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Don’t forget the undercarriage…
The inner cargo hold pod fits very well into the fuselage halves and everything seemed to line up well. it’s a good idea to add the undercarriage units at this stage and definitely before you attach the separate lower fuselage panel. I was worried about knocking these off and that may still be an issue but to insert them later after painting as I’d prefer to do look unlikely given the layout.
The fuselage closed very well except around the nose where something seemed to be fouling a clean join, but I just couldn’t locate it. Maybe it was this, but I ended up with a gap at the front left side of the separate lower fuselage panel. No great shakes though as I just used cyano for this front area and added a shim of plasticard to the gap and taped everything up.
Don’t forget that if you plan to have the re-positioned rear cargo doors these need to go in just before you reach the rear fuselage with your glue. This is useful as they will act as masks during the forthcoming spray job.
So, while everything sets solid overnight that’s it for this first instalment and I will be back with you very soon when we take off the bandages and see how the joins have healed!
Construction continues…
As you can see the fuselage is all together now and the big cleanup has largely been completed. This will take a bit of time as there are many joins to attend to. None has proved very problematic, just that one under the fuselage where I had to insert a shim of plasticard. Some cyano was needed in some places to act as filler and I like to use this for small areas like joins (see your Techniques Bank) because when it’s dry (and I set the cyano with activator when using it for this task) it can be easily re-scribed. For this re-scribing task (there’s an HD video on this in the TB) an Olfa P-Cutter is a great tool, mainly because it is so reliable and never fails to provide a great new scribed panel line.
