**** DONE: GB-53 1:72 Focke Wulf Fw 189 - Eastern Front

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Frankenohu progress. Well all the rivets are gone mostly. A few problems. The tops of the horizontal stabilizers after I cut out the rudders left a very small piece attached by an even smaller bit of plastic. "Gee" I said, better be careful of that in case I accidentally break them off so of course I went ahead and accidentally broke them off. So now I have glued some styrene bits on the top and will have to re shape them. Everything fits good but I can see I'm going to have problems with the canopy which does not match the profile of the rear part of the fuselage. The canopy is wider at the rear than the kit. Gluing it on as is would give the rear gunners opening an oval appearance where it should clearly be round. Not sure how I'll deal with it at this point.

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That canopy step sucks. Any chance of cracking the fuselage seam and adding a filler piece?
I thought about that but I have the floor pretty heavily glued in and it would be pretty destructive to try at this point. I'm going to see if I can sand off the bottom edges of the canopy to see if I can lower the rear enough to take more of the curve out of the arc. If all alse fails I can always make a plug and form my own canopy. I did it with a BV-144 and it's more or less the same canopy as far as I can see shape wise.

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Meanwhile in the Frankenohu chop shop. I want to ad a bit of depth and realism to the landing gear and engine nacelles. The kit would have you glue what amounts to be a one piece gear doors and cover in place and glue the landing gear to the cover. I opened the nacelles up and hogged out a bunch of extra plastic to open them up to the inside of the wing where I added some stringers and bulkheads. Probably not very accurate but makes it look a little more interesting. I spent a lot of time, well really an hour or so looking for technical studies of the inside of the nacelles as far as the landing gear mechanics and gave up so I'm winging it at this point.

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Landing gear fun. After opening the gear bays I'll need longer actuator gear and the ones in the kit are ...well....you know. My first attempt at replicating the gear. Not very happy with it, it's not geometrically true and a bit bulky looking. I also mostly carved it with a blade so there is pretty much zero chance of making an exact copy. Needs a re-think.

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