Mine is the Revell kit and don't give me too much credit, ingenuity is something i'm short of. i really admire people who can stretch old sprue into windshield wipers or whittle old toothpicks into a Old Ironsides model. so my cut-outs will be clear. i'm more a workman than an artist
Ohh Mike I hear you on the ingenuity thing, I have none of it either LOL. I've pinched all of mine from other modelers.
Where i made the cut outs in my model seemed to be the most logical places to show the detail, Cockpit roof, First bomb bay, Second bomb bay and rear crew compartment. The only thing I would do different if I even pulled that kit on again is I would extend the cockpit cut out back a bit further so as to show off the navigators/flight enginneers work area better.The straight edges of the cut outs made it more business like and hides the edges a bit better when the model was all together.
I forgot to tell you about on of my favourite scrtach building materials, Soft drink (soda) cans. Cut the tops bottoms off with what ever you have,cut down the middle and you have a sheet of wonderful, easy to work with metal. It cuts easily with scissors, bends well into clips, hose clamps, bomb bay hinges etc and looks totally realistic as damaged wing spars once you mangle it a little bit. Just DON'T use the wife's dress making scissors.
tail end charlie - why dont they make the fuselage in clear plastic then you can paint what you like? Or is it difficult to make clear plastic?
Trumpeter has done this with a few of their kits, I have just recently bouoght a 1/32 P-51B 1/32 Dauntless, both have whole clear sides. In all honesty I was excited about this until I had a good look at the clear parts. All of the internal moulding is still on these parts as they are just the same as the normal parts and this distorts your view inside, plus with all the internal mounting points for other parts it starts to look ugly. Great Idea on Trumpeters part but to get it to look great it is still going to require a lot of thought on how to pull it off. The other problem is that clear plastic is usually more brittle than the normal styrene plastic. I have not had any experience with Trumpeter clear styrene but time will tell. A quick experiment is to grab a left over sprue of normal plastic a clear sprue. Bend them and the normal styrene usually bends a lot before it breaks but the clear styrene breaks before you get even a decent bend in it.
Sorry for the story but I'm home with a head cold and everything else I try to do is not working and I need a modeling FIX.
Cheers Switch