LSP_Kevin

Excellent work, Chuck! Kev

Lovely work, Denis! Kev

Wow! Kev

Cool! Kev

He never did, as far as I'm aware. His outfit was Mastercasters. But since he's presumably in jail now, I figure doesn't own anything any more. Kev

Howdy folks, Just a tiny little What's New update this week. Enjoy! Kev

Great to see you back, John! Kev

I'm finding myself really drawn to this build at the moment, so I figured I'd better take advantage of its organic momentum, even if that means other projects stall for a while. Besides, there's enough glue and putty drying wait time ahead on this one that I can easily rotate back to at least the 757. Anyway, setting aside the conundrum with the livery, I forged ahead with the fuselage assembly, first by adding a set of alternating tabs along the inside of the fuselage join: You'll notice I've also added some nose weight. I gave up fixing lead weights (fishing sinkers, in this case) with CA glue long ago after a couple of bad experiences, and switched to using Blu Tack: Yep, Blu Tack. Not only is it safer than CA, and quicker than epoxy, but in my opinion it's also more effective than the former. Believe it or not, it creates a really secure encasing for the weights, and also prevents them from interacting with the kit plastic or any other chemical compounds used in the area. I've had weights secured with CA come loose in a model before, but never with this method, and despite the disbelieving responses, I preach it wherever I go! (Yes, I'm a right pain at parties.) The tabs made it difficult to knit the fuselage halves together neatly along both top and bottom joins, and I realised that I probably made them too wide. After a bit of a struggle, I got there eventually, and ended up with this: I reinforced all the joins with thin CA, just to be sure. Another issue caused by the tabs I'd used was this undulating effect along the join: I'm not completely certain if this is caused by the tabs being too wide, or the alternating pattern I deployed them in - or perhaps a combination of both. Since the effect is much more prominent on the top (shown in the photo) than the bottom, I'm thinking it's more the latter, as for the bottom I used fewer, longer strips to form the tabs. So on my next vac fuselage, I'll experiment with using narrower strips that are as long as possible, and perhaps using thinner plastic that will conform better. But that's for another day! I'd previously joined the two small tail end pieces together, but when I offered them up to the main fuselage, they were too narrow. I made the rookie mistake of not joining each half to its respective fuselage half, instead of making a separate unit out of them. I ended up cutting open the front section and shimming it with some styrene stock, which resulted in a much closer fit: I finished off this round of fuselage work by highlighting the seam with a permanent marker. This will help me spot the low points as I sand the join back, and show me where I need to add filler. I've also been working on the engines, with one going together with a minimum of fuss: With the other, however, I managed to create some asymmetry in the plastic parts, meaning they didn't meet in the middle like they're supposed to: I shimmed the gap with some Evergreen strip, and will let it set up firmly before moving on with it: Suffice it to say that both engine pods will need their share of filling and sanding! Lastly for today, I added the resin hot ends to the previously assembly pylon/engine assembly: The instructions are a bit unclear with the assembly here, and I wasn't sure whether I was supposed to remove the plugs at the front of the resin pieces so I could butt-join them to the plastic, or make cut-outs in the plastic to accommodate them as inserts. For the bottom assembly, I tried the latter approach, but the plugs are really too wide for the resulting hole, even if you remove all the plastic. You can see in the photo above that I managed to split the plastic trying to fit it in. So for the second one (top in the photo), I removed the plug and went the butt-join route, which was about the same amount of work, but with no split plastic. Again, plenty of remedial work ahead! Kev

Tamiya lacquer thinner! Or Mr. Color Thinner - whichever one you have to hand. Just don't use hardware store lacquer thinner, as will be almost guaranteed to damage the plastic. But honestly, unless I'm feeling fussy about surface details, I'm often happy to just go over the existing paint after a quick sand to knock it down a bit. Kev

It's just paint, so sand and respray, or strip it entirely. Kev

Nice work, Craig! You'll have to change the image in your sig, however, as it's way too large. I'm surprised the forum software even let you use it, as they're set to max of 400px wide. Kev

LEGO bricks are so handy for this kind of thing, and while I have a bunch of them, I've never been able to find the square plates to use them on! Kev

I might, but the decals actually look pretty decent, and Brad Shinn's photo on Facebook makes me think that I might be able to get away with simply painting the tail a lighter colour. I need to print the tail decals for the 757 soon, so I might print a couple of copies of this tail too, and lay them down over some lighter blue colours to see if the effect is convincing. Obviously if it's just going to end up being a mid-blue over a light blue, then that really isn't going to work. The only other decals I have to hand are some American Airlines markings from the Minicraft kit, which is destined to become an Air New Zealand bird. And there's no full tail decal on that scheme either, so it would simplify things there, too. And, as my earlier photo shows, the fuselages from the two kits are a good match, so there's a chance the cheat stripe decals from the Minicraft kit would fit here OK. And they're printed by Cartograf, so no qualms about the quality. Kev

I'm a little confused about the United Airlines 777 scheme provided in the Welshmodels kit. It describes painting the undersides, engines and fin in Midnight Blue, and applying the supplied striped fin decal over the latter. But compared to the real thing, the decal stripes appear to be much too light - closer in colour to the lighter of the two stripe colours. Their positions, however, indicate that they're intended to represent the darker colour. And that lighter colour looks to me to be lighter than the Midnight Blue on the fuselage and engines, which appears to more closely match the darker colour. So, I just can't see how these decal stripes are going to work over a Midnight Blue base colour. It's almost as if the positions of the decal stripes are reversed. What am I missing? Kev

I hear ya! It's full-tail decals that scare me. They never seem to fit properly, and are prone to curling or tearing while trying to apply them. But they're a feature on so many airliner kits, including the UA livery that comes with this one. I just hope I can nail it again for my second 757... Kev