Hi Kurt and Dan, thanks for your kind words!
The outside cockpit skins are now in place as well. A bit of a tricky job I must say as the skins have to align very precisely at the bottom to ensure proper mating of the forward and aft fuselage segments.
I started with the front one, which has clear reference lines at the lower frontside to glue along. I was somewhat surprised to see the remaining gap at at the bottom side, I had expected both ends to mate, which would be the best reference point to see if everything is exactly aligned.
The aft one, with the glazing behind the pilot's seat, didn't give any problems with respect to aligning the "Z" and panel lines. I punctured a hole at the location where the antenna mast has to be placed and made sure that the hole is right at the location where I glued the small tube before, to provide stability to the mast when inserted at a later stage.
However, whatever I tried during dry-fitting of the bottom ends, a narrow gap between the black and white underside remained and I didn't dare to put more pressure on the structure, being afraid that it would buckle. Either the outside skin is too narrow or the inside skin too wide, as I'm pretty much convinced the error is not on my side! Anyway, on the pictures the gap looks dramatic but in reality it's not more than 0.5mm wide at maximun.
Unfortunately this results in a too tight fit at the bottom side of the first fuselage section aft of the cockpit area, but nothing that can't be restored at some point later in the build, after the wings have been attached to the fuselage. The panel lines at the camouflaged sides and top align perfectly. Besides, after two train test-builds I've become pretty experienced in restoration works
.
Pictures have an orange shade to them, they were taken late at night under artificial light. That's the drawback of a model like this: It's extremely addictive and I've decided not to go against it. Luckily my management understands and accepts the fact
. She knows by now, after almost 24 years of marriage.
I have deliberately used glue on the entire surface areas, which after drying of the skins resulted in a surprisingly strong assembly. What started as a fragile construction has in the end turned out to be quite strong. Nice!
Regards,
Erik