Back | Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14
Engines…
Construction moves temporarily to the engines and getting these together. The oval shape of the intake ring is good and is moulded separately. I toyed with the idea of assembling and attaching these after painting but the fit to the main pos isn’t perfect so I decided to assemble them completely and paint afterwards. Looking at the painting involved I hope that this is a good call, along with fitting the engines to their pylons and cleaning up that join.
You can probably see from the images that there are a few sink marks on the engine cowls and I used cyano glue to fill these and activator to set it immediately. This allows you to sand the area in about 10 minutes and this speeds up the whole process. In fact, the more you look, the exhaust pipes are finely moulded but need careful sanding to create a nice unbroken ring. Assembly is straightforward though and all is secured with liquid poly. While the engine pods are drying take a look inside near the fan blades and you’ll see some very prominent joins that need to be filled. Even in 1:144 scale these parts are quite big so it’s worth taking extra time to sort these now. I used white PVA to start with, applying with a cocktail stick and when that was dry, adding a bit more and finally after that goes off, some Mr Surfacer to blend it all in. That looked ok to me.
The pair of small vanes, one for each side of the engine cowls have been left off to facilitate painting and will get added later on. These are incredibly well moulded and will look very subtle when attached.