SPA Modeler

Between bad weather and holiday celebrations, I missed out on a couple weeks worth of my longest distance bike rides... so today I paid the piper ... but I am feeling better now

So in the mid afternoon I began work on my Tiffy. Of course this is not gonna be straight OOB, so I began with modifications...

As you can see, this kit is old... 1969, the same year as the first Apollo Moon Landing... but the surface detail is not bad at all. Nice petite raised panel lines and some rivets here and there...



since RCAF 439 Sqdn was a "Bombphoon" unit, I had to first fill the rocket rail mounting holes...




I used some strip styrene filed ti fit and a good amount of Plastruct liquid cement for each one, then nipped off the excess... I will sand them smooth later...





then I had to sand away the kit's exhaust stacks to make way for the Ultracast exhaust stacks




The kit's pilot seat is kinda weak - it's made for a seated pilot figure


so I found a possible resin replacement in my spares' drawer


then a test fit of the Ultracast dust filter...


since it is designed for this kit, it drops right in place with no fuss.... nice!


that's all for now...

...and we're off! Great start.

Last night after dinner I sanded the rocket rail mounting holes smooth and this morning I rescribed the lost panel line detail





after that, I test fitted the upper wings to the lower and noticed a bit of a gap there where the landing light openings are located... so I set about creating some wing spar there to fill the opening





This morning I glued the upper wing halves on the lower wing





and as you can see, the spar is visible...



kinda plain now, but not to worry... I am gonna mount one of these in each opening for landing lights... now I am glad I found them.. I can do a whole bunch of fighters with this package...



and finally I got some work done in the cockpit...

seat separated from the armor plate and resin replacement seat from it's pout stub



and the IP and floor troughs ready for some generic RAF PE detail stuff from Reheat that I have had for ages...

[image]tp://i1319.photobucket.com/albums/t671/stikpusherII/rcaf%20tiffy/100_1304_zpsc19808d9.jpg[/image]

I should have some more progress to show in a few hours...

whoo, nice work

Thanks for looking Owl. I am glad that you liking this build. Didn't you do one of these not too long ago?

Well here is the afternoon/evening update...
I used this Reheat generic RAF/FAA set to spiff up the cockpit a bit


added a compass to the IP


and some rudder pedals to the floor troughs. I also added a brass wire connecting rod for the pedals based upon some photos I came across, as well as some styrene rod structure work to add what I saw in those photos... those pedals were a challenge as first you had to bend them to shape, then add the upper crossbar...




I also added another layer of armor (sheet styrene) to the cockpit rear bulkhead, the seat, some framework, as well as a retaining bar for the harness. I have some Eduard RAF late war Harnesses that I will use on this after painting



it may not look like much but those little PE things drove me a bit crazy... but nowhere near as bad as my last PE experience...

aren't you done yet?

Seems you goung to remove some year to this old mouuld

Nice work Stik! You are becoming quite good at this scratch em up type of building. Fun to watch.

Paul wrote:aren't you done yet?

No, not a weekend madness this time...

BsYamato wrote:Seems you goung to remove some year to this old mouuld

Oh I hope not... that is one of my trademarks...

LyleW wrote:Nice work Stik! You are becoming quite good at this scratch em up type of building. Fun to watch.

Ya know, the more I do of that sort of stuff, the more I enjoy it... I love a new tooled well detailed kit with all those things already there, but I have more fun dressing up these old kits. New kits are for me to recharge my batteries after a particularly challenging build project...

But I gotta try to keep up with BSY and Fermis here...