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And so to the undercarriage…
The Eduard set gives brake lines and what look like ‘jubilee clips’ which wrap around the main gear legs. Although very fiddly to apply, these look very authentic when finished and dry brushed and worth the effort.
I found the assembly of the landing gear/IFR probe (step#20) a very delicate operation, the gear leg and housing being connected by very fine finger hinges. A little too much cement here could spoil your day and the look of the legs.
I chose to put in the fine pipe work on the refueling probe, it being quite prominent using plasticard ‘blocks’ and fine copper wire. Photos are provided in the instructions showing a lot of detail here, once again a scan around a ‘walk-around’ photo on the web will help. The tail wheel assembly was very straightforward, with Eduard brake lines fitted here too.
Something that had been ‘niggling’ at me since I started the build was the auxiliary fuel tank in the fuselage, although well moulded, I thought that the straps around it looked too neat, so I chose to just go over them with Tamiya tape, cutting carefully up to the buckles, and then leaving a loose end with a buckle. Although a loose strap would probably never be allowed, it just looks a little more ‘used’.
As the main cabin was going to look a lot busier, glaring omissions could not be tolerated. There’s not many on this kit, but the worst must be the lack of bulkhead detail behind the front glazing by the crew’s feet. It should not be possible to see straight through the fuselage…but you can. There’s quite a bit missing here, above and below the cabin floor. Internet to the rescue again. Above it was quite simple to block the ‘view’ behind the control panel, but as the area below the floor is very visible, it required a little more work.
It was noticeable that there is a large square hole under each of the pilot/co-pilot seats, so this was cut out and a plasticard box frame fitted around it. With a coat of yellow/green primer it was just noticeable under the finely detailed seats, the only problem with these seats being a huge ejector pin mark. I was not worried about these because the crew was going to be in the seats, so I left them alone.
The two gunners’ seats in the cabin are attached by turnbuckles on the real aircraft, this is well reproduced on the model, so well in fact that it is another incredibly fiddly bit to build. I dry fitted the floor and roof together after cementing the seats to the roof to let the seats ‘sit’ until dry. I also tried to represent the fabric cover over the front part of the cabin roof by using a coloured sheet of card, cut to shape. It looked quite reasonable. With some added detail to the rear of the fairly sparse cabin roof, and a coat of grey, I moved onto the throttle quadrant at the front. Knobs and levers were added, as well as the flexible electric cables for the internal lights, these were made by winding fine wire around a piece of rod. Photo references were used for the detail colours.
As a bit of a break from bulkheads, seats and levers, I thought that I would assemble some weapons. Only the cabin weapons though, the mini Gatling guns, and 30 cal. door guns. In doing this, I added ejected casing tubes from the Gatling guns using a length of spring taken from a ball bearing seal. This was given the required shape by a piece of bent copper wire, and fitted into a drilled hole in the side of the gun body.
The support beams holding the guns were hollowed out by drilling down the ends and then fitted to the cabin side parts, which were then fitted to the cabin floor.
