Another cold and snowy Friday night with Andy Donnelly's Celtic Show setting the atmosphere got me in the mood to spend another detail session on my Wimpy. With the turrets essentially done, I concentrated on finishing out the nose area.
The bomb sight that I made a while back had to be stuck in and I knew this would be tricky as it only attaches to a single point and is otherwise free. I started by taping the fuselage halves together and dry-fitting the sight and figuring out how it should go. The spacer I had added for the pick-up point earlier ended up being in a place where I could not attach the sight (it would have caused the reticle to interfere with the girder in front of it) so I glued in another piece and attached the sight with CA glue. Below you see the sight in place and glued to the now two spacers in white.
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The other thing that needed to be done was to glue in two triangular bits to fill a gap in the floor supporting the turret. For some reason Trumpeter stopped the circle early, leaving a visible gap when the turret is in place. Below you can see the two pieces and they had to be carefully glued such that I could get the fuselage apart again. I was hoping that I could find away to install the turret later to make all this easier but even if I cut off the teardrop that supports the pivot point, there was no way the turret would drop in so I'm stuck with adding it to one of the fuselage halves.
Back with with the fuselage split again, you can see the bomb sight in place as well as the port side turret floor fill-in piece. The interesting thing here is that the bombardier's cushion is now glued to the port half whereas it used to be on the other side. As I discovered though, that doesn't work as the shape of the cushion is such that the small corner extensions interfere with the sight when I try to bring the halves together. Should have though of this earlier!
This final shot shows the last bits of wiring now in place. Three were added: two from the sight to the "computor" and one from the sight to the small control panel on the wall. All that's left now is to shoot a bit of paint on the wires and white bits and call it done, except...
....there is one last bit that I'm not sure I can do and that's the draft door that isolates the turret from the nose section and stops air from blasting around the turret and into the crew compartment. It's seen behind the turret in the below pic and is, in actual fact, convex and not flat:
Though it probably should be there on my rig, the issue is that it will interfere with the nice sighting "computor" that I mounted on the wall. So it's a bit of a head scratch what I will do here, if anything.
I'm now reconciled to the fact that there is no way this build will be finished by the end date of this GB and that it will probably continue at this pace well into the spring. Thanks for following.