Thanks for the kind comments fellas, much appreciated.
Rhino I have a 1:72 Shed in the stash, never thought of making a gunship outta it. :laugh:
Well, this thing proceeds apace. I have all the cabin windows reglued back in place and the fuselage primed. Wazzat reglued stuff, you ask? Let me explain. I had the fuselage prepped and sanded, ready for priming, and was applying tape to the cabin windows. There was a muted pop, and the window disappeared into the fuselage. This caused another "What are swearing at up there" moment. Lo and behold, with a bit of shaking and contortion, the wayward window fell out the slot where the wing tab goes. Of course this meant it had to be cut to size and glued in from the outside, but what the hey, I'm retired. More tape, and the next third window disappeared in the same way. You guessed it, another 'special' moment. I got that one out the same way as the first, but then realized there was no way I could keep shaking the stuffin out of the model trying to retrieve windows. Solution...
This is not a camera hatch. I drilled a 1/4" hole just forward of the tailwheel and enlarged it to accommodate several windows at the same time, then pushed every one of the furshlugginer things into the fuselage and shook them out the hole. Neato. Did I mention that as I drilled the 1/4" hole it caused the belly seam to pop, and as the old song says "She was split from stem to stern?" This required the belly seam to be reglued, reputtied and resanded. I then cut every one of the windows to fit into their openings from the outside. No fool I, I also waited until every freakin' one of them was installed and the glue had dried before closing the hole. Ha!
The trailing edges of both wings had a bend in 'em, enough that I thought there might be a slight bend between the inboard and outboard wing flaps. Close scrutiny to a few pictures showed this ain't so, therefore the trailing edge is warped, not to mention a scale foot thick.
Much sanding is involved to thin down the trailing edge and once that was accomplished I added a strip of .010 x .020 styrene to create a nice crisp edge.
On to the main gear. Here's what the gear legs look like. That just screams "Cut me off and scratchbuild something!"
I cut the gear struts off flush with the bottom of that humongous fairing and drilled a 1/8" hole up through it to accept a length of 1/8" aluminum tube. This will be the new gear strut and the bit between the two little collars you see there will serve as the oleo strut. Devilishly clever, wot? Any fule can make one, but ya gotta make two, and they must be precisely alike because otherwise the airplane will list drunkenly to one side or the other when it's up on its feet.
The hole in the lower collar where that drill goes through will accept the new axle that I made from a short length of 1/16" tubing. There are two gear scissors on each main gear leg, but I want to wait until I install the gear permanently before adding them. While I was down there I pounded out a round of beer..ahh.. beverage can with a Micro Mark punch to use as a wheel cover. No particular reason I just think it looks ok. I shall cut off the axle to an appropriate length after they are installed, and I may make some towing lugs for the ends. I have to check whether this airplane was towed via the tailwheel or the mains.
On to the engines. I decided to use the resin engines because they look better. They at least have rudimentary cowl flaps around the bottom of the cowlings. To use them, however meant having to remove a load of material off the back of the engine cowling. After much thought and not a few cold beverages, the engineering department came up with a wonderful idea. Create a tool to remove all that material, instead of paying twenty bucks for a 3/4" drill. But I'll save that for the next post.