**** DONE: 1/48 Tempest MkV - Allied Advance and Defense of the Reich WWII.

[Crimea_River]

Back to work. Tonight was for making styrene powder. Cockpit side walls, rudder, and wing trailing edges were all sanded down to reduce the thickness in these areas. The cockpit work was to make room for the resin sidewalls, first grounding them down with a Dremel bit and then rough sanding the surfaces flat to the point where I could see light through them. The wing and rudders were sanded down because, well, they were just too thick.

 

[Donivanp]

Good tedious work there Andy.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Crimea_River]

Thanks guys. I don't know why I didn't do this before but, after looking at the sad main and tail wheel offerings by the kit, I ordered a Barracuda resin set and picked up a Quickboost exhaust set as well.

 

[Donivanp]

Sounds really great, never know for sure till they come in but I seem to find something to use no matter what.

 

[Gnomey]

Looks great so far Andy!

 

[Night Fighter Nut]

Coming along nicely.

 

[Airframes]

Good stuff Andy. As far as I know, this kit has its origins in the old AMT/ERTL kit, the one I used in a previous GB. Pretty basic, and I'm surprised Eduard didn't do a re-tool job on it.

 

[Crimea_River]

I think you're right Terry and thanks all.

Got the fuselage in clamps atm. Will post something soon.

 

[Wayne Little]

bring it on Andy...

 

[Crimea_River]

Here's some stuff:

The gear covers, like many other parts of this kit, come with huge protrusions of plastic as shown on the right. The door on the left has had this mark removed.

On the inside of the covers, the mediocre details at right are given a PE detail that makes for a big improvement.

The wheel wells also receive some kit-supplied PE parts to improve details. I think I'll need to add a bit more to this area since it is quite visible.

Here's the fuselage as it now looks. The clamps have been removed and the seams were cleaned up. Given that there were no locating pins, things came out reasonable well and I only had to use a little CA glue to fill some minor ridges.

As Karl pointed out, there is an interference between the resin cockpit parts and the top of the wheel well inserts. No surprise, given how deep the resin parts go below the top of the wing chord. I'm gong to have to carve away a lot of the floor and firewall to allow this area to fit. I think this will work, given that the "floor" below the foot rests should not exist anyway. I'm going to play with this tomorrow to see how bad it will be.

At the tail wheel opening, I had been a bit over-zealous with the sanding to reduce the thickness of the rudder so I had a gap that needed filling. Eduard provides a nice PE insert at this location to replace the lump of plastic form the original kit.

And that's it for now. I hope to find an hour or two to work on this tomorrow and will post an update if that's the case. Thanks for looking in.

 

[fubar57]

Nice add-ons, really make difference.



Geo

 

[Airframes]

Looking good Andy, and I hope that cockpit tub mod works out OK.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Gnomey]

Great work so far Andy!

 

[rochie]

Nicej ob Andy.

One review i saw when i built mine said he removed just about all of that floor until it was wafer thin to get it to fit !
Just as you plan and as you say there was no floor anyway in the real Tempest

 

[Wayne Little]

Done good mate..!

 

[Crimea_River]

Thanks all. It took a little longer to get to where I wanted to be at this point because of sequencing. In order to see how much I had to take off the floor, I had to glue in the wheel wells. Before gluing in the wheel wells, I wanted to add extra detail and this is much easier to do with the wells not installed. Anyway, the following will bring us current:

We'll start with the shell ejection ports. The were opened up in the usual manner with no drama. Helps to have a nice, square jeweler's file.

The plastic is very thick on this kit and it was necessary to taper the exposed sheet metal around the wheel well openings so they did not look like concrete.

Here are the details added in one of the wells. The retraction jack and plumbing still needs to go in but this will be left til later.

And with the well attached, I was able to see what needed to be removed from the cockpit resin and here's the result. Though it looks pretty bad, no loss of detail is visible from within the pit.

That's all folks.

 

[Airframes]

Major butchery on the resin tub - well done Andy, and nice work on the wheel wells so far.

 

[Wurger]

Agreed. Well done.