Forward gear, erm, forward…

Apparently the forward gear bay needs to move 12/13mm forward to bring it closer in scale.
I know I said I wouldn’t be rivet counting, but that’s quite an error and I felt it justified the small(ish) effort to fix. The work is pretty straight forward, with the cutting of the bulkhead being the trickiest part for me.

I added some flattened sprue to reinforce the wheel bay attachment to the fuselage and also at the bulkhead (mainly because of the gap left after the over-enthusiastic use of the file.)
I couldn’t put it off any longer. I had to build the huge fuselage sections.
I opted to build in two halves, not on tubular sections as in the instructions. With a bit of coaxing the sides went together without much work. I had a couple of days away that provided plenty of time for them to set. Joining the halves together was tricky, due to the size of the thing. I shimmed out the joint between the front section and main fuselage on the L/H side as the diameters were different. Still needed lots of filler…
Then, when closing up the fuselage, there seemed to be a slight bend along its length so that the trailing edge of the fin was just over 1mm out of alignment. Not ideal, but nothing Miliput couldn’t solve. The panel lines around the fuselage were thus out of alignment, but, as I was going to rescribe the soft lines, that wasn’t a worry. Sighting from back to front and vice versa I couldn’t see a noticeable bend or twist, so that was OK. I don’t know what I would have done if it was noticeable anyway!
The centre join was reinforced with styrene strips and putty.
I filled in the gaps around the front wheel well with styrene and Miliput and sprayed a primer coat of the recommended paint, Humbrol 81, Pale Yellow. I think I’ll put a final coat of 93, Desert Yellow, as that seems to tie in with my reference photos.As the long bay doors are closed I wanted to fit them now and sand flush to the same profile as the fuselage. I added a strut of sprue to provide support to the doors (moulded in one piece) to withstand the forthcoming work.

Closing up the nose

I made sure that the angle of the visor and the nose were aligned and tacked it into place. Once set, I liberally applied some thick glue and left over night. Next day, I filled in the gaps and the area where the visor and nose join with Miliput.
Even though I was careful to seal up any holes I couldn’t prevent the fine dust getting under the visor whilst sanding to shape. I gave the front end a good rinse under the tap and dried over a radiator. Not perfect, but certainly an improvement.
First I roughly shaped with a file and then worked through wet & dry and finally onto the micromesh.
Then came the masking.
Using plenty of photo references I got as close as I could with masking out the windows and visor. A couple of coats of primer and time to move on to the next bit.