Fanes

Really nice work going on there, Tolga. I admire your craftsmanship and perseverance!

Been lurking for a while, but I have to commend you on that distressed paint job, Quang. Love the mix of hard edged and translucent green camo. Did you use stencils/masks for that?

Really looking forward to the Dora WIngs Dewoitine!

Nice work so far, Leon! Don't know if you know, but there is a nice ebook from klp, which covers most of the little hickups of the Revell kit. Have you looked at the clear parts in your kit? Mine were badly deformed and I opted for a resin replacement from Aerocraft.

Whooooopsiedaisy - something must have happened between "send Rick a PM" and actually sending it

Great to see this one sailing to the finish line, Tom! One little confusion on my side regarding the colour of the landing gear: As far as I understood the Tweak List, only the small trapezoid thigy connecting the gear to the cover should be Amber. The lower part of the strut should be black? I think, there were pictures with the lower strut in black, as well. Cheers, Joachim

Remember that nasty gap at the lower fuselage? Well, it's no more! With some brute force and a huge amount of CA, I was able to reduce the canyon wide gap to a small step, that should be easily blendable with some filler and a little sanding. I will do so, after I have blended the wing root/wheel well transition. This will need more than a drop of CA - thinking about some Milliput followed by some reshaping. What did the trick, apart from the ridiculous amount of CA, was putting in a piece of sprue to spread the fuselage at the front and thereby preventing it from pinching inwards. The test fit with the engine reveals some minor gaps at the lower firewall. I did some sanding after taking the photo and now the seam can be closed with light pressure. Should be okayish, especially because I plan on adding the engine at the very last step, after painting the whole plane. That's it for now, progress in the next days will be slow, since I'm back at work as of today..

Keep up the good work on your Storch - it's a pleasure to watch! But for sure, I won't be getting that kit for a quick build Nice to have you chiming in Sean! Your build thread, together with the tweak list, is my main motivation to tackle all the small details of a Nakajima build A6M2. Still hoping, that my Zero-Sen turns out as elegant as yours. Btw. your current Hunter build is entertaining and educating as well! I will try a different brand of raised rivets in the future (already have two eduard sheets in the stash). Looking back, I think your choice to imrove the wheel wells by scratch and PE parts was a much wiser one than the resin parts - scroll down to see why... Back to the rivet job. I did some testing of colour modulation for the engine cowl and therefore applied a blue mottle over the gloss black, followd by a 50/50 mix of Gunze rubber black and Tamiya gloss black. The result - not so much visible after all, oh well. The other thing I learnt was that the raised rivets are so low, that they don't really hold a pin wash. Enough complaining - with the cockpit in place, it does look rather good! In my opinion, the work and especially the painting together with the Quinta bits, really make the cockpit pop out from the black framing. Me likey. Unfortunately, there is aghost seam on the rear deck (visible in the picture below, just aft of the opening for the loop antenna). Cleaning that up will be fun Talking about seams: The front and the wheel wells are a new challenge to master. There's a fairly large gap between the lower wing and the fuselage parts. Of course on both sides, since the resin wheel wells push that part downwards. Even though I removed a lot of material. The wing is only dry fitted at that stage and I can make minor adjustments. My plan is to bend the lower wing a tad upwards, then glue the wing along the wing root to the fuselage. When that's settled, the parts with the gap will be pressed together, as hard as I can, then tacked in place with CA at the front - followed by a big splurt of plastic glue from the inside along the seam. We'll see... The wing root on the port side is just fine, while there's a very small step on starboard. Since the mating of the fuselage to the lower wing is pretty tight, a slight sand of the locators might do the trick. I couldn't resist to make a first overall shot. It slowly starts to look like a Zero now. Consider this a morale boost.

Thanks a lot - well, I'm not sure I'm not slowly going insane with all the small details to be considered.. Very much looking forward to see spray some paint on my Zero. Eventually, there might be a quick build snuck in to build up confidence. I thought of getting a Hasegawa Storch - until I saw your build thread

I found Chuck's F-15 build most educational (as I'm not an Eagle expert): Will follow along

I saw your finished A6M5 and really liked what you did. Hopfeully the undercarriage won't fight me as hard as it did with you. As for now, there's just a splash of gloss black on my rivets. Nothing spectacular, in fact I'm not happy with how much carrier film is still visible. There was plenty of setting solution applied. Maybe it will be less visible once the area is a flat black.

Since I cleared most of my stash before my move last year, I didn't think that there was anything to donate for the raffle. But with the Bf 109 book in the raffle, the adversary will be in as well: And note me down as a recipient as well. Cheers, Joachim

I'll take any Mk. V from them. The Va might be a good starting point for a PR IV Spitfire and there are a lot of possibilities for Vb and c Spits based on Malta alone. So - keep 'em coming!

This seems to be my slowest build so far. I don't know what the exact problem is, but there seem to be endless amounts of rabbit holes. Maybe choosing a Type 52 Zero from Hasegawa would have been the smarter choice. But it is what it is and I might lear a thing or two on the way.. The following is a loose collection of small things, that I tackled in the last weeks. Starting with the placards. There is quite a lot of placards on the actual airframe. On the fabric parts, they are below the fabric (which then has a transparent cover). To reproduce them, I shamelessly copied Sean's approach with 0.1 mm styrene sheet and CA to get a smooth transition. Here they are on the ailerons (before sanding): And of course one on the rudder and one on each elevator. Next up on the tweak list: The Zero's airframe is covered in flush rivets for aerodynamic reasons, of course. Under the canopy, rivets with dome heads were used. Tamiya gives us nice, small, and shallow rivets all around. Adding insanity, I decided to add raised rivets in the appropriate areas. First of all, the rivets were filled with Perfect Plastic Putty (going by the Archer instructions). That worked only so so, because the putty lacks adhesion and I ended up pulling it out of the rivets. My tests were done on my shelf-of-doom Spitfire FR IX from Revell, where the deep rivets really helped to retain the filler. Will use another product next time.. The cover under the windscreen has rivets as well and so I started there to get accustomed with the rivets from Quinta. First note: don't ever buy the white ones! They are incredibly hard to see on the decal sheet (which doesn't have a blueish hue) and that makes cutting strips unnecesseary complex and timne consuming. The application on the plastic is a little bit more simple compared to the Archer rivets I've used before. The transparent film is quite thin, yet not overly delicate in handling. Maybe alittle bit too stiff for tight curvatures. Putting all the rivets on, really tested my patience (and sanity). So I turned to somehting else inbetween. The wheel well covers are quite thick and are mostly void of any detail. So I thinned them down and added a small stiffener from stretched sprue. A necessary improvent? - hell no, but I enjoy doing that stuff. The landing gear legs have some heavy mold seams, which aren't completely removed in the picture (painful macro), and lack the characteristic spot welds of the real thing. Luckily the welds aren't raised, but look more like small depressions. So I marked the six spots with a riveting wheel and gave them a slight drill with a 0.25 mm drill bit. Perfect? - no, but I can alwys improve! Did someone mention rivets? Yup - there they are: It took me four sessions over a whole week to apply them all. Currently they are left to dry completely and will recieve a coat of lacquer black afterwards. Everyone who uses these raised rivets on a whole aiframe has my highest esteem.

Thank you very much guys! I had a great day out in the sun with some friends. Quite a good distraction from applying raised rivets to my ongoing build