turbo

Ah, the good old days before we had all these nice AM replacements - kudos to you Kev! And thanks for the kind words Mark and Jeff. So, just as I was feeling like I was making progress towards closing things up, I went to cut the flaps from the sprue and was confronted with this. Yep, six - count 'em - six bloody great ejector pin marks in each flap. And nope, they're not there on the real thing. It's not just the number of them, but the inconvenient location for filling and sanding. This isn't the first time on this kit there have been badly placed ejector pin marks - fortunately newer Tamiya 1/32 kits seem to be much better thought out. If I'd noticed this earlier I might have rethought the whole flaps down detailing idea... Anyway, here we are now. I've decided the best filler for styrene wherever possible is...styrene! I cut sections of 1.6 mm styrene rod and placed them into the ejector pin marks. Tamiya Extra Thin was then run in, the plastic given a few seconds to soften, then pressed down with the butt end of a cocktail stick so that the molten plastic filled the mark. I'll let this harden overnight then sand down with my David Union tool. Cheers, Kirby

Thanks Spyros! Soooo, after saying how glad I was to get the wheel well detailing out the way, I've just come to the belated conclusion I can't progress much further without improving the flap area. I find doing fiddly PE and detailing work can be a bit mojo-sapping, so I like to break it up with other tasks. In this case, unfortunately, I need to address the flaps before the wing halves can be joined and I've run out of other small jobs I can use to procrastinate! The kit has moulded ribs on the upper half of the wing, which is better than nothing but can certainly be improved if the flaps are to be modelled in the deployed position. Fortunately, the Eduard exterior PE set has quite an acceptable solution. The first step, however, was to grind off the kit structures using my trusty David Union tool. No need to tidy up with sanding as the PE will cover all this. Here's the Eduard PE replacement complete - I think it's a real improvement. The biggest challenge here was getting the ribs placed and glued into position. I found the best solution was to insert the kit metal axle part first then insert the ribs underneath it which helps keep them in place while you're doing the gluing with thin CA as well as making sure they're located properly. And here it is dry-fitted to the upper wing. I'll leave it to the last minute before painting and joining the wings to glue it permanently in place so I don't do my usual trick and break something! Edging closer to being able to close the wings up and feel like I'm making some progress....

Welcome aboard Phil and great start on the Mustang - looking forward to what you've got in mind...

Thanks very much Phil and Mark, much appreciated! Thanks for the kind words Gerhard. You should definitely give it a go - the kit is great and up to Tamiya's usual standard (apart from the wheel wells maybe - they can give retractable undercarriage a miss next time!). It's great to be back on the bench Nick!

Just catching up on this Tom - beautiful work and love the vignettes! Kirby

Beautiful clean work Chris!

Thanks very much Jeff, Ernest, Nick, and Zac, much appreciated! So, revisiting the wheel wells here's a reference picture courtesy of Ryan @A6M that I posted earlier but needed to reacquaint myself with. The 2 diagrams on the left are A6M5 wheel wells. The biggest challenge here (which is obviously why I stopped where I did!) is the cabling for the landing gear position indicator switches which runs into a junction box before being relayed to the indicator lights in the cockpit. This reminded me why I made the increased thickness plastic strip - junction boxes! The junction boxes were fabricated by drilling holes to locate 0.3 mm copper wire then carefully sawing out the boxes from the stock plastic strip - fiddly work! The wire was then cut to length and installed as best I could to replicate the cabling in the reference diagrams. Probably a bit over-scale but anything smaller was going to be too much of a test for my dexterity! I've gotta say, I'm glad that's out of the way. All in all, the operation of drilling out lightening holes and fitting PE and cabling was fiddly and time-consuming due to the confined spaces and fragility of the parts once some supporting kit structures were removed. I think it was worth it in the end though as the kit-supplied detail here is one of the rare weak points. Now, a question for Ryan @A6M if he is floating about or anyone else who might know. Were any of the junction boxes or cabling different colours or was the whole lot just sprayed over with aotake? Cheers, Kirby

Hi folks and happy new year! Wow, I can't believe it's been almost a year since I posted on this project. Work kept me off the bench pretty much all of last year, but I have now struck out working for myself so I want to create a little time for modelling. The main problem with picking up a project like this is trying to remember what I was doing and why and the sequence of steps I had in mind - this is where posting on a forum as a record comes in really handy! I found this in the box so I had obviously installed the PE ribs into the wheel wells and started on the plumbing - more on this and some references shortly... I also fabricated some additional thickness plastic strip and have no idea why! I just dug out the references for the wheel wells and there may be a neuron firing as to the reason for this...

You can feed the end of a bit of sandpaper into the slot and wrap it around the bit to use for sanding. Haven't tried it myself as have the D400.

Another spectacular model John. The mottling and weathering are really well done - congratulations!

Thanks for that Ryan. With their usual attention to detail, Tamiya actually have a nice moulding of the closed vent intake on the leading edge of the wing. I might consider drilling it out later to represent it in the open position. So, work on the wheel wells continues. Sean and Alex in their A6M2 builds and Ryan in his tweak list have all highlighted problems in this area, particularly if you are making some modifications. As I've mentioned previously, Tamiya have designed this kit to have retractable landing gear which has resulted in some compromises. In an effort to save space, the roof of the wheel well is made up of 3 sections - the wheel well part, the upper wing, and an intervening thin strip of the fuselage. The biggest design compromise didn't become apparent to me until I test-fitted it all together. As you can see in the picture below, there is a large and ugly step between the wheel well part and the fuselage strip which, from the reference pictures above, shouldn't be there. This is not a fit problem due to some previous misalignment - all the locating parts are fitted perfectly - it's how Tamiya has designed it (including the inconveniently placed ejector pin marks). I couldn't live with this so ground and sanded the step down to something more acceptable and also made a start on eliminating the ejector pin marks. This all needs a bit more tidying up but is difficult as the area is not easily accessible. I also plan to obscure the offending area further with the electrical and brake line plumbing. I somehow managed to complete the lightening hole and PE modifications to the port wheel well without breaking it at its weak point (phew)! At this point I decided to deviate from the kit instructions, which always makes me nervous with these finely tuned Tamiya kits. I've had a lingering concern that adding the PE cross ribs to the wheel wells before installation could result in a subtle fit problem unless they are bang on in dimension and in my placement. Given the tight design tolerances in this area this is important, so my solution was to install the wheel wells at this point to ensure a proper fit down the track. The instructions would have you attach the wheel wells to the lower wing, but I felt attaching them to the upper wing would give me better access for fitting of the PE ribs and plumbing. The wells were dry-fitted to the wing halves and fuselge and, once I was happy with the fit, Tamiya Extra Thin run into the contact points between the wells and the upper wing halves. This should give me good access to fit the PE ribs neatly against the roof and install the plumbing and other detail. Then I just need to hope to hell that my dry-fitting was accurate and it all fits together properly later... Cheers, Kirby

Thanks very much Sepp, Rod, and Reuben, the kind comments from folks around here certainly give me extra inspiration!

Thanks Alain, appreciate it!

Thanks very much guys, I appreciate your comments!

Spectacular effort Brett! The raised rivet detail combined with spot on weathering is fantastic - congratulations!