A More Interesting Title... ah Forget It. Spitfire Mk I Part 4

Things progressed a bit this weekend. Not huge leaps and bounds by some standards, but it's progress nonetheless.

I hand painted the front and back radiator parts before attaching them, because once the radiator fairing is on, it will be difficult to get to them. On the right is the gun sight that I nearly forgot when I was about to close up the cockpit. Woops.

Just when I thought I was free and clear with filling and sanding, I attached the bottom cowling and put the carburetor intake together. What do you know? More filling and sanding. Then a little more filling and sanding.

All smoothed out now.

Both radiator parts are attached to the radiator.

I cut some masking tape to fit the parts and left little tabs in the middle so I could more easily pull them off with tweezers after the bottom is painted.

After some amount of exasperation, the canopy parts are masked and ready for the fuselage and painting. Canopies...can of peas?

Final shot of the canopy-less cockpit.

Okay, one more final shot.

The bottom parts are attached, sans the main landing gear. From left to right: pitot tube (pronounced pea-toe, not pit-tot tube, even though it is more fun to say), oil cooler, carburetor intake, radiator. The Mk I Spitfire was not fuel injected, so when the pilot would pitch the nose down hard and pull negative G's, the fuel would be pushed out of the carburetor and starve the engine and die. Not where you want to be in a fight... in the air. It took a woman engineer to create a stopgap measure until Rolls-Royce got their act together to implement fuel injection in 1943. Something the German engineers had been doing since 1937. Read all about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Shilling%27s_orifice

I used a pin vise to drill out the gun ports on the leading edge of the wings closest to the fuselage.

Canopy and antenna mast attached.

From here, I need to work on the main landing gear and propeller to get them ready for painting. I will wipe it all down with some plastic prep solution before spraying the primer. The solution is essentially just isopropyl alcohol, but if you change the label, market it to a smaller group of consumers, you can charge more for it.

Here is the corresponding YouTube video. Yes, I am aware that the blog post number and the video numbers don't line up. Just ignore it, two different systems: http://youtu.be/VxSj5xRr8ug

Spitfire Mk I Parts 1, 2 and 3!

Some of you may have already seen these pictures. (psst...there's new stuff in here too.) For the record, this is Tamiya's Supermarine Spitfire Mk I in 1/48. I'll intersperse some words somewhere in the junk of pictures, because who wants to tell a story with pictures?

I spent some time adding some extra wires in here. Keep this in mind, it's important later.

So this is the black undercoat. I'm not entirely convinced I should have gone this route this time around.

The interior green coat was put down next.

I sprayed a very, very thinned mix of black in the interior and wiped away what I could. I thought it would run more so I let the first coat dry, which ended up making it darker than I wanted. Oh well, moving on.

I added some silver accent here with dry brushing the details.

 The cockpit and instrument panel went through the same process; black, green, wash, dry brush. The seat got a coat of dull red however.

 

The silver dry brushing really make the details pop.

The completed seat assembly.

All the work that goes into the cockpit, and what can you see? Remember those wire? When I was dry fitting the assembly before gluing the fuselage halves together, I found that they interfered with the cockpit sliding in and gluing into place. It was all torn out except for the coiled bit in the middle. Another lesson to be learned.

At this point, the fuselage seams wore sanded smooth, panel lines re-scribed and the wings were assembled.

When I dry fit the wings on to the body, I realized there was an awful lot of gray plastic at the bottom of the cockpit. I just couldn't stand for any of that!

The wings were glued on and tape was applied to protect the areas around small gaps that needed to be filled with putty.

Where the Spitfire sits right now. I'll remove the tape and sand the wing seams, sand the puttied areas smooth and re-scribe where necessary.

 Here is the YouTube video that happened somewhere in there: http://youtu.be/AFSZBMX64dw

A Frighteningly Bizarre New Era

Welcome! I've finally come to the conclusion that sending the updates for my model builds via email was just a bit cumbersome, OK, a lot cumbersome...like a cummerbund. Ergo, I will be using this site to post such happenings from now on. It will be open to not just my email distribution group, but to all the peoples of the Intertubes. Some of the items of whatnot will probably shift around as I figure out this newfangled contrivance. You can thank me now as I will no longer be clogging up your mailboxes with such detritus.