Well progress has been made even though time has been spent on other projects….
Quite a bit of painting had been done and the fuselage finally closed up plus all sorts of other stuff that just eats up time…
Painting has started on the engines but things have stopped as I may attempt to cast them to capture the mods and work done. On the inlet cone you can now see the lip I had to add. Not sure how to cast these as I do not want to cut them in half! I may do them (well attempt) as solid lumps and grind out the internals, will see how the casting goes first!

The same goes for the nose, started detailing the cockpit, but have stopped so I can, attempt, to cast the nose. In this case I will blank off the windscreen and cast the out side, then grind out the inside. All going well then I’ll do a second two part cast of the final nose….maybe!!!

Just the start of the detailing of the rear RO’s station, more to do.

Unfortunately the main gear has to be fitted before the fuselage is closed up….not the best situation! As can be seen I have already knocked off the scissor arm off the far leg!

The section just forward of the RO’s station has been removed to allow the wing to fit.

The new tail required some grinding off of material to allow it to fit, as I have found with the wings too, they are designed for the Hobby Boss model and not the Hasegawa one. Hence the new tail has a rounded section instead of the stepped one the Hasegawa model has!

Ok now to the wings, after about 2-3 hours work I have the wings to a stage where they are in the correct position (to each other) with respect to the fuselage! These wings like everything else with these conversion kits are designed for the smaller (and incorrect) Hobby Boss model. They were first drilled then pinned, this allowed me to sit them on the fuselage and position them into the correct position. Sounds easy but ended up being very frustrating, especially seeing as they don’t fit the width of the fuselage. Eventually with super glue and lots of cursing they are set in the correct position. The gap will be filled with sprue, which should give it additional strength.


The plan is to complete all the work on the wings and their fit to the fuselage but not fit them. This will then allow me to fit the engine pods and finish all their join work before finally fitting the wings, as I will have a reference point to align everything up to. If I have done my job correctly there should be little to no filling required for the final fitting of the wings to the fuselage. Plus leaving the wings off will allow me to correctly set the engine pods alignments in distance from the fuselage and AoA.
Finally how she looks altogether, this will be the last time I do this until it’s altogether. I did this to check a few things;
A, will drop tanks fit? Yes
B, will props foul the fuselage/ground? No
C, is it a tail sitter? No, it’s actually almost neutral, just slightly tail heavy!!!
D, to look at it’s awesomeness!!!




And no the wings/model isn’t warped it’s just the way the camera was.
Well progress will now start to slow right down as the Tropic Moon beasty build starts and I go back to work. There is still quite a lot of work to go on this build, but I am just truly loving this build! For all its difficulties it is such a joy to build, I haven’t had so much fun since the He-177Z!!!