Time to get a start on this one. After looking over the instructions for the interior and seeing the usual Special Hobby vague diagrams I decided to go for some thing easy first like the wings, tail planes and floats. The wings were easy, only an insert on the upper side for the rear portion of the cowling. This was done as an insert because some versions had a rear facing machine gun and others did not. These parts fit quite well with just a little sanding and the wing halves went together reasonably well but suffered from really thick trailing edges. Most of the time I choose to ignore this as it is fairly common on a lot of models but these were way thicker than most...
I think a belt sander would have been a good choice here but I wasn't going all the way to sharp, just wanted to make them a bit less blunt and more rounded. I ended up burning through several large sanding sticks as it was to get it to where I wanted. The tail planes weren't as bad so then it was on to the floats. I knew from when I reviewed this kit that there was an alignment problem with the floats...
You know it's not going to be good when they make a point of noting in the instructions that the fit is problematic Anyway I started by aligning and gluing the top sides which really didn't align all that well...
I then glued the bottom sides using a trick I learned over on Large Scale Planes...
Zip ties, worked a treat, the bottom edge was too sharp for rubber bands and I was afraid of crushing it with a clamp. I also used this trick when I attached the gondola on the 290 and got a nice tight fit.
Once the floats set up I ended up sanding most of the raised detail off the top of the floats to get them evened out. I didn't consider this a bad thing as I have a fair number of 115 photos and from what I can see the detail would be better represented with scribed detail anyway. I drilled holes in the center points of the detail before sanding it away for positioning later on.
That's it so far until I get into trying to figure out where all the interior parts go. One thing for sure this bird is going to be sizeable...
Thanks for looking !
