Good afternoon, fellas. I hope y’all are having a good day out there!
BIG updates today on two fronts. Let’s dive in.
First-up: Marga has guns! Sprayed them with Tamiya Light Gunmetal straight out the rattlecan this morning, and after that I put the rest of the colors on the gun deck. Have a butcher’s:
I like that gunmetal. It’ll look nice with some schmutz on it.
Now, on to Pips’s Emil because there’s lots to talk about!
Firstly, Pips’ Emil is standing tall!
If you’re asking yourself how I managed to not snap off the struts throughout the course of all that building and filling and sanding and painting, I honestly have no idea, clumsy as I am HAHAHAA! But I prefer to build the 109’s this way. It is easier for me to position the gear exactly how I want it. Now, that last bit is still going to take practice. While I feel like the stance is *passable*, I feel like I’m just a degree, maybe two off from precisely where it needs to be. Oh well, NO PROBLEM! I’ll just build me another one after this one (more on that later).
Now, secondly in terms of Pips’ Emil, it’s “FULL DISCLOSURE” time! Y’all ready to enjoy a comedy of errors and have a laugh at my expense? Strap yourselves in...
So you fellas are aware that I had fit issues with the resin cockpit set, mostly due to my inexperience working with resin cockpit sets. Oh well. Stuff happens. Problem was, I’d already removed all the detail that was molded into the cockpit sidewalls for to fit the resin pit in there.
But I had a solution! See here, I had another Emil kit on my Shelf Of Doom which I had previously bashed for some damn reason or another, cant remember why. Anyhow, I pulled the fuselage out of there, no problem right?
Wellllll.... maybe. See, that particular Emil kit, with the replacement fuselage in it? It’s an E4. So after some head-scratching I did some research. According to Wikipedia, the difference between an E3 and an E4 was upgraded armament. “Cool!” I thought, “No problemo.”
...but what Wikipedia failed to mention, and what I learned much later was, the canopies were different!
I didn’t realize there was an issue until I looked closer at this photo:
What happened there was, the original clear part for the rear canopy came off and got lost in my office someplace. “No problem!” I said to myself, “I’ll grab the one from the other Emil kit.”
It fit super-good (imagine that!) but there was that step you see. It eluded me for quite a while! But I finally noticed it when looking at photos.
SO, I popped the clear parts off, masked the rest of the clear parts from the spare Emil, painted them up, and put them on. BOOM! Perfect fit:
But there’s a problem... see, the canopy on an E3 is slimmer and rounded off at the top. And as you can plainly see, this one here is more angular, and a bit wider.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry
Yeah boys, it’s sure been one thing after another with this project, I’ll tell you that! But I have learned a whole Hell of a lot, and honestly, not only have I had more fun than headaches with this build -when looking objectively at the whole process- I’ve also matured a lot as a modeler. One aspect is paying attention to the fine details, which as you can see from my progress on Marga, I have indeed taken that lesson to heart.
So you know what!? I’m going to finish Pips’ Emil. Only I guess it isn’t *technically* “Pips’ Emil” anymore. It’s more like “The ‘Franken-Emil’: One Modeler’s Testament To Sticktoitiveness And, Oh, I Dunno, Actually FINISHING A Build”!
HA! So there we go! That’s it for me today. More about my next 1:48 Emil later.
Damn that sucks Kenny.
