Have a quick read of the review here to see my initial thoughts on the kit if you like. I don't mind waiting
Well... first item for work was to clean up the central sprues that sit in the middle of the two hull parts. Easy to do, and so I moved on to snippiing off a couple of the round equipment bay inserts on the cargo jaws up front. Because of the way they're sprued up, all you have to do is nip them close to the attachment lugs and clip them in. They really are THAT good a fit. A little dribble of liquid glue, and some pressure for a short while, and we're done. The same process was used for all of the many inserts, the detail of which is excellent! No shadow of a doubt, the detail is the crispest (as previously mentioned in the review), and extra spruelets have been added around the edges to ensure that the detail gets a full fill of styrene during the moulding process. Well worth the effort of nipping them off.
I had a few misgivings about simply gluing the side walls into the bottom of the hull, as I felt that if I didn't get them perfectly square, it could cause fit issues with the upper hull when it came time to close it up. As a precaution, I installed a few parts, and did a test fit - no problems encountered at all, as the mounting lugs are precise, so I ploughed on. Here you should take the time to remove any mould seams on the edges of the parts, as although you can't see some of them, others are on view.
The instructions show you attaching the big round endy things (yes, those again) being attached later in the build when the hull is joined. I didn't want to have any hull parts lying around to be painted off the hull, so I joined them to the bottom half, again, checking alignment by test fitting the top hull as I went along. Everything fits beautifully, and I will be able to keep the two hull parts separate until after painting, so I can paint the cargo jaws insides easily with my airbrush. The cockpit amd crew tube would also be able to be click-fitted later if you so choose, but I suspect I'll be attaching mine once I have the cockpit painted, which fits INSIDE the tube parts, so can't be left off until later.
So how does it look so far? Good... the build has been a breeze, and I think has taken me about 30 minutes so far. The quality of the moulding really shows in the speed and ease of construction
That chunk of blutak was just there to hold a joint closed while the glue set.
The front panel of the jaws locks the two halves of the hull together, so would have stopped me from splitting it for painting, so I lopped off the lugs from the top of the hull to solve that issue. I clipped the hull halves together while the glue set though, just to make sure they ended up in the right place.
I've also built up the antenna and am working on the cockpit area now. Just need some refs... Jeff?
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