White and more white
What is becoming extremely apparent before any further construction continues is the amount of white painting that will be required. Here’s a list of the main areas to consider:
- The interior of the upper and lower main fuselage halves around the engine.
- Interior of the air intake ducts
- Interior of the intake tunnel
- Interior of the lift fan exhaust casing
- Around the lift intake areas on the interior and exterior of the upper fuselage
The lift fan exhaust post is nicely detailed, but needs the slats painted in black before some careful masking and the body painted in white, time consuming but worth the effort for this piece.
Engine
You’re not going to see much of the complete engine, shame really as it is very nicely moulded and a great base for the super detailer to start with. What will be highly visible is the fan blades and surrounds, so worth the time and effort here to finish these in Alclad II Stainless Steel. The jet pipe has options for normal flight or vertical landing, either way you can leave this off till much later in the build.
Overall the engine goes together neatly, but I would leave the completed intake ducts and intake tunnel off at this point, and you’ll see why in a moment.
Bringing it all together
I departed from the instructions at this point, mainly based on dry fitting attempts and realizing the fit is so tight that there must be an easier way to do this. The instructions call for fitting the fully complete engine (including air ducts and lift fan to the lower fuselage, followed by the forward lower fuselage with the wheel bay and cockpit tub in situ. It just didn’t feel right to me, so after trying various methods, here’s what I came up with:
- Fit the main engine only to the upper fuselage
- Fit the cockpit tub in place
- Align and fit the air intake ducts, so you get a nice seat to the upper fuselage
- Note that I pre-fitted part of the fan blade
- Fit the lift fan casing into position, remembering to run the compressor shaft into the fan blade centre
- Build the two tunnel halves round the shaft, trust me the upper one slides in easily and the locating slot in the compressor casing ensures alignment
- Add some weight around the cockpit tub to prevent a tail sitter
- Fit the lift fan exhaust into the locating pins on the lower fuselage, now you are ready to bring the two fuselage halves together
- This takes some massaging as the alignment is so tight, but it will go if you start at the rear and work forward
- Last but not least add the lower forward fuselage with the front wheel bay in place
If there was any goof here it was me, when I ran a little too much liquid cement under the tape holding the forward fuselage halves together, so an unsightly glue spot, but nothing that can’t be fixed.