OK, so I have made a bit more progress on the typhoon. I am using a
number of resin accesories from Ultracast to depict the famous 'Sharky',
including their four blade prop and 'tempest' stabilisers. I totally
overlooked the fact that I should have ordered their replacement
radiator complete with dust filter and cuckoo clock doors. Not wanting
to pay the postage on a single item (tight eh! Must be my Scottish
ancestry), I decided to have a go at scratch building my own. I rolled a
piece of miliput to form the body of the filter and finished it off
with some plasticard. It's not perfect, but I'm quite proud of my first
bit of scratching.
After a lick of paint and a wash, this is the result
As I am opening up the gun bays I had to carry out some surgery to the upper wings and remove the panels. Using a pin vise, I drilled a sequence of holes just inside the perimiter of the bays.
I then filed the rough edges smooth while test fitting the resin inserts until a good fit was obtained
The resin pieces come with a substantial pour stub on the underside wich needs to be removed to get the wing halves together. I went to fire up my trusty 'Dremel-a-like' cheapo rotary tool and found it was dead, deceased etc, etc. I then attempted to saw off the offending article but soon realised that this onerous task would take up too much valuable modelling time. I decided to chuck a dremel sanding tool into my 18V De Walt drill and have at it, albeit, very carefully. Several nerve wracking minutes later, I was able to super glue the inserts to the top wings and get the wing halves together.
With all the internal bits sorted, it was time to get the fuselage halves together and the wings on. The fuselage went together with the minimum of fettling but a dry fit of the wings revealed a gap at the wing roots. This, I fixed by inserting a sprue 'spreader' in the fuselage to force the root joint out a bit and this was augmented by a sliver of plasticard. Puttying and sanding of the seams and the mis-alligned panel lines came next, followed by re-scribing said panel lines. Now scribing is the modelling task I least relish as there is so much scope for making a mess of things, but there was nothing else for it so I broke out my scriber of choice from UMM. After marking out the line with a strip of Dymo tape, I carefully ran the tool down the edge..... and promptly ballsed it up. After much cursing and a dose of Mr. Surfacer, I made my second attempt. This time, totally focusing on the task and determined to exorcise my scribing demon, I managed a perfect pass. I think I have found a good method in using the excellent UMM tool, lightly scribing a first pass, removing the tape and then using the pointy end to slowly chase out the line to the required depth. It helps to be completely 'in the zone' while carrying out this task.
In removing the seam underneath the fuselage I had almost sanded away the tail stiffening plates so I replaced these with some cut from thin plasticard.
I also decide to replace the rail behind the canopy with a length of styrene strip.
So, having attached the resin stabilisers, this is where I'm currently at.
Next time:- Starting the paint job. Yesss!!
