I had to take a break after an hour this morning as my hands were getting too shaky! I'm close to applying a trial primer coat to the fuselage to test my seam work and, as always, I try to think ahead to all the parts that need a primer since Tamiya's grey surface primer is lacquer based and I want to minimize how many times I run this crap through my airbrush because of the fumes. So, I decided to tackle the bombs which are made up of resin and PE parts, both of which need a good lacquer based primer.
VERY finicky! I started with removing the body from the rather large casting block, which was no problem. Next came flattening the nose a little and adding the tiny nose pistol vanes. Shaking starts as the cuts need to be perfectly flat and perpendicular so the part needs to be held firmly (but not too firmly - PING!) in tweezers and filed carefully. Next came the PE fins which weren't too much of an issue, other than getting the cruciform angles perfect. Then came the very thin resin cylindrical vane, which just begged to be broken during removal from the casting block and clean-up. I managed to not break it but fitting it over the fins took some doing, shake, shake. The tiny PE arming vane on the back was next and this went OK.
Then came the extremely thin stabilizers. Cleaning these delicate parts induced more shaking but I managed to hold it together. I debated the options of either gluing these to the hard point fairings or to the bombs. I chose the latter since I want to glue the fairings to the wings and paint them along with the undersides. Having these delicate stabilizers glued to the fairings would have no doubt resulted in damage so I opted to attach them to the bombs which will make fitting the bombs to the model later much easier. However, this required accurate placement of the tiny parts onto the bomb so that the stabilizers would fit properly into the slots in the fairing. I used my dial vernier to measure the spacing, then made pencil marks on the bomb that straddled the suspension lug equally and glued them in place. This took several tries but I finally got them on.
At this point I decided not to push my luck and tackle the second bomb. Here are pics of one finished bomb along with the pieces for the second one, which will be done after I take a sedative.
Thanks for looking in guys.