Academy 1/35 USMC AH-1Z – Step 1d

This step was about assembling the fuselage and the landing skids.

Here’s the gallery with 61 images of this step.

Lessons learned in this step:

  • The two halves didn’t fit together, likely because of that protruding piece (sorry, I don’t know what it’s called) on the starboard side.
  • The Vallejo acrylic filler didn’t work all that great on the main horizontal seams; it seems to work best in corners and other sharper angles.
  • The Tamiya white putty seems to do a better job sticking to the putty knife than the model.
  • There are lots of weird angles to sand (short curved pieces at perpendicular angles).
  • The section behind the main rotor and the nose section may or may not turn out okay once I get it primed and painted. I intentionally didn’t putting down a third layer of putty so that I could see the difference between post-sanding and finished product.

This step took just over six hours.