B-17G Flying Fortress; GPM; 1/33

[Yeti]

Impressive model! The plexiglass parts look especially nice. Did you have to order those, or fabricate them yourself?

[gotham]

Impressive work. Don't think I'd have the patience to build one model for two years.

[Tino]

First to all - Thank you for your kind comments.
Chaparral2d, hyair, MacSongLi, Yoavhozmi– Thank you again for your comments.
Gerardo – Thank you very much! I see that you really liked my model!
CMDRTED – I will do it. It’s not a big list but I will tell some things that happened.
Elliot – Model have indeed some mistakes/problems that the pictures don’t show very well.
Yeti - I order the Plexiglas and it came the piece for the nose (bombardier place), the round piece in the top of the nose in front of the cockpit, and the piece for the dorsal tower. The others were made by me.
Gotham - It took me two years because of my lack of time. The model have less than 600 pieces. So, at the beginning I expected to take about 6 months in my normal conditions.

I will also let here one small video were you can see how the ball turret work in my model.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI8F4ss_OLw

[milenio3]

Tino, meu amigo! Parabéns!

You made it to the Picture of the Week!

A checkmark plus goes to Portugal!

[elliott]

And a gold star!

[John Dell]

It is always nice to see a B-17. Very nice job on a complex kit. Congratulations on the Picture of the Week!

[Tino]

Take this from the picture of the week tread:

"Just thinking that somewhere at the first half of the build I considered this model almost lost and I never would be capable of making a good model of it.
Now that its finished I can say that I made the right decision of never quit finishing a model even when things seems to go wrong."
And all this ended with the pictures of the week. Not even in dreams I thought that it was possible after things went wrong.

Thank again for your kind comments everybody.

About the problems with the build:
Some pieces don’t fit right. Some formers were to big ans some to small but these were easy to solve. In the big ones I sanded them all around. In the small ones I cut very thin strips of paper and glued them around until the former got the right diameter.
The interior of the central section of the fuselage was hard to glue right. I needed to take it out and glue again. In the process I tore a part of the exterior silver piece of that section. Glued it again but its still there and its visible.
The biggest problem was in the wings. When I got that stage I understand why I found in several forums why there are some treads building this model stopped at middle. I remember clearly one case of someone at kartonbau.de (I think it was René) that just gave up because the wings doesn’t fit with the fuselage. I will not say that the wings don’t fit with the fuselage but they are very hard to fit well. That’s the truth. First the markings in the bottom of the fuselage are wrong. The positions of them are wrong for the right wing position (too much at front or to much back). I needed to cut them much bigger until I find the correct position. Also the wing roots don’t fit very well in to the fuselage. In this place the wings don’t get right, leaving an empty space between the wing and fuselage. What I do? I filled those holes with glue and paint them with silver paint. Well, it helped a lot.
Another thing. The engine nacelles. The propellers spinners had a gigantic in each one. The same recipe to solve the problem. Fill them with glue and paint it over. The nacelles also don’t fit very well in the wings leaving the wing skin a little corrugated a hole at the side…
The instructions for the landing are very sparse. That was hard to find out how everything fit together.
The tail landing gear don’t hold itself. Its necessary to reinforce it. I used card and a tube of paper to hold the wheel in place.
Finally, to finish, one curiosity. The nose art was white. It is work of the modeler to paint it over. In the instructions we have the colors to use in polish!!!
This is an hard model. Big, old, hand designed and naturally with some errors.

Sorry my bad English and I hope that you understand what I write. If someone have more questions I will be happy to answer them.

[CMDRTED]

Tino, thankyou this is exactly what I was looking for. I have several B17 kits, including the one you have built. Some of the older kits have terrible fit problems and to start a kit project like your B17 and take quite a long time to build it only to find these problems would turn quite a few newer builders off from paper models. I wish more folks would be quite as detailed as you explaining the problems with a particular kit and also what you had to do to correct the problems. Once again a very beautiful job on construction sir!

[milenio3]

Tino, I hope you din't mind, but I want to let our fine community here at PM
that your construction report and photos are in the Spanish forum:

Maquetas y modelismo en papel - B-17G - 1/33 - GPM - Aviones militares

Tino added very good photos for references during his 2 year building of
this fantastic model.

[Tino]

Of course that I don't mind Gerardo.
Instead I say thank you for share. Gracias.
Just one thing. For the people that don't know portuguese or spanish, I remember that I wrote in portuguese and the other members in spanish. So if somebody is using an online translator should remember this.