Minicraft 1/144 Pan Am Stratocruiser

[Graeme H]

Coming together nicely, do you think the Cobra bits are worth the money?
I know what you mean about modeling at the speed of Life,

[kfutter]

Coming together nicely, do you think the Cobra bits are worth the money?
I know what you mean about modeling at the speed of Life,

Thanks, Graeme. To be honest, in this scale, I think the Cobra engines are of marginal value. Don't get me wrong, they're nicely done and all, but they're relatively expensive, and don't give you the rounded props seen on many of the civil birds anyway. And they add a fair bit more work to the build. Having said that, I'll probably change my mind once they're installed and painted, as they're certainly a vast improvement over the kit parts.

Kev

[hrtpaul]

Not boring me mate

[kfutter]

Right, well I'm glad you guys aren't bored! So, I decided to push this one ahead a little bit today. Previously I'd noticed that the trailing edge on one of the wings was a little untidy:



Gotta fix that! I've already begun the process, but forgot to take a photo, so I'll finish that story in the next update. In the meantime, though, I figured I may as well attach the engines now. For this task, I elected to use a two-part epoxy glue, rather than CA. Not only would this give me more working time to correctly position the parts, but being a set of butt-joints, it would also offer much more strength. My weapon of choice here is the mighty J-B Weld:



This stuff is used to fix engine blocks, so it doesn't get much stronger than that! And here's the result:



One of my concerns about fitting these engines was about them not being completely parallel to the fuselage, due perhaps to my not getting the nacelle faces completely true and perpendicular. Well, this in fact turned out to the case, with small but noticeable variations in the direction each engine is pointing. Oh well. This was never meant to be a show pony anyway, so I'll live with it.

J-B Weld requires around 6 hours to set up properly, so I decided to (finally) move on to the fuselage. One of the first tasks is to paint their insides matt black:



Once done, I take a cotton bud moistened with methylated spirits and clean the paint off the mating surfaces. In the photo above I've done the top part, but not the bottom.

The point of painting the insides like this is to deal with the inherently translucent nature of thin polystyrene, and stop light leakage. For most military builds this doesn't matter, but for a fuselage that will be substantially white, it means less paint is needed on the outside to counteract the effect. Check out the difference in the photo below. The part on the left has a matt black interior, and the one on the right doesn't:



Even if this doesn't make a substantive difference to the finished result, it's quick and easy to do, so there's no real reason not to. I also did it to the inside of the clear nose piece:



I'm not sure whether I'll be using decals for the cockpit windows or not, yet, so this gives me the option of masking them if I need to. Minicraft provides the window decals, while the aftermarket decals only provide the silver frames. And they don't appear to be a good match to each other. As the latter is likely to be more accurate, I'll have to mask out the kit window panes. Anyway, that decision is a little further down the track!

Kev

[hrtpaul]

Looks great man. Like the matt black trick too. Very cool

[kfutter]

Looks great man. Like the matt black trick too. Very cool

Thanks, Paul. I forgot to mention in my post that using matt black on the inside of the fuselage halves is even more effective with white plastic.

Kev

[hrtpaul]

That's very handy as I have a few kits with white plastic

[tor lives]

Great progress and techniques Kev.....keep it coming
TOR

[kfutter]

Thanks, Ray. Since posting my photos, I've noticed that one of my engines is slightly out of alignment. Oh well. As I keep saying, this build is really just to show off the livery (a decal carrier, as we used to say), so I'm prepared to live with my usual ham-fisted stuff-ups.

Kev

[kfutter]

Well, despite being pushed for time, I decided that some token work on this project was better than doing none at all. Firstly, here's a shot of my one misaligned engine:



Damn! The J-B Weld has really done its job though, so short of sawing it off and starting again, it's not going anywhere. To be honest, that's what I really should do, but I'm going to live with it, and disguise it by pretending it never happened.

I've also got some ugly gaps to deal with:



It'll be out with the Milliput for those bad boys.

So, remember my dodgy trailing edges? Here's a pretty nifty way to fix them. Take some thin Evergreen rod and cement it to the problem area:



It's better to use rod than strip, as it's actually easier to glue into place. Use a normal styrene solvent cement so that you can get a really good welded bond. Note that I have previously removed the primer from this area so that it doesn't interfere with the bonding process. Leave it to cure for at least 24 hours; you want it to be rock solid. If you don't feel that it is, you can always reinforce it with some CA.

Next, take a fairly coarse sanding stick, and sand the rod almost completely away, using about a 30° angle:



As you can see, this takes care of the ragged mismatch between the parts, and also gives a nice, straight trailing edge. But Kev, why don't you just use CA for this job? I hear you ask. It's true, you can, but I find the approach I've shown here produces a neater result, and it's much simpler to get a straight trailing edge.

OK, that's all I managed for the weekend, but hopefully somebody found it useful!

Kev