Ok time for an update, actually the thing is almost ready for some paint, I admit I've been slackin on posting things so a little catch up is the order of the day.
First off, thank you gentlemen, much appreciated.
Next up, while it's true that instructions are more or less just somebody else's opinion, sometimes paying attention to that opinion can save a bit of grief, for example, it wasn't till I was playing with the intakes that I realized what was wrong with this picture.
It occurred to me that Airfix had
Not engineered this kit in such a way as to protect me from my own incompetence. The multiple explicative moment......
The solution, and the *engines*, I am not particularly pleased with these.........
The excuse, from what I understand, is that the detail isn't really noticeable in this scale, but personally I think it has more to do with hiding poor molding quality, some details are nice, others.......not so much, more like Hi-Tech retro. Case in point is the landing gear parts that go into the bay, the molding quality of these parts was no better then those in a 60's kit and took a bit of clean up, even still the detail is soft. The vertical portion glue into a cut out in the side wall and the support struts have no positive location. not really a big deal, but given how things go together painting it all is going to be a pain unless one doesn't care and paints it all one color..........
Otherwise attaching the bay doors before painting will make things very difficult.
The collector ring is a 2 part affair, with a nasty seam that is a pain to fill,
I decided to attach the exhaust to the collector ring to ease painting, the parts fit well here.
Holes drilled out in the heat tubes.
The torpedo fits good and actually looks round rather then oval, but the "panel lines" are a bit thick so I decided to fill them in and redo them
Also included is the wooden tail, but again the thing looks to be retro, thickly molded with the prerequisite ejector pin marks, and doesn't look particularly accurate, Interestingly the instructions don't even have a color call out for it.
Since most pics don't show this I won't bother using it.
If anyone has any good tips and/or pics of painting these torpedo's I'd greatly appreciate it....
Moving on to the wings, with the typical nasty seam and lack of detail, this is where a nice set of etch lights would be nice but one has to make do with what one has
The navigation lights are separate clear pieces, which is nice on one hand, but on the other is the annoying plastic color that shows through, so I thought I'd play around a bit and experiment. I painted the area which was to be glued with interior green and then when it was time just applied the glue over the paint. The parts seem to be stuck on good, the jury is still out on the results though as there is kind of a mix of green and plastic showing through, I tried tinting the glue with paint but that didn't work out. The lights were drilled out and painted, the red looks bigger then the green in the pics but they are actually the same size