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| Most excellent box art! The kit comes with fuselage and wing interior parts and I will be building it with much of the outer skin removed to show all the interior details. |
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| The kit is fairly complex and has lots of runners. |
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| Parts removal from sprues. This is a trick I use to breakdown the perceived complexity of a kit to make it easier to build. The next order of business is to clean up the parts. |
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| Delicate parts remain on sprue "handles" for easier clean up. |
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| Seam removal with ZM scraper tool. |
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| 0000 steel wool. |
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| Wrap steel wool around bamboo skewer and chuck into a motor tool. |
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| Additional seam removal. |
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| Gets hard to reach areas easily. |
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| Using Liquid cement to remove mold seams with a brush. |
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| I will be building this without the other fuselage side so that the interior will be visible. This means that these pesky knock out marks will need to be filled or removed. |
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| I have a homemade punch, but not with a punch the size I need. I drilled a new hole using a drill press. I then used the drill bit as a punch by filing the shank end flat. |
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| I put a .005 styrene sheet in and punched a few. |
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| Basic instructions on making your own punch. |
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| .005 thick by .150 diameter discs. |
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| The discs are put in with liquid glue. |
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| For me this process is less work than using putty. |
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| Gluing the engine block together. |
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| Another pesky mold seam. |
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| Stretched sprue is used with liquid cement to fill the gap. |
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| Once dry, the area is sanded. |
I will be posting in-progress images regularly as the kit needs to get done quickly so that I can photograph it. I haven't built a military kit in a while and I will be building it as "skeleton" model. Everything will be pristine and not weathered, which is also a different way than I typically build. Having a lot of fun so far!