brahman104

Brilliant work on the prop governor Jay! Surely after everything you've done already, the remaining pipes should be pretty straightforward! Craig

SOOOOOO Good!!!!! Amazing work as always Peter! Craig

Outstanding! I have seen photos of this aircraft before but never thought I'd see a model of it! Very well done! Craig

Your wood grain effects look good to me! Craig

Looking great Iain! Clever idea to inject resin into the voids...... Something I might have to look at for my tail surfaces later. That's a lot of sanding you're doing...... I'm sick of just working on my two nacelles! Craig

Man..... don't look at my build then! As Pat said, there's just too many dimensional issues with the HK kit for one to achieve exact dimensional accuracy. Even factory drawings as I have found have discrepancies in them. It also helps that the original fuselage in 1/48 has A LOT better shape and looks a lot closer to the B-17 to begin with, especially around the #3 bulkhead. I hope you do start a early model conversion though; that'll make 3 of us! Cheers, Craig

Absolutely incredible work Jay! I still can't believe you made everything from scratch! I love the reduction casing and the mount pads for the magneto etc. I can totally appreciate how hard it is to install all the ignition wiring... especially when it's pre-painted! Awesome stuff! Craig

Sooo good!!! Craig

Brilliant work Kevin! Very nice work on the clear parts too; they sure can be nerve wracking to get right! Your work with the litho plate looks awesome. What are you using to glue the panels down? Just ordinary contact cement? Keep up the great work! Craig

Thanks for the link Ben! That would have solved a lot of the issues I had with my nacelles. Unfortunately I see that he only posts to UK and EU..... back to the drawing board for me! Cheers, Craig Edit : My bad, looks like I read the info wrong..... I now have the upgrade on its way to me, thanks for the link Ben!

I can't 3D print as neat as you do styrene....... I love seeing your builds come together Oliver. The Huskie is looking great; looking forward to seeing you make a T.53 out of the Arado engine. Cheers, Craig

Thanks Tom! Yes the credit for the exhaust must go to Terry; if he hadn't told me I doubt I would've even noticed..... funny how you think you know your subject when actually you know hardly anything about it at all! The scoops on the other hand, yes, I am onto them at least! Once the nacelles are smooth I'm going to cast them as they are, so they can be used for later E/F builds, then add the unique C/D intakes on the copies Hahaha, I do love your optimism about being on the home straight! There's a lot of detail that still needs to be looked at in the fuselage, but you are right, definitely getting there. Maybe not this year, but one very soon! Always a pleasure Tom Craig

Nice!!!!! The colours look really great Pat! Craig

Things are putting along nicely now after the initial setback with the nacelles. More sanding and smoothing work yet to do, but they're certainly on the way I was able to reuse the very rear of the nacelles (thanks to HK's super thick plastic) to shape that all important join. While I'm on a roll with the wings I figured I'd better build the wheel bays so once the nacelles are finished there'll be no hold ups to gluing the wings together! Wait! What's this??? I'm using the kit parts? Shock horror!!! Actually the kit parts here are pretty good and don't really need anything other than some creative painting (still got more to do) but I also wanted to finish the eduard exhausts while I was at it. Like so many aspects of this build, this is the first time I've really used weathering pigments and played with different airbrush techniques to create effects like this. I'm really happy with the results, even if they may be a little over done for a relatively new C model That's when Terry's eagle eyes noted something amiss with the inboard engine "extensions" (that's the long straight pipes that route the exhaust past the wheel bays). In much the same way that HK probably only looked at one B-17 for their reference, I think eduard did too. This type of exhaust appeared very late on the G model production and was not very common. Indeed, most of the B-17's I've seen flying today don't have them either. They are present on Duxford's "Mary Alice" which is where I'd say the companies did their research. If they didn't appear till late in the G production run, then there's absolutely no way they could be present on the C!!! This is what they should look like (thanks to Terry for the following two images) Until Terry pointed this out I was completely oblivious. I'm sure I'd seen these before but it definitely wasn't on my mind when I was painting them up.... lucky I had my quality control inspector checking my work!!! So what to do about it? I hunted around for a while and found a pair of torpedos from a 1/72 seahawk kit that fitted perfectly for diameter.... I then replaced the centre section with the torpedo. In my excitement, I forgot to add the glycol boilers, so they came next. Now we're cookin'!!!! Hopefully the next step will be a major milestone in having the wings together, then I can focus on a long-awaited return to the fuselage! Cheers, Craig

Love the rivet work Pete! I did the same with my CH-47 a few years ago; big job but worth it!!! What did you use to fill the existing rivets? Craig