen in the below pic. Having settled on the above choice, the result is still not quite right but close enough to be acceptable.

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The fit of the MG insert in the wing leading edge is far from perfect. I had to squeeze one of the inserts to deform it to the shape of the wing and also added spacers to fill the large gaps.

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The wing/fuselage joint was not too bad but, again, not perfect. One of the features of this kit is that edges of butt joints are not sharp but, rather, are rounded so that even if joints are firmly brought together, there is always the appearance of a gap. This happened in the wing roots and I had to add some stretched sprue to both fill in actual gaps and to smooth over the grove resulting from the rounded edges.

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I'm now entering the nemesis phase - filling and smoothing. More to come later today, hopefully.
 
Nice adaptive work Andy! Looking forward to seeing the stretched sprue results. I've heard about this technique for filling gaps but I have yet to try it.
 
Nice adaptive work Andy! Looking forward to seeing the stretched sprue results. I've heard about this technique for filling gaps but I have yet to try it.

Its a good way to solve your 'light'gap issue,when plasticard strips aren't quite the right fit, good for filling panel lines that are sometimes in the wrong place or off centre to other mating surfaces...Dragon Ju88 has these issues on the fuselage...ask me why I know..:D
 
Thanks everyone. I have not posted for a while. Time's been spent on filling and sanding so not much to show for entertainment. However, tonight I attended to the exhaust stack installation. I've chosen to pose all of the cowls closed and have saved the engine for another potential future build. That meant that I had to find a way to support the stacks.

First, though, I drilled out the openings as shown here with one bank drilled next to the one that has not.

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I made a frame of lengths of sprue and glued these into the fuselage. I then made careful measurements based on a scale drawing and filed the width of each exhaust bank so that they protruded form the cowl the correct amount before gluing them to them to the sprue frame.

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Following that step, I installed the upper cowl which needed to be thinned at the rear edge so that it sat properly on the shelf molded in the fuselage.

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In the background of the last two pics can be seen the finished wing roots. The inserted bits of stretched sprue were sanded flush with micro mesh pads and the panel lines rescribed. That's it for now. May see some paint go on this weekend.
 

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