Nose weight?
With the tub all tucked snuggly inside and the fuselage top and bottom joined, it’s time to see how much nose weight is needed. Well I think we could get away with none, however I am a cautious fellow, so you can bet the nosecone will be loaded.
Above we see the exhaust. It’s a bit hard to see, but notice how thick the outer lip is?
I have taken less than 30 seconds to thin the outer lip down to a much more scale realistic size. Little touches like this make all the difference when viewed on the final model and take such little effort to achieve.
Speaking of small touches that look great. Intake vents are a favourite of model manufacturers for leaving solid (see the right hand intake). Using a fine drill and blade tip, you can quickly hollow these guys out and they look so much better for it.
It was at this point that this kit started to remind me of the AV-8B I built sometime back. Hasegawa have engineered the kit to allow them to do multiple variants, which means many more “optional” panels and sections that need to be attached by the modeller (rather than by the molding process).
Anyway, this in itself is not a bad thing. It’s only a pain when each of these optional panels does not fit well. So it is with the two panels on the wing leading edges (some variants of the Draken have gun ports on both sides etc). In this pic, you can see the end result of poorly fitting panel being filled with superglue and sanded back to shape. This will later be re-scribed to bring the panel lines back.