SoftScience

Now it's beginning to take shape. And a question for the experts - what's the time.period when the italians flew these in green and gray camouflage?

The first steps taken Fitting the resin cockpit tub is a little tricky, so here is some advice 1. Glue the forward 1/4th of the fuselage halves. Essentially the parts in front of the cockpit, and those parts only. Let thr back parts dangle losely in the air 2. Once these are dry, stuff a bit of weight into the nose, 3. Insert the resin tub through the cockpit opening by spreading the unglued rear parts of the fuselage. Just let it sit loosely inside and then glue the rear parts of the fuselage together. 4. Add some CA to the sills that are inside the fuselage, beneath the tub. Center the tub on these. The resin part is narrower than the opening, so it's sides will not touch the fuselage side walls. 5. Position the tub so that the notches in the resin walls line up with the small square protrusions on the insides of the fuselage walls, just beneath the cockpit opening. These protrusions won't reach the notches in the resin part, because once again, it is narrower than the fuselage. This is the correct orientation and position for the tub. Once your CA is dry, you can glue in some sheet styrene shims between the resin walls and fuselage walls. This will make your canopy sills seem wider, but I think this is better than an unsightly gap on either side of the cockpit walls which makes the flak curtains look like they're floating in mid air. The photo below shows the cockpit with the shims. The instrument panel has been glued to the coaming and those are just dry-fitted to check positioning. It all looks like it lines up.

Not much to report. I have been cleaning up and rescribing lines. I was almost done when my scriber madly slipped on the intake panel line and the attempts to fix it made things even worse. Fill sand and repeat.

In the 1990s, the Dominican Republic purchased a handful of surplus A-37s from the USAF. They extended the old SEA camo around the belly of these planes, and then added shark mouths because, why not? Shortly afterwards, Academy released a pretty nice kit of the A-37, but it was plagued by Academy's craptastic decals. Around 2012, Encore Models rereleased the Academy kit in a 2-pack, with a resin cockpit, resin weapons, and much nicer decals. In May of 2019, I bought said kit. And that brings us here..... i haven't started building yet, but check out these details, yo! This is 1/72

Just to be pedantic, tusks and fangs are modified canine teeth, so....

Was that prior to their releasing the same modular kits but with new decals and new prices period?

The finished ejection seat. It's not great, but good enough for a closed canopy. The front and back halves fit ok, but will need sanding. Which means rescribing. Dang!

I didn't pay much attention to this GB at first, as I WAS of the opinion that shark mouths only belong on P-40s, and I've built enough of those in the last few years. But I picked up Encore's boxing of the Academy A-37 which includes a Dominican bird with a really gnarly looking set of dientes. Estoy corregido. I also can pass up the chance to build something with Latin American markings.

I love watching short run builds. At some point they transition from a collection of poorly fitting chunky parts to a sleek model. Your effort is especially impressive. The Electra Jr looks so sleek and sharp in its coat of silver.

Very nice work on the resin cockpit. You mentioned some minor surgery; what did you have to do?

It's been pretty good so far, Steven. Typical Hasegawa; okay but not flawless fit. Today I worked on the cockpit. Im going to add some lead foil harneses, but need to find a good reference photo first. Oh, and have to add the bumblebee stripes to the ejection rings.

This is like the modeling version of hearing a B-side from some obscure Kajikistan-only released live album by the bass player from your favorite band's first band. i.e.. Cool!!!!

Good looking seat!

That's more detail than I expected to see inside an old-school Hasegawa kit. I like.it!

Thanks everyone for the kind words. It means a lot to me.