SPA Modeler

Someone on here described tha texture as “soapy” ... it fit. Black plastic with black parts to attach has become very hard to see these days.

KSaarni wrote:The consistency of the plastic is many times underestimated but also very subjective thing.
Someone likes harder styrene while someone else prefer softer and then of course colors.
Black, white, "metallic" are colors I try to avoid, but of course sometimes there are no options..

- Kari

That's a very good point Kari - sometimes the deal breaker between and good and a bad kit.

KSaarni wrote:The consistency of the plastic is many times underestimated but also very subjective thing.
Someone likes harder styrene while someone else prefer softer and then of course colors.
Black, white, "metallic" are colors I try to avoid, but of course sometimes there are no options..

- Kari

One property of “silver” plastic that I like is that if you sand off raised panel lines, then polish out the area, the “shadows” of the lines reappear in the plastic and can be used as a guide for scribing if you go that route.

This Z-M kit also has the silver plastic. It's as if the metallic pigments are congregated at the surface... if it is removed, darker plastic is revealed. Helpful when re-scribing but can also be misleading as it leaves visual imprints of features you thought you've removed.

My dislike of the black plastic boils down to cutting, trimming and scribing it. It's hard to describe. When you scrape a knife blade across it with the blade perpendicular, the removed plastic tends to come off in crumbly bits and pieces instead of uniform shavings. I've had the same kind of experience trying to get the molding ridge off of a set of vinyl tires. But it holds paint fine and sands ok.

With the Corsair past the finish line, I'm now jumping between TWO builds not THREE so I should be able to make more progress on this Tank fighter. I have attached the tail unit to the fuselage. There are wooden and metal versions of this tail and I've chosen to represent a metal one, hence the riveting. Fit was not the greatest here so I've had to use some Milliput to fill open gaps and used a curved x-acto blade to shave down some overhangs. After the cleanup, the riveting next to the joint line was finished.



The Z-M wing assembly is on the complicated side. Instead of one wing bottom and two upper wings, Z-M chose to go modular... why I do not know. You have the two wing bottoms (1 & 2), two wing tops (3 & 4), the inserts for the forward wing edge (5 & 6), the wing gun covers (7 & 8), the central wing bottom (9), the 2-piece ailerons on the left and right (10-13) and the two flaps (14 & 15). That's FIFTEEN parts, not including the structural wing spar and various details.

Wanting to not leave things to chance and needing to evaluate what it will take to upgrade the flaps to the aftermarket brass parts, I've tried to dry-fit the wing assembly using tape. The first thing I noticed was that the completed wing is incredibly WIDE. Kurt Tank was serious about the high aspect ratio wing and fully committed to this characteristic aspect of design. The second thing I noticed was... hey, the fit is pretty good here. The wing spar ensures the correct dihedral and the outer wings seemed to fit well in relation to the spar and to each other.


The scribing work on the wing bottoms is pretty much finished but all wing surfaces will need to be riveted prior to assembly.


Preliminary fit of the wings to the fuselage was understandably shaky given that the major contact points (engine and wing root fillets) are missing. But this gives us a preliminary look at the unique form of Herr Tank's fighter.


If you count the wing root fillet parts, the wing assembly has SEVENTEEN components!

That looks good. The lwork on the tail is something.

That's a lot of parts, but it looks to work really well