Ayovan

When the wife and I were still dating (40 years ago) I had a 69 with a 351w. The wife called it the "other woman". And NO! I wouldn't let her drive it. Probably why I'm still married 40 years later. LOL Wish I had that car now.........

I got an email from Special Hobby this morning. Ondrej found a spare sprue D in the warehouse that I can have for 2 euro ($2.40)+ shipping. Excellent customer service, even though I didn't purchase from them . I guarantee I will in the future though. I have been re-scribing and riviting for a couple days on the F-80. I fixed the wing fillet panel lines on the bottom of the fuselage, and went over a lot of the rivet details. I wish I had more done, but I can only work on it for so long before I start going cross eyed . I don't know how some of you guys do a whole airplane with rivets... Andy

They have a pill for that.

to the asylum Steven.

Selfie?

If I get the F-80 finished soon enough, maybe the Hun will be a 2nd entry for the group build. That's the one I really wanted to build.

To use the website I would have had to purchase direct from Special Hobby. I bought from a private seller on ebay. Doooh! I sent them an email asking to buy the parts or even the entire sprue D if possible. Hopefully they'll get back to me.

It's starting to look like an F-80 now. Last night, I re-scribed some of the panel lines that got lost in sanding of the seams. Most of them turned out good, but a couple will need to be filled and re-re-done. Then I'll try fixing some of the rivet details... That oughta be interesting.

Well that's really irritating....Went to put the tip tanks together, and 1/2 of one misawa tanks is missing.

So, my F-100-F Wild Weasel, with AGM-45 Shrikes, LAU-3 rocket pods, ALQ-87, and wing tanks as the load out, would have qualified ?

I built one of these last year. It's the plane my grandsons like messing with all the time. I don't know how many times I have fixed gear doors, props, canopy, and or anything else that can get broken off, on that thing . Some of the joints like the booms to the wings (underside) needed some work, and some blending at the joint around the super chargers to the booms. It's a 1970's kit...it is what it is. It did take a fair amount of weight to get it to sit on the nose gear. I enjoyed the build, and it does make a decent looking P-38 OOB, so with someone with some real modeling skills building it, It should come out really nice. Andy P.S. I enjoyed it enough, I recently bought another one.

Most likely ALL!

Getting the wings fitted today I had to do some grinding on the main wheel wells and the intake tunnels where they were making contact and not letting the wing seat to the fuselage properly. The front wing/fuselage joint will need a fair amount of filling and sanding. The rear joint isn't bad, but the raised fillet panel lines don't line up. I suck at scribing and re-riveting, but I'll give it my best shot. At least it on the bottom of the plane, and not on top for all to see. The wing roots don't look bad. In fact they look pretty decent. They will probably only need some Mr. Surfacer 1000 applied with a brush to fill what little gap there is.

love the Malcolm hood on a B. I just might have to do 1.

I closed up the fuselage today. The seams along the top of the fuselage look decent, and won't need much filling and sanding along with the outer intake/fuselage joint, but the seam at the lower aft fuselage will need a bit of work. The cockpit looks a little better after some touch-up, a dark/grime colored wash, and a coat of matt clear. A lot of it gets hidden by the small cockpit opening in the fuselage. I'm not sure why the matt clear ended up more like semi-gloss ?

We always hear about the bad experiences people have, and not enough about the good. Both of these companies offer us excellent service and products.

Read about this a couple days ago. Very cool indeed.

Thank you Peter, I had not thought of using wood glue to fill gaps in the intake tunnel itself. Thanks for the tip Andy

I decided it was pretty sound advice to glue the outer part of the intake to the fuselage first. Made it a lot easier to clamp in place to dry. I'll leave that till tomorrow, then do the other side. I'll know for sure when I take the clamps off, but it doesn't look like it will need much filling if any at all.

Received a package from GT resin today with a couple of F-4 splitter plates. Thank you Gary. Andy

Spent some time dry fitting today. Someone had mentioned in a post about doing the intakes before joining the fuselage halves, but after dry fitting the fuselage,intakes, and wings together, I think I'll need to join the fuselage, install the outer inlets to the fuselage, then the intake ducts to the fuselage and outer inlets, and then the wings. The outer inlet parts need a fair amount of massaging to the fuselage to close up some pretty large gaps at the underside near the nose gear bay, and need to line up at the wing root area as well as align with the fuselage. There's a whole lot going on where this all comes together. The way the instructions want you to assemble it, is to glue the fuselage together, glue the intake ducts to the wing, then the wing to the fuselage, and then the outer inlets to the fuselage. I think it would be pretty difficult to get anything to align properly this way, as there are no locating pins or anything to help get these 4 components to align for assembly. I'll definitely think about it some more before I glue anything together.

Peter, thats just bad ass. Beautiful workmanship.

I'm not going to bash, but response from Kitlinx was...........Ummm lets just say less than satisfactory. They eventually got back to me.

Roger that. Aftermarket for the A-7 is a little sparse.

Still needs some touch-up and a wash. Considering my hands shake like a leaf in a tree during a wind storm, any detail work is hard to do. So I'm ok with it. I have other more expensive, more complex models I want to do, but they will have to wait until I get off the meds that are making my hands shake. My doctor just put me out of commission for another 4 months, today.