Sword 1:72 Lightning T4

[Viking]

Having seen Reheat and Paul J's lovely builds of this kit I was inspired to get cracking on mine!
I thought I would do a WIP and see what wrinkles there were to iron out, if any. Hopefully it may help anyone else building it as it seems to have sold like hot cakes, so there must be hundreds out there!

First thing was a lack of any firm method to hold the cockpit tub in place, so a few strips of plasticard sorted that out, glued on to the very thin marks in the fuselage sides.

They won't interfere with the nose bullet, and shouldn't be visible when finished.
For a T4 you need to shorten the cable ducts, though this is not mentioned in the instructions. The drawings on the plans show it though. Careful work with a blade removes them, with a final sanding and a little bit of rescribe. They are fine for a T5 though, and can be left alone.

Main interior components were assembled,

primed, and painted in base colours.

The ledges are not so obvious when painted;

The seats have an awful lot of pre-painted etch brass to go on them, and look quite nice;

Tub made up;

Nice pre-painted instrument panel too. Apparently this is not quite accurate for a T4, bieing a T5 panel. I'm not too concerned though, my T4 will be buttoned up with the canopy closed.

I thought a bit of nose weight would be advisable. I cyano in a pebble. (My neighbor has put a load of these in the strip of land between our driveways, all sorts of shapes & sizes! Little does he know how useful they are). I needed to trim the front edge of the cockpit sides to get the instrument panel to fit, you can see where I have removed the black paint.

Nice easy fit of the tub, it won't even need to be glued. It does close up at the front better than shown here.

Then the wings. There are som ejector pin towers that need shaving off, or they will interfere with the fit of the wing halves.
Top, not removed, lower trimmed off.

Pretty happy with it all so far, I've got a T5 on the go alongside it!

Thanks for looking,

John

[Tomoshenko]

Cockpit and seats looking good so far. Are you going with the box scheme?

[Lightningboy2000]

That looks superbly well done!

I've been doing the same thing (on the T.4) apart from your excellent idea to add plastic strip to those ledges. With mine I aligned the cockpit with the moulded ledges on both sides and found that the whole cockpit was too wide. The top fuselage wouldn't go together and neither would the nose by about 2mm. Not sure if all mouldings are the same. Oh and I ended up with a more oval than circular intake which looked odd.

Have got the T.5 as well but haven't started that yet, so will try your method. Really hope it all goes together as nicely as yours.

Martin