BorisAlexandrov

First off... the clear parts. It's a quasi-full interior kit that has a lot of details on the inside, and Zoukei Mura is kind enough to provide these outer panels as clear parts. They're quite delicate and brittle, and given their enormous sizes the sprue gates are too wide for comfort. So instead of a sprue nipper I turned to my faithful Tamiya craft saw for helping me remove these parts from the sprue and clean the residues. To apply an even pressure on the clear parts to prevent shattering I sawed on both sides and worked bit by bit all the way to the center until the remaining gate residue can be safely removed with a blade. Thankfully these parts survived this violent process. After a few sanding passes with the sanding sponges by Meng and DSpiae, this is what I ended up with. One issue that I have with these clear parts though - They are smooth on the inside but quite frosty and bumpy on the outside. If you want a perfect, clear like glass frame to show off the interior details you're out of luck. I tried multiple polishing compounds on these parts for curiosity and concluded that, you'll need to sand the outside surfaces real hard multiple times and risk losing all the panel lines and rivets detail, or else you'll need to stare closely at the blurry interior through this frosty clear parts once you've done. And if you are planning on painting both sides of the clear parts like me, there's no backup regular grey parts. So... do tread carefully when dealing with these clear parts because there's no fallback option this time. Oh and by the way, for the aircraft that appeared on the box art as the victim of this Ho-229, I do have the kit stashed recently as well... Not quite certain if I can do the kit justice though. Guess I need a bit more motivation to make it the subject of my future posts.

Hello fellow friends from britmodeller! It's my first time ever posting here and I'm planning on building a Ho-229 by Zoukei Mura as a start. These late ww2 doomsday wunderwaffes wielded by the axis never cease to fascinate me. Maybe it's true that they were rushed by the desperate engineers who attempted a last ditch effort at turning the tide of the war, that they either came too late to do anything useful or cost questionable amount of resources, but the concepts behind them are still quite imaginative even in today's standards. I'm planning on making this post as episode one of my wunderwaffe series including stuff like V2, Ho-229, Me-163, Me-262, Mammut tank, Kikka and more, starting from Ho-229 for its appearance in Wolfenstein: The New Order. Now that the kit has finally been restocked thanks to Volks USA, I grabbed two of them as soon as I can while they're still there. My plan is to build a heavily weathered Ho-229 like the one being restored in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum because... I love chipping paint with hair gel. So here we are, admiring the box art of a Ho-229 that just scored a Lancaster kill in an interception: (Let's just ignore my messy workbench for once) Interestingly enough, the box is a hybrid of top opener and side opener. Something I've only seen in Zvezda kits. Instruction manuals from Zoukei Mura are really something else. Having this Bauanleitung laid on my workbench really makes me feel like a German aviation engineer in late April 1945, wondering how to get my job done while being bombarded by both B-17s during the day and Lancasters at night. It's by far the most comprehensive, detailed, unambiguous instruction I've ever seen in my short model life... Or am I not supposed to disclose this STRENG GEHEIM Nur Für den Dienstgebrauch material here? Maybe I should remove this post before any Gestapos show up? Since it's easy to find out-of-the-box sprue reviews and build reviews for this kit pretty much everywhere now, I won't be posting photos of all the sprues in the box. I'll show them when this build unfolds, of course.

Way to go, that's going to be a project of lifetime! Looking good so far!