modelling minion

I think that your work on the engine looks great Bob. A good save with the exhaust pipes!

Very nice work Nigel, she is coming along a treat.

I think Plastic Patrice looks quite at home in the Corsair cockpit, is he a less famous relative of Plastic Bertrand? And yes I know he was Belgian but he might have family in France. If any of this goes awry we shall all forget that anything happened and sing the praises of your seatbelts.

It may not be your favourite technique Tim but it looks like it worked very well.

Definitely your idea Dennis, the evidence is a couple of replies up!

Might actually improve some of our models!

Nice work Tim.

Fast work Tim, looks like you will be first in the gallery at this rate!

Some nice progress there. Doing work like sorting out scribed lines and the drilling takes a lot longer than you think, we it does for me anyway.

Cockpit looks much improved John, very nice work.

Nice work John, the interior is looking great.

Thats a great photo Alan and perfectly illustrates the different paint used, thanks for sharing it.

A bit later than promised but here are some pics. We'll start with the easy ones first, the cockpit floor and the wings. The parts for these were removed and cleaned up and in the case of the wings the holes drilled for the rocket stubs for later and then a bit of glue added and we get what you see below; Not bad detail for OOTB especially when it is painted and weathered, the seat has a rather crude moulded on harness which I will probably remove and replace with either aftermarket or scratch belts. The wings go together quite well, there is some cleaning up required but nothing out of the ordinary. Now we move onto the fuselage.... The Hasegawa fuselage walls for the cockpit are just bare plastic, which isn't right for any mark of Corsair, and from looking at cockpit pictures of F4U-5N's there should be what looks like paneling which is flat that covers the side walls so I made some supports out of plastic strip and then fitted some acetate over the top to form the panels. At the minute it looks quite crude (it is quite crude!) but I took the picture now so you could see the supports through the clear acetate, hopefully when painted and a few placards added it will look better, and the other fuselage half has had the same treatment. Next is one of the not so good things about these Hasegawa kits. To get the different nose profiles they have used a multi-purpose mould to which they add the nose section desired for whichever kit they are making and this can result in a less than clean join down the fuselage sides in the area marked in red. On my F4U-7 it wasn't too bad at all but this one had a nasty step which needed removing on both halves and I'm still not 100% happy with hos it looks and feels, removing it also means the inevitable loss of details which I will need to re-scribe later. None of this makes the kit unbuildable but it can be a pain to clean up and to be honest we expect better from Hasegawa. That's it for now, not sure how much progress will be made today but as usual all comments and criticisms are welcome. Craig.

Thanks Werner, no need to apologise my friend, there are that many great builds going on it is really difficult to keep track of what people are building and in which GB!

And I have no doubt that you will succeed.

It might be rough John but you are knocking it into shape.

Well done Steve she looks fantastic. Great to see that you have used the stand too exactly in the spirit of the GB. Very well done mate!

Paul that is truly excellent work, the cockpit looks fantastic as does the interior detail for the rear fuselage. I can't see any problems that I would want to hide and would happily be pointing people in the direction of the cockpit not covering it up!

That is excellent work John, your added details to the engine make a huge difference.

Good to know as I've got my eye on one on a certain auction site. I couldn't agree more Andy, it's a fantastic scheme.

That is a really smart paint job, excellent!

I think your Ouragan is looking great Andy. Funny how the blue paint behaved itself perfectly when the brown was a pain. Other than the stripes how are the decals behaving?

Thats a very neat job for decal strip, well done!

That is some very nice work on the engine Bob, it looks great.

Thanks Bob, been doing a few little bits today, nothing special mostly just cleaning up parts might get some pics up later.