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Hello again. Due to impending holidays, chances of visitors, and general laziness, I have determined to try, at least for the rest of this year, to do some simple, quick to resolve models -- I hope! With that in mind, first up is the excellent Planet Models XF-91 Thundercepter V-Tail version. Having done the radome-equipped, standard tail version a few years ago, I felt this model would meet the criteria, and be another example of a resin model build to encourage others to take the plunge! The Thundercepter was designed with inverse taper wings, to help combat the early jet phenomena of "pitch-up". You can discover all that conversation elsewhere on-line, so I won't cover it here. A secondary reason for building this aircraft was to explore the use of dual engines-- a regular jet for normal cruise, and a rocket assist when high speed was needed. In the end, as jet aircraft engines progressed, this need was deemed unnecessary, as well as the logistics surrounding having to ship, store and load dual fuels for each aircraft. Thus only two aircraft were ever built, both being used for testing. I'd like to imagine that a lot of the research that led to our modern dual-tail aircraft was due to this V-Tailed aircraft. Anyway, the box looks like this: The aircraft itself has very few major parts, but there are a lot of small pieces for the landing gear retraction links, etc. I will not do a kit review here, as it has been done elsewhere on-line. The first step on most resin models is to complete the "innards" before closing the fuselage. In this case, the innards consist of one large cockpit/front gear well piece, the ejection seat and backrest, control sick and instrument panel with foot pedals. I glued them all together and painted them appropriately. Then the cockpit assembly was glued to the right fuse half with CA, followed by a liberal dose of 560 canopy cement, which is kind of like heavy duty white glue, for insurance. You may refer to several of my previous builds on this subject, so I won't rant here... Care must be taken to assure that the intake splitter is truly vertical, and that the landing gear well lines up with the front gear door opening. Then some weight is added under the cockpit area, using the afore-mentioned CA + extra glue method: Above right, sorry for the blurry photo. Next, despite sanding the fuse halves flat with sandpaper on a flat surface, some filling will be required along the fuselage seams, but not a lot: When all that sanding is sorted, the v-tail is next added, and some filling done there as well: Planet models has thoughtfully provided a dotted line molded into the aircraft on each side to show the center-line of the wing. This helps immensely when positioning the wings onto the fuselage eventually. But, I had learned from the earlier model that I'd built, that this was no picnic -- so I marked and drilled the wings and fuse, drilled tiny holes, and used short lengths of wire to correctly locate the wings later on. This serves two purposes; one, to allow me to paint the wing before assembly if desired, and two, the wing on the aircraft has variable incidence, so the seam from wing to fuse will not need to be filled, resulting in use of less cement, thus the wire will add a little additional support: Above right, the same procedure is used for the fuel tanks, as adding them later with only glue is a real bear, at least for me. The wire pins just make life a lot easier. Next, the vacuformed canopy is carefully cut out, and glued to the fuselage with G-S watch cement: My usual process is to smooth the excess watch cement with 91 percent alcohol, but for some reason, this time around, I could not see the clear glue well enough to see whether is was filling everything smoothly. So, above right, I taped off the glass area of the canopy, and added some 3M spot putty, just to make sure everything was going "smoothly". As I have stated before, I go to great lengths to prevent "steps" where jet canopies join a fuselage, unless the real aircraft also had them. Well, time for putty to dry, and for me to plot my next evil deed, so more next time. Ed