Here's the brush housing occupying what was once the bare space on the prop shaft between the hub and engine.
Ahhh... what to tackle next? Took a preliminary look at the brass blast tubes mounted onto the kit's gun bodies. I want to be able to mount the tubes AFTER assembly and that will take some modifications to accomplish. But not in the mood for that!
I decided to tackle the nose cowling checkerboard pattern. The cowling has been sitting for a while with a nice coat of gloss white, waiting for the checker painting. There are different ways of establishing a checkerboard pattern but since I had the Montex mask set, I thought I'd give that approach at try. But first, I scanned the Montex checkerboard pattern and created a custom mask so that I could produce more masks if necessary.
It appeared that the Montex checkers were designed in three components: left, right and bottom. To verify this and to check potential fit of the pattern to the cowling, I produced temporary masks of just the outlines of the three components and placed them on the cowling. Obviously, the vinyl mask material is not going to conform perfectly to the complex curvature of the cowling but it fit well enough to confirm the placement of the three components. I found that the bottom piece over-lapped the side pieces, indicating that the bottom pieces would not fit perfectly.
Using the top center of the cowling as the datum, marked by a piece of Tamiya masking tape and the joint at cowling flaps, I started placing the square pieces of the masks one by one. And yes, I labelled each piece of the mask for orientation and re-placement reference.
After a few rows, it became apparent that the square pieces were not fitting well around nose edge of the cowling so I elected to stop short by two columns. After the top row on the port side was established, the datum tape was removed and I used the masks already in place as the new datum for the starboard side.
Once I got to the bottom section, I verified that no, the pieces were not go going to fit as designed. Instead, I measured the remaining space and designed a new set of masks to fit that space. I had to do this twice since my original attempt had five rows and the alternating checkerboard pattern needed an even number of rows to work correctly so I made a new bottom section with six rows.
After all of the rows were in place, I started removing alternate squares to form the checkerboard pattern.
The front and rear borders were masked and Tamiya Black was sprayed onto the cowling.
Here is the result after the first coat of black paint.
The top was the messiest.
The top after some repair work. I think this approach is going to work!
