David H

Painting of the bare metal begins with the aft fuselage. I'd actually forgotten how i did it last year on my YF-104A so i had to go back and look at my records. First i masked along the fuselage "Break Point" aft of the trailing edge. The aft fuselage is where most of the colour variation is so it kind of gets sectioned off for special treatment. Something i had struggled with in the past had been masking off the flush position formation lights. Trying to punch masks from Tamiya Tape or equivalent just wouldn't give me a clean enough result. Just as a lark, i tried punching some out from Tamiya flexible plastic tape for curves. It worked! Huzzah!! And then came the silver paint. I always regard the first coat of silver as a roll of the dice, because half the time it reveals sanding scratches that need to be worked out...inevitably leading to a repaint. I got pretty lucky this time. Some cleanup needed to the knife edge vertical fin, and a seam on the belly immediately behind the ventral fin. But i can live with that. https://flic.kr/p/2shMc7w I had forgotten that i had undercoated big sections of the aft fuselage on the YF- with Semigloss Black. However, it's not hard to go back and fix this. So, we'll fix those areas tomorrow, shoot some semigloss black, and then shoot some more LP-11 over that, and we'll see how things look. Thanks for shopping at Jurassic Jets. We hope to see you again soon.

Neil, i might be stating the obvious, but with rebate joints from hell like that, using a rigid sanding stick or block helps to distribute the pressure across the joint and it can deliver a more consistently flat surface. If a filled rebate joint is done properly, there should be very few traces of filler remaining anywhere in the narrow joint line itself. I know it's tedious, but time spent thinning down the nesting lower planks from the inside also helps tremendously in mitigating the "step" between the two adjacent parts. I don't mean this as a criticism, but having built several airliner models with this style of plank construction i think it's an important tip worth passing along. -d-

Painting Begins. i might be able to start on the bare metal tomorrow. We'll see. First coat may be sanding scratch city...

<in Michael Caine Voice>: Cheers, Ol Son!

Hello again, Polystyrene Citizens. The Middle canopy piece has been installed (in some places more than once), and i'm blending in the bases with filler. It may alarm some out there, but i normally sand my canopies down before polishing them back. Sometimes it's on account of lousy fit. In this case, it because of a lot of scratches while the parts languished in the box. Also, the rear canopy served as an alignment tool for setting the longitudinal location between the front and rear canopies. Like a lot of aspects of this kit, not a lot of positive location guidance here... The first joint that i glued was the left side one. The glue seemed to take OK so when dry, i nudged the right side into place, bombed it with Extra Thin and taped into place to dry. So anyway, while sanding the filler at the base of the right side, the left side joint cracked open. Fortunately the canopy did not crack or shatter. So... glue the left side back in place..let it dry, and then try filling it again. While *this* has been drying, i sprayed the upper wings with a healthy coat of decanted white surface primer and set it aside to dry overnite. This morning i will mask the wings off and sand away as much excess overspray as i can. I found some joints that the black primer did not highlight, so i will need to mask off the white part and carefully fill and sand around the joint. Nothing i haven't done before, but a bit of a buzzkill as the painting stage kicks off. As ever, keep those letters and cards coming. -d-

The "in-between" piece has been glued in and is awaiting a priming/fault-finding/fixing iteration. There was too much "spread" in the base of the canopy piece so gluing it on at the end really wasn't the option i was hoping for. -d-

Major tinkerage happening at Convair-Bremerton... Patching up the narrow red pinstripe around the nose is done. What remains is some localized re painting and cleaning up of the narrow white part underneath and of course repainting the grey radome (The technical *Boop* maneouvre will happen much later in the build) Another thing i wanted to address were the air bubbles found in the joint at the base of the vertical fin... https://flic.kr/p/2s5y5mo I wasn't able to eliminate these entirely but i did mitigate them. It did however, require a strip down and repaint of the rather prominent bare metal base of the vertical fin. I accidentally re painted using SM-208 instead of SM-201. I think once the oil paint wash goes on it will knock down the brilliance enough. 990s were bright shiny aeroplanes, but when photographed on overcast days on wet ramps the planes had the look of being shiny but slightly oily or sort of "scuzzy"... Think i mentioned it before, but when Swissair passed their planes through rework, they stripped off the white paint and red cheatline at the aft end of the fuselage, plus they removed the light gull grey paint on the tailplanes. I think that would be accurate for a -990 before it underwent the in-house performance enhancing mods (e.g., modified wing root fairing, extended aft nacelle/Reverser assemblies, etc.) So...if you are pondering that Revell/Atlantis kit- it represents the early configuration. I don't know why i gravitate towards paint schemes with narrow cheat lines around the nose.... Not quite 100% symmetrical- but i'll take it. More to come.... -d-

The first layer of Mr Surfacer on the wing joints seemed to work, so i then carefully wet sanded the wings and wing roots back down to bare plastic. I don't have a fetish for wheel wells, and i don't put my models on mirrors...but here you can see i didn't really cut any corners on the undersides... In case i didn't mention it: Hasegawa provides the main gear struts as a one-piece integral unit. It's intended to be installed prior to the longitudinal wheel well keel/truss. This makes for complicated handling during the build. I carefully sawed the struts from the central mounting block and set them aside. As a side note, Hasegawa would have you install the landing gear and doors very late in the game. The wings are almost an afterthought, coming along only very late in the build. One of those instances where we diverge from the kit instructions for very good reasons. They provided absolutely no help for attaching the landing gear doors either, but i digress. So at this point, the windscreen needs to be semi-polished and masked off. I could theoretically begin painting right now. However, it would probably be prudent to do a fit check of the remaining canopy pieces. I thought about adding the "In-Between" piece after painting but the more i think about it, i think it would be better to attach it now and blend it in. If i can wedge the front and rear canopies in it would probably ease the whole masking process. What a could do right now, is paint the upper wings since i'm doing a lot of painting of the fuselage uppers on the -990 right now. More to come.... -d-

definitely not panel lines. -d-

Took the model out of the fixture this morning and everything is more or less OK. Liquid cement did not flow entirely along the wing joint, so i gave it a second application of Extra thin and set it aside. The lower wings and the wing root also got a blast of Mr Surfacer Black for fault finding and a little bit of Mr Surfacer 1000 was needed on one of the joints. Will probably pick this back up tomorrow. Been working on the Coronado... -d-

I finished cleaning up the fuselage... Then, as mentioned above i fashioned some flush position lights for the aft fuselage... With that tedious exercise out of the way, i could go ahead and install the wings. I'll leave this to dry overnite and then survey the joint work tomorrow.... -d-

Those nacelles look great- especially considering what you started with. Are those intake lips a ring that was made from thick styrene plate that was bored out and sanded to fit? -d-

Installed the windscreen, cleaned up the joint and am cleaning up the fuselage. Guess i should get back to the Convair 990 now.....

Looks good, Barry!! -d-

OK, the starboard side has been largely cleaned up now.... ...and now back to fixing the nose. -d-