In the previous post I painted the crewmen and the cockpit. This post covers assembling the cockpit, fuselage, wings, and the empennage.
(Scroll all the way to the bottom of the post to skip to the YouTube video.)
Lessons learned
This part is the first instance where I’m actually putting pieces together, and it didn’t go as smoothly as I’d hoped. Most of the build time was spent test-fitting pieces and getting frustrated that they didn’t line up consistently.
The front crewman didn’t rest flush on top of the seat or against the back of the seat, which meant I had to wait longer for the glue to cure to make sure he didn’t fall out!
The inside of the fuselage has ridges where the cockpit should fit, but there’s not enough surface area for the assembly to stay in place while the glue sets up. I ended up just not gluing the cockpit assembly; it’s held in place by the two halves of the fuselage.
The fuselage parts didn’t fit together cleanly. There are several trouble spots that will be super-visible later…
The other places are either not noticeable or covered up by some other pieces (e.g., air intakes, exhaust ports).
Although I used the same glue (Model Master liquid cement) on my 2016 Camaro, I had more trouble than I expected getting the glue to cure. (Yes, I washed the pieces before gluing, and I used rubber gloves while handling them.) The Testors liquid cement with applicator brush didn’t seem to fare much better or worse. This translated into several minutes of me just holding pieces in place by hand.
A typical approach to keeping the halves of a fuselage in place is to clamp or rubber-band the pieces together. That doesn’t really work here because of the opening at the bottom (more obvious in the video); i.e., pushing two pieces together at the top would pull them apart at the bottom. After watching several videos about techniques, I don’t see how sanding would have helped.
Something I could have done (and even knew about from watching other builds!) was to paint the inside of the fuselage near where the cockpit rests. If you look carefully inside the cockpit, you can see the white plastic on the sides.
I’m attributing my problems to this being an inexpensive kit from an off-brand manufacturer. (Most of the other aircraft kits from Tamiya or Revell are 2-3 times as expensive.)
After assembling the pieces, I watched videos and read some posts about how to fix parts once glued. Some of the problems may be too big to fix, but I’ll give it a go in the next part.