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OK, going to be covering a lot of ground in this episode so grab a cup of coffee or your favorite adult beverage. Taking up where we left off, once I filled the various gaps around the rear most cowl piece I glued the cowl flap section to it. This only makes contact in two places so make certain your mating surfaces are clean and flat. One thing I hate about resin stuff is gluing them with superglue. No matter how well things fit it always seems that once the super glue is applied things don't line and you have so little time to make things right. Well I got lucky on these and every thing went together well.
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Just a bit of sanding top and bottom and things were good to go. Next up the kit engine keys into the from of the cowl flap section, no issues here.
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Next the cowlings are installed. These have two spacer nubs to center them but they still need to be rotated to the proper orientation and even using slow setting super glue I had my moments with these but in the end they ended up where needed.
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Fit was good and a sanding stick took care of a bit on excess glue. With the wings done as far as need be for now I moved to the fuselage. I did end up using the the bomb bay piece. I'm not sure it adds a lot of strength but felt it might be insurance against seam cracking when installing the wings. The fuselage went together well but I did need to reach in through the nose and pop the bomb bay piece into it correct position. The halves fit well with no other issues with interior parts. I did not like the idea of putting the astro dome in at this stage and sure enough as soon as I started working on the bottom seam I knocked it out. So this will need to be addressed some where down the road.
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Once the fuselage had time to set up I cut the nose mounting flange off the front and smoothed it up a bit. Test fitting the resin nose showed it was just a tad larger than the fuselage so using sandpaper on a flat surface I sanded it down until it matched. As I mentioned earlier I really hate glue large pieces with super glue and in this case there were no alignment aids. I foresaw trouble in this an decided to use a different adhesive. In this case it's something I suspect most have never used in modeling. I have used it a few times primarily on parts that I was concerned that super glue would be to brittle.
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I put a bead around the outside of the fuselage being careful not to over do it as I did not want a mess to clean up, installed the nose and once positioned (which this stuff gives you plenty of wiggle time I let it set up over night. Everything fit tight and solid and I had only a couple squeeze outs to clean up. There were a couple places that did not meet perfectly but a little sanding on either the nose or fuselage too care of those.
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Just as a reality check on the seat height if you compare this photo
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With this line drawing
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It appears that Revell got it right on the seat height and my earlier supposition was wrong assuming the drawing is correct.
While on the subject of the cockpit I did receive the True details cockpit and as a diversion will show it here. The overall set is show below
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The side walls are definitely an improvement over the kit and removing the kit detail to place them should be easy enough.
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The instrument is better detailed than the kit part but you will need to remove and reuse the rudder pedals from the kit part. The instrument detail is a bit shallow and I would have an issue painting it so my choice would be the Eduard part, your mileage may vary.
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The throttle quadrant also has more detail but is still short a couple levers.
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It's pretty much a wash on the pilots side console.
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The seats are a definite improvement.
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The floor and the rear bulkhead offer a bit more detail
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The control wheels don't offer anything that I could see worth the effort to clean them up and attaching them to the control columns.
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If everything fits I think it is worth while but you'll need to make that call.
Anyway, on with the build. With the nose on it was time to start bringing things together. The wings were attached. The fit was great, I wish everyone would use recessed for mounting wings, it just makes every thing so much easier. The tail was also attached. This fit so tight I could have gotten by not gluing it but I decided to anyway. So now at least it looks a bit like an airplane.
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Things are going to slow down now as I found I don't have the colors I need (on order) and I want to get some Master Models gun barrels and Sprue Brothers is out of the ones I want. So stay tuned for the next exciting episode...