Madmax

Fantastic - looking forward to this build Lukasz! Piotr's artwork for the box top is absolutely brilliant...

Excellent work Malcolm, and two great saves already - the ailerons and the cockpit colour!

With the rib tape situation under control, it was time to get some of the other parts smoothed out and primed. The removable canopy panel took a fair amount of filling and sanding to get a smooth transition into the clear part, and the spats were a real challenge to shape. Lots of filling and sanding required there too. Notice the clever bit of kit engineering inside the cowling for the engine to fit inside a near scale thickness of the actual sheet metal. One will obviously have to glue the two halves over the engine once it is in place! The next move was to design some masks in order to spray the scalloped shapes. The kit plans have some very useful 3-view drawings, but I still tweaked these a bit based on the reference photos I have available. Now poor Nick @Cheetah11 has to translate my shoddy drawings into 'silhouette language' in order to cut the masks! I think I'll have to buy Black Forest cake for my next visit to his place... And now I have started to spray an undercoat of white on the areas that will become a more pleasant yellow than the kit plastic. Even over light grey primer, it takes many light coats of white paint to make an opaque undercoat. Some patience required! The kit prop looked too much like a constant speed prop, with a clearly defined hub. I have tried to make it look more like the original prop which was quite possibly a single piece of aluminium milled into shape. Here you can see the shape of the actual Curtiss prop, and an interesting discovery. The early 'Z' had three louvre vents (per side) behind the engine... Whereas by race-day there were only two per side. There are more interesting little tweaks that I'll point out as the model progresses. Until then, Cheers! Sean

Here comes the next move Mal... How could I not???? Good plan Derek! You're lucky to have some of the Williams Bros kits stashed - I wish I had bought more when they were still readily available.

So, armed with Malc's tip and a look at what @tomprobert did with his Sterling, I set about cutting up some Tamiya tape and carefully masking off the wing ribs. It is actually a very effective way of getting the spacing and thickness right, one just has to be patient... I decanted some normal Tamiya grey primer into the airbrush (ie. not the fine primer), and voila - rib tapes! They came out a bit too prominent at first, so I gently sanded them back with a sanding sponge. There is some variety in the effect now, which I quite enjoy. You can see the final result under some fine grey primer: It is a relief not to have to look at that yellow styrene for a change. Thanks again for the tip Malc! Cheers, Sean

An extremely useful tip for the rib tapes Malc! Read on, you'll see... Thanks for the encouragement Kev! Here it comes Mal. Takes a while as I'm often away. I couldn't find the Kelik tapes, but saw some from HGW and Quinta that I may well use on a Gladiator in time to come. Thanks Hubert!

Excellent work on the wheel wells Leon. The kit is a bit of a fight, but keep going!

Clever move not to tackle the chord and the slats Malcolm! I'm afraid that, regardless, you still have quite a job on your hands. The nice thing about this kit is that you will know every panel line and rivet on an F-86 by the time you're done...

Wonderful choice of subject, and an exciting prospect of seeing how you correct the HK kit's shortcomings. Go for it Nick!

This is superb Hubert! You could even possibly sneak the 'Little Prince' into the scene... just kidding, but it evokes that kind of mood. Wow.

With the fuselage halves joined, I could finally get down to modernising the surface of the kit. Considering it is a 1979 kit, raised detail comes as no surprise, but at least it appears to be pretty accurate. I have used the raised lines as the guides for scribing and reshaping as indicated in these photos. You may recall that the air intake scoop wouldn't align, but there is enough material to carve and sand it into one unit. It just needed one tiny piece of styrene to neaten-up the lip Then I ran into a tricky issue. The upper surfaces of the wings have a nasty sink mark at about 1/3 chord length, and there is no way to fill it or sand it without losing the rib-stitching detail. The one place where raised detail really is useful! I elected to sand the wing, rather than struggle with putty, and then glue stretched sprue into scribed lines where the ribs are. The snag is that the final effect just isn't convincing, the spacing wasn't perfect and the lines weren't totally parallel. In other words, it looked pretty rubbish. I sanded it back and have tried again, but much less prominent and fading away towards the tips. Maybe it won't be seen at all, but I can't sand the wings any more, since they already resemble ironing boards. Best left alone, rather than jeopardise the whole build... This is how the stitching actually looks. Pretty prominent... Another tricky aspect of the build is how to put back the removable canopy panel should one want it posed like a whole aircraft. I have seen a build where the panel has been vac-formed, but the fit of such parts is normally slightly off (in my experience) and I don't have any decent equipment for the job at any rate. So, I have made do with what is in the kit and just modified it a bit. It will do for some long distance photographs, but no detail shots of the removed panel! (B&W shots to give your eyes a break from the horrendous yellow plastic) At this point, I have come to understand why so many Gee Bee models don't actually get completed. Ah well, not keen to give up yet, I stuck the wings on before they end up looking like wafer biscuits. If nothing else, at least it looks really cool at this point! Bob Hall was clearly a creative guy as far as aircraft design goes. As you can see, it is not the easiest of builds. I have had to use some two part putty to fix the wing join, but to keep the spirits up - I made a proper metal tail-skid and used thin styrene to represent the rubber 'boot' the Granville Bros put on the real thing. Little things sometimes spark joy. Most of the kit parts need some attention to improve them, like the struts for the horizontal stab that are rods on the sprue, but should be flattened oval in cross section. Then I would also suggest using your own axles to put the wheels in after the spats have been painted. Enough bellyaching from me - it's still great fun. What I'm really looking forward to, however, is to see how to paint a 0.1 mm red pinstripe between the distinctive black and yellow scalloped shapes that make this paint job pop. That's bound to make the flat wings seem like child's play! Cheers, Sean

Thanks Tom, glad you're enjoying it! The project kinda brings itself to life I must say, being such an iconic little plane. I know exactly what you mean about the Tintin series, it would fit right in... Your enthusiasm is infectious Mal! Thanks Malc, it's a great video. Delmar Benjamin clearly was the man for the job!

Despite how worried Trumpeter made these chopper-jocks look, I'd say they're in good hands! Excellent work Patrick.

This is looking fantastic Ernest! Love what you've done with the fabric decals...

Beautiful model Kent! I think the doubled flying wires really do make it look busy, but also very convincing.