SPA Modeler

Excellent progress John!

Will be going back through the whole build progress to check this one out. Another one of your masterpieces in the making........

Great to see you back at the bench btw.

Thanks guys! I painted the radiator intake components.



I dirtied up this area using airbrush post shading and pastel washes and splattering.

Ya know... you oughta be in pictures building this bird... or any model kit you're doing. I never could do radiators looking realistic as that. You are a master.

Superb work John!

Thanks guys! I'm just plodding away on a number of different fronts. The big hurdle of this kit, from what I've read is the main wheel well area. I'm not quite ready to tackle this yet but I've cleaned up the parts that make up the walls of the wheel wells. I want to put some plumbing in and it looks like there are some molded depressions that correspond to wiring holes so I've drilled these out. Will these be sufficient? I'm not in the mood to figure it out just yet. I still have a set of Eduard brass wing flaps that will need wing surgery so I'm thinking that there is still stuff to do before I get to the wheel wells.


The fuselage is in the process of being cleaned up. I used black CA glue as the primary filler for the long joints with Mr Surfacer 1000 on top of that to feather everything flush. I don't usually primer my entire model but will use Mr Primer Surfacer 1000 to check certain areas like I did her on the fuselage spine.




The painted radiator components have been glued into the nose piece.




Jumping over to the wings, we can see that two of the four leading edge inserts for the wings fit very nicely with minimal cleanup required.



The other two inserts are needing a little more attention. Note the thin line of black CA glue in some of the joints. This approach fails many times as there is just not enough material to withstand the re-scribing of panel lines. In this case, I used my scriber to gouge out the black CA glue and some surrounding plastic as well and re-applied the black CA glue.



Here is the result of a 2nd round of CA filling. I'm a lousy scriber but I've learned to drag my sharp edge instead of pushing it when going through areas of mixed composition. This reduces the chance of pulling out chunks of filler, whether it is CA glue or Mr Surfacer.


There is a fuel fill cap on the centerline of the fuselage forward of the cockpit. The kit supplies a square outline decal but to match the other nearby fuel fill cap, I decided to scribe a new one.




I can understand why Special Hobby didn't mold the fuselage fuel fill cap since it is on a glue joint but there is a circular fuel port on the top of the port wing that is also omitted in and only represented as a decal. I placed a circular template using the decal sheet as a guide (not the most accurate) and scribed the port.

Excellent work John!

Lovely work.

Thanks guys!

In addition to the wheel well area, another area of concern is how the nose + resin engine will mate with the fuselage. I've decided to add a couple of shims to help separate the rear of the nose assembly to match the front of the fuselage. Due to the engine, the space to add shims is restricted to a small strip just below the engine casting block.



With the wings taped together, I tried a dry fit of the three major subcomponents. Yes, there are gaps but considering that this is all friction and gravity, I'm pretty pleased at this initial step. The shims also serve as a shelf for the rear of the engine block to rest.



The re-shaped kit spinner is ready for painting. It doesn't match the Barracuda corrected spinner exactly but I've removed the most obvious "bulbous" look of the kit spinner AND the baseplate diameter matches the nose exactly, which is why I chose to use this instead of the Barracuda spinner and nose. My normall scrubbing pad and splatter templates are used for the pre-shading.



I read somewhere that pink is a great base for yellow and I tried that here on the prop blade tips.


Seemed to work well but hard to conclusive when the yellow area is so small. There is some very light hairspray chipping (mostly on the edges). The props were also given a couple of rounds of salt fading to dirty them up. I'll probably put a few chips on the yellow tips with a sponge.



The back sides of the props do not have yellow tips. As I am going to model David C. Fairbanks' Tempest: JJ-F (EJ762), I am basing the painting of the props on this photo...

The prop blades with the finished spinner.


The tail wheel leg has been repainted in a metallic color (White Aluminum). I thought there was enough ambiguity to make the landing gear legs light grey but it seems pretty apparent that they were metallic in color.