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Sea Fury 805 Sqn RAN HMAS Sydney Korea 1951 - completed


trickyrich

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13 hours ago, Col. said:

Good going Rich. At this rate you'll have to pick your next project soon!

 

hmm yes! I do need to get this one out of the way as the Carrier GB is coming up and the project for that is a resin 1/48th RA-5C Vigilante with AM cockpit, wheel wells, and tail pipes........not of which were meant for it!

 

11 hours ago, Colin W said:

Crikey Ive only just started and you've almost finished building this monster.

Great going and excellent quality too.

 

Colin

Thanks, as mentioned, she's a dream to build, the only issue so far with the build was the one join on the wing. If I don't cut the wings then I could have the wings and fuselage joined and finished today! 

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ok yes insanity took over and I cut up the wings….I rather wished I hadn’t, but too late now! Plus furious rate of building has now slowed of course something that was planned for, extra medication not so much planned for!

 

So first thing yesterday armed with a cup of tea and still in PJ’s I set off to cut the wings up........before I had a cup of coffee and a sanity check. I mean who in there right mind cuts up a frighteningly expensive model…..me it seems! :wall:

 

Right there were two way to go about this, either make two cuts on each wing and remove the sections that were going to be replaced, or cut the wing at the fold lines then remove the extra material from each wing to fit the new sections as required. The safe option was the second and it ended up be the better option!

 

First off the fold lines on both side of the wings were lined up with Dyno tap, I used this for a cutting guide. There was some shrinkage in the lower piece of the wing so that the panel lines didn’t quite line up with the top one, but I used the panel lines on the top of the wing as reference points. It much easier to re-scribe lines than have to add material accidentally cut off!

 

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So I was left with this, as I posted in the tease for yesterday, plus this. I was actually really happy with the cuts as they were near perfect and almost square, so only a tiny amount of sanding to square everything up was required.

 

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I added some internal bracing to each of the wing sections for extra support. I ended up removing the one on the outer wings as they didn’t need it and just got in the way.

 

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Next up to glue in the new sections to each wing. This is where working with resin is a pain. CA glue is great because you can work really fast when constructing and there's no waiting around. It’s bad because you only get one chance to get it right!!!! CA Gel, well it allows you to adjust bit first, but I find you end up getting it everywhere and you still glue things in the wrong spot! Epoxy, is really slow, it get everywhere and it’s a pain to clean up join lines. Building plastic models is soooo easy!

 

Well out of the 4 new pieces I got 2 right straight away, one on the second attempt and the last well it was a bit out and so stuck fast it was never going to be removed! At this stage while gluing I found out that they should have mentioned that I needed to have removed the outer flaps! These were removed after much cursing.

 

These are the wings after gluing prior to ant clean up work, the white bits on the joins of the new bits (the lighter colour resin) are from the CA accelerator.

 

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Ok after liberal amounts of filler and over night curing everything was given a sanding back, resulting in this.

 

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It needs a second batch of filler in a few areas and I’ll have to rebuild a section of resin on the part I misaligned but overall it’s in good shape. I’ve got the second lot of filler curing overnight at the moment.

 

It took longer to pose it for this photo than it took to cut a wing off!

 

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Here it looks like a Star Wars vessel!

 

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Once these wings are cleared up I can get back to the normal building which should be fairly quick. There’s not an awful lot to do before painting actually. Fit the elevators, a wee bit of filler required here and fit the wing…..a little bit more than a wee bit required here I think. I reckon by the end of the weekend she should be close to painting.

 

Ok time now for a trade secret……….

 

The secret to a quick resin build is good reference material, lots of test fitting, and good Rum!!!

 

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This comes from way up in the north of part of Australia where everything will kill you! A bit further north than the spot where you could place the whole of the British Isles…and loose it! From a wee town called Kununurra, gosh I wish I could hear that trying to be pronounced, I bet some wives wouldn't! :D  It’s produced in a tiny wee distillery up there, but unfortunately the old owner cane grower/distiller passed away just before Christmas. So the wee dram and model are for him! :cheers:

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…well finished ……not quite!

 

Another busy couple of day in which I tried to cut my figure off plus had to have a tooth removed!!

 

Ok most of the time has been spent cleaning up everything plus fixing up a few areas where sanding caused issues.

 

One of which was the trailing edge of the centre section of the wings. A bit of plastic rod and CA cement easily sorted this out.

 

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The same with the rear section of the new wing cutout where it meets the flaps, again some bits of resin were used to rebuild this section. Speaking of which they forgot to mention the flaps when cutting out the wing. The outer flaps needed to be cut out seperately from the wing and then refitted. Luckily they supplied new flaps for if you want to have them down (almost never seen down when the wings were folded), so I used the replacements instead, this gave me a much better join.

 

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I spent quite a bit of time on the intakes for the oil coolers and radiator. Because of a small bit of shrinkage of the lower section of the wing I needed to do some work on this area. I had to reshape the openings for the Carburetor and radiator intakes, either by making new sidewalls or careful trimming of the existing resin. Also the top of the Carburetor intakes opening wasn’t quite right so I rebuilt this as well.

 

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With all this completed it was time to give everything a light coat of grey just to see how all the joins looked.

 

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Actually they came out not to badly at all. So minor sink makes in the filler and odd blemishes around the place, these were relatively quickly sorted out.

 

I thought it best that I start doing some work on the wing fold interiors while the wing we still easy to work with.

 

There are a few discrepancies between the real thing and the kit-supplied part. Most noticeably there’s an actuator missing from behind the rear hinge and there’s really nowhere for it to go! Plus some ribs are missing. The rear hinge is slightly to far back and the opening for the ammo belts is a bit too wide.

 

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Short of doing some fairy major work I’ve tried move things slightly, it’s not 100% accurate but now looks much better. Well maybe......I've just noticed I've put a couple of those small details in the wrong place!!  :wall:  Will sort that out later.

 

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There’s also a painted rubber (?) seal on the centre section of the wing fold I had to add as well, the filler is there to smooth things out. I’ve added a few small bits for the Pin Locking assembly plus some additional hole in the out wing assemblies. Once the painting is finished I’ll add the pipework/wiring and actuators to this area

 

I’m now about ready to join the wing and fuselage together. I’ve spent a lot of time on the join trying to get it all to fit nicely with the least amount of filler. I needed to add a section of plastic strip to the rear wing opening on the fuselage as there was quite a gap here and I needed something for the CA glue to hold to.

 

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The wing fold has been the most work so far, eating up nearly 3 days and there’s still a bit to go as well, but all the major stuff I needed to do is done. I’ll just give the wings a final rub down them a coat of proper primer, I’ll do this before I fit the wings.

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thanks, I've just done a coat of primer, near perfect finish so am really happy, now can fit the wing.

 

I knew the wing fold would be the thing that gets noticed, that's why I've been spending so much time on it.

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Some good progress made today plus something a bit odd happened!

 

The wings were given a coat of primer and the results are near perfect! I’m very happy with the way they came out and well worth the extra work involved. No join lines anywhere, just a couple of panel lines to sort out. Just some discolouration from the two different coloured resin, which will disappear once I start the actual painting process.

 

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Ok now for the odd bit, the primer used is Vallejo’s Acrylic-Polyurethane Surface Primer. This stuff is meant to be really good and I’ve used it before with good results. However this time I noticed that as soon as it became wet during sanding back the wing joins (it had cured for well over 12 hours), it started to bubble and lift off! Once it’d dried out again it was ok….most strange. The Tamiya acrylic I used before this still stuck like glue. I’ve not come across this before or have heard of it happening. Think I may stick to Tamiya acrylics of primers for now!

 

OK with the wings done the centre section could be fitted. Again, all the test fitting before hand paid off. This is a known problem area on this model and does require quite a bit of filling. Most of the joins had been shimmed with plastic card before hand, so all that was required was just a small amount of filler in a couple of places. I’ll go over these with a bit of paint as a final check, plus I still need to add some thin strip to the gap behind the trailing edge of the inner flaps.

 

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This done, the tail surfacers were added, again just some careful sanding was required, I may get away without filler here as I used extra CA cement when fitting to act as filler.

 

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Just for something different I decided to do some work on the stores. The drop tank mounts weren’t the best and needed quite a bit of work to fit nicely.

 

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The bomb and rocket mounts fitted much better.

 

The configuration here was not the normal for RN aircraft, it was used by the Canadians (who came up with it) and the RAN. It made it really simple to configure the weapons load. I was planning to go with 500lb’s but the rockets are actually quite nicely detailed…..something to think about.

 

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She’s starting to look very impressive now, though the actual wing mounting points aren’t really secure, once they’re up it’ll be a look but no touch model for sure!

 

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So once I’ve finished cleaning up and finishing the wings the cowling will go on, the U/c sort of has to wait now until the painting has finish, though I’ll try to do what I can before hand. From there it’s pretty much painting time, this will be a bit different from usual as well. This is a super enjoyable build and despite the work required on the wing joins quite a simple build.

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15 hours ago, modelling minion said:

Awesome work Rich.

And one of your fastest builds to date!

yes it is coming along quite quickly, I reckon if it wasn't for the wing fold I'd have her painted by now! Plus as I mentioned, for a resin model she just falls together, she's a far better model than some of the Tamiya and Hasegawa ones I've built.....we don't talk about the Zoukei Mura Ta-152!!!!

 

Things are starting to slow down now, lots of small stuff to do. I've stripped off all the Vallejo primer (and the Tamiya stuff underneath)...what a mess, least now it's back to bare resin and I know it's super clean due to all the alcohol I had to drink....I mean use! :D

 

I slightly alluded  to this earlier but I will be painting her a bit different then usual. There's such huge expanses of one colour on her, and I want to try and get away from the flatness of large areas of one colour. So I'll spend quite a bit of time working on the base for these colours. The aim is to apply very light coats of the main colours allowing for the base colours to alter its appearance. I've seen this done before but haven't really tried it. It'll be a sort of test for the main event later in the year, an F-14D! Plus the invasion strips will be done in reverse as well, white on black. I've seen this done on a pro-build of the same model, it gives a really nice weathered look to the strips, not so bold looking but a more subtle and natural look. Can't wait to start painting her!!

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22 hours ago, Col. said:

Sounds as if you have some interesting techniques planned there Rich.

...experiments more like it....hopefully it'll work else I have to strip back the paint job!

 

A couple of quieter days but still managed to get a bit done. Only have the rest of the week off then back to Monday to Friday for a while….though may be heading up to Malaysia for a couple of weeks towards the end of next month. Will be visiting the RAAF base there for something different.

 

Sorry about so of the photos, I made an adjustment to my camera and forgot I’d don’t it, so the depth of field is all over the place in a couple of them, it was too later by the time I figured out what I’d done.

 

A lot of yesterday was spent fixing up all those tiny wee spots you find as soon as you put a coat of paint on! The gaps between the wing and fuselage were sorted out by bits of waste resin, I never throw out scrap bit of resin, they can be so handy. In this case in less hen 5 minutes after the strips were glued in the joins were completely finished and perfect. I love working with resin!

 

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As can be seen from now on I removed the coat(s) of primer from the wings, it took a while and was quite messy. The good thing is that I didn’t damage the paint work in the wheel well or details in the wing folds.

 

I fitted the wing tip lights. There are meant (?) to be small ones fitted to the trailing edge tips of the wings, but looking at lots of different photos of aircraft they don’t seem to be a standard fitting. They don’t seem to be visible on period photos of aircraft at that time, I wonder if they were a later feature. Anyway I’ll be leaving them off. The under wing recognition lights were just a disk of clear resin! I tidied them up a bit buy fitting a reflector under the cover, I just don’t know if they were coloured or not.  Anyway they look better.

 

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The exhaust pipes were painted along with the exhaust guard on the fuselage, and then the cowling was fitted. This wasn’t 100% successful.

 

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I am of the conclusion that the cowling is either slightly to large in diameter, or there was some shrinkage of the main wing. I was really careful in cleaning up the front join for the wing/fuselage, as I knew if I removed too much material they wouldn’t line up correctly. So I’m quite surprised that there is such an alignment error. I’ve tried to clean it up as best as I can but it’s just going to have to stay like that. I noticed in photos of one of the Pro-builds that they had similar issues but there was no mention in the build blog. It’s not that bad, just a bit annoying.

 

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I’ve started working on the U/c, I’ve decided to go with silver for the legs instead of grey because I can not find anything 100% definitive on what colour they were at that time. B/W photos are of no help as the tones are so close and Resto aircraft………  There are a couple of “springs” which are attached to the actuator arms for the gear, they should have shrouds over them, so I added these with aluminium tube.

 

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I also fitted the main actuator for the gear was well in the wheel wells.  It's still in the test fitting stage, I won't fit these until the end of the build.

 

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Finally the wheel covers. I had lost for a while one of the small wheel covers, so I ended up making two new ones. An hour later I found the one I’d lost!  The LHS door was meant to have a teardrop fairing on it, I’m not sure what it was for, but I needed to add it. They’ve been given an initial coat of paint, I’ll do the panel lines then mist a final top coat on them. These should be fairly quick to finish.

 

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Tomorrow depending how things go, I’ll start painting the outer wing sections. That way if I stuff everything up with the new techniques, it’ll be easy to remove and start again. I’m still tossing up whether to paint on the roundels or not. The ones supplied in the Novascale decal set are very grainy in their printing and just don’t look right. I’d use the kit ones but they’re the wrong size, they’re “type D’s” but 4 of them are slightly too large unfortunately. RAN ones with the Kangaroo are of a later time period!

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Looking real good, i like the gear bays, and the wing fold work is spot on, i feel for you with the polyurethane paints, i don't do full models in it any more  now,  after the hataka f111 fiasco, i only use them for brush painting small details and extras, too much trouble, i see where you tried to sand it back on the wing underside, its left a rendition  of the  coast of norway, well done for removal, 

Glynn 

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You are doing a fantastic job on this Sea Fury. I like the propeller jig and the excellent painting of the prop cowling and undercarriage bays. What paint did you use for those? Looks like zinc chromate primer. Great job. I have some inspiration for my Airfix Fury. Well done. 

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3 hours ago, Hewy said:

Looking real good, i like the gear bays, and the wing fold work is spot on, i feel for you with the polyurethane paints, i don't do full models in it any more  now,  after the hataka f111 fiasco, i only use them for brush painting small details and extras, too much trouble, i see where you tried to sand it back on the wing underside, its left a rendition  of the  coast of norway, well done for removal, 

Glynn 

thanks, I was really surprised at the reaction to water, though I think being on resin didn't help. A lot of acrylics have trouble staying on resin (even enamels for that matter to). I find Tamiya acrylics have worked the best in the past, just give everything a good rubdown with enamel thinner first. I'll be sticking to that method now.

3 hours ago, Threadbear said:

You are doing a fantastic job on this Sea Fury. I like the propeller jig and the excellent painting of the prop cowling and undercarriage bays. What paint did you use for those? Looks like zinc chromate primer. Great job. I have some inspiration for my Airfix Fury. Well done. 

thanks. The colour is meant to represent Hawker Primer, it was there own version of zinc chromate primer. From what I have read it was a slightly lighter or less intense colour than the standard ZCP we all know. Tamiya XF-4 has been suggested as the closest match to it, though I lightened mine with about 20%. I'd just paint it straight on first, then darken the panel lines, then mist on the lightened batch until you get recess shading you like. I use to just add the panel wash and remove it to get the shading, but this way it's much more subtle. I really like how it ends up looking and you don't have to clear coat before the wash!

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1 hour ago, trickyrich said:

A lot of acrylics have trouble staying on resin (even enamels for that matter to).

I have keyed the resin in the past by using 2000 grit sanding film. Its enough to scuff the surface but not gritty enough to leave scratch marks. The micro scratches let the paint have more and varied surface to attach to. 

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I'm posting a link to this site which some of you may have seen already but if not it's a very useful one for Australian and New Zealand military aircraft.

 

ADF Gallery

 

I've found it invaluable for my builds and there are quite a few photos on the site I've never seen else where. For the time period I'm building to there was quite a variation in the markings, it was a bit of a transition period as I'm finding out. The finishes on the aircraft varied greatly as well, going from almost factory fresh to the paint on the upper wings being badly faded or discoloured from being out in the open at sea. However good the paint was they used the conditions up there were a bit much for it.

 

Sorry I can't post the photo's....copyright and all that stuff!! But if you go to the Sea Fury gallery you'll find them......including aircraft 110 that tried to eat 108's tail! 

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16 minutes ago, Corsairfoxfouruncle said:

Thanks now i need an australian cobra ! Yes they never recieved them, the order was canceled. Think what a Whif that would be. 

I agree they would have been nice! My son works on the ARH Tiger's and defence is trying to work out if they should carry out their mid-life updates or replace them. We've had them for 10 years but they only "officially" went operational last years! I know Bell is pushing hard their AH-1Z Viper.......I may have to do one in 1st. Avn Regt colour scheme! :D

 

....opps of topic....

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…..well not quite, but am getting close to. :D

 

Ok first up these beauties showed up for me yesterday, so I had to fit them.

 

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….a task I made very hard for myself, needless to lots of plastic and resin was damaged/destroyed in the process! But they are at a stage where I can just insert and glue them in and it’s sorted.

 

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The wing isn't cracked, those cracks are actually filled with CA cement, there's no way that wing will split apart!!!

 

After some final touches and cleaning up, plus a rub down with thinners (who doesn’t like that!!!) it was time for the final primer. For this I used Tamiya’s XF-19 acrylic, it goes on so easily and turns out to be a nice tuff finish.

 

The wings were perfect…

 

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…there were still a few minor issues with the fuselage that I needed to fix. The shiny bits on the underside are blobs of CA cement, I used them as a filler for the problem areas.

 

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So this morning after these few areas were cleaned up it was painting time.

 

And here she is all finished in her experimental Li-Vis camouflage!!! Cool huh, just need some gloss before the decals and she’s done painting!

 

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….well not quite! :D There’s about 5 hours work here and this is just the base coat and pre-shading!

 

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As I mentioned I’m trying something a bit different here. Because there as such large expanses of just one colour I needed to do something to break up the flatness that would result. So other than pre-shading panel lines I masked out different panels and painted them different colours of grey. I used grey as it’s the colour I have the largest range of. The leading edges have also been darkened slightly as these naturally darken up from the dirt and dust they pick up in the air…strange but true. Finally all the upper/top surfaces have been lightened slightly with thinned white to help “bleach” paint from sunlight. You can see the slight difference on the wing upper and lower surfaces.

 

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Now to make this all work I’ll be laying down really thinned out coats of Sky and EDS Grey, hopefully light enough to give the finish some life. I know I’ll have to lighten up some of the top surfaces with some post-shading as well, as they were quite damaged by the elements going by some of the photos.

 

If I get it right it’s going to look amazing…this is all practice though for an F-14D BombCat I’m building later in the year.

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Wow Rich... this is looking like one of those threads to bookmark for future reference purposes? Exceptional modelling skills on show so far. This will be one build to keep a keen eye on! 

 

Cheers.. Dave 

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Well not a lot to show for all of yesterdays work.

 

First up was to mask everything up for the first colour, Sky. I didn’t want any overspray because as mentioned these coat will be really fine and it may have given and edge. Actually masking took a while.

 

I’m using Mr Hobby’s Sky (H74) for the first colour, this was initially blended down to a 55/45 mix with Mr Colour Levelling Solution for the first coat, and nearly 40/60 for the last (I didn’t try for any higher ratios as started to spray a bit watery for my liking….played it safe.

 

It went on like a dream!!! :yahoo:

 

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While I was doing the pre-shading I was careful not to go too contrasting with the panel colours, as I was a bit worried how it would look with the main colour on. I needn’t as it turns out, I could have fair more extreme! That said I’m super happy with the results, just the look I was after not too much but not a bland flat surface!

 

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The only issue I had paint takes forever to dry and even longer to harden so as a result there is a small mark one the port wing caused by sausage finger here!! :wall:

 

Next up is to mask up everything again for the EDS Grey. But first I have to sort out the front canopy! It’s a bit warped and out of shape, mostly caused by it being so thin. I mean it’s thinner than a good quality VacForm one, I’ve never come across clear resin this thin……..and it scares me! I’ll do the hot water (maybe warm this time) to see if that helps than just slowly tack it in place with CA cement. Being resin it won’t “fog up” with the CA. I only have one canopy so I don’t want to stuff this up!

 

In between coats and drying I started getting the weapons and pylons ready for painting. The bomb pylons here were the main issue, the bomb supports were the wrong shape. The actual supports were spring-loaded fingers rather the normal arms with the adjustable screws (?) on the stays, the link below shows what I mean.

 

http://www.brengun.cz/e-shop/1-32-accessories-31/us-bomb-racks-935#

 

The bomb racks now look much closed to the real thing, not that you get to see that much, everything was undercoated so I just need to go over them to tidy up any issues and they can them be painted.

 

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The new Diamond patterned tyres showed as well so I can get that task completed now, though the tail wheel is still a bit of a problem as the rim is a smaller diameter than the tyre! So I spent a good hour rummaging around for a replacement…….I get distracted easily! :whistle:

 

And I found this,

 

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Well it wasn’t really hidden just sitting on a bottom shelf. I started her over 10 years ago and just never got to finish her. My building and paint skills are a lot better now so I probably should finish her off…..that said I was up till 3am work on her!

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