The next item to install is the remotely operated belly turret. This is a two-piece Paragon resin assembly and I am installing the upper cup. The edges of the cup are sculpted to meet the contours of the kit fuselage but are not correct and the fit into the fuselage is very loose. Either there will be a large recess to the front and back or a raised area to the left and right. I chose to lift the part so the front and back edges met the kit part and then will grind off the raised area. I painted the interior area of the cup Green Drab then placed a small drop of superglue to the back edge of the resin part and tacked it in place. Once it was positioned properly I placed a few more small spots of glue to secure it in place then worked around the edge with a heavier bead of superglue. This was hit immediately with accelerator. I used my Dremel with a small tear-dropped stone to grind off the excess superglue and resin until the parts edge is nearly flush with the plastic. I shifted to a diamond needle file to finish to basic material removal then cleaned it up with fine sandpaper. There are still a few small spots that need some putty and then it will be ready for primer.

     The top turret guns are installed into the glazing and I place Fast Frames masking material on the glazing. The interior areas are covered with Grumbacher Liquid Frisket material. The turret is installed into the cockpit roof, the clear piece that comprises the cabin windows is glued in using Testors Clear Parts Cement and the entire assembly is installed onto the fuselage. A wee bit of putty is applied at the seams and smoothed out with acetone. The Fuselage seams are brush painted with some primer gray and so are the outside areas of the new nose window frames to seal the putty that was placed there early on in the build. All the remaining clear parts have been Futured and allowed to cure for 24 hours and now are installed. The previous modeler destroyed the clear part for the side door so that needs to be reconstructed. Both new nose windows need to be fashioned and the waist gun window areas need to be masked off. All the kit windows are covered with the Fast Frames masks.

    I am using the clear plastic packaging material from a package of Xacto blades to construct my new windows. It’s a simple matter of cutting out some rectangular pieces and trimming them to fit the openings, dipping them in Future and allowing them to cure. I place a bead of Clear Parts Cement around the interior edge of the window opening and use a thin strip of masking tape placed across the new windows to hold them in position. The Paragon replacement nose cone has been trimmed up, Futured and masked with strips of masking tape and liquid frisket and is glued in place with the Clear Parts Cement. A single strip of masking tape is used to help hold it in position until the glue sets up. After the glue has dried I place another bead around the seam on the nose to blend in a slight step from the fuselage.

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The wings are not glued in place but simply held in place by the plastic lock tabs. They will be glued shortly.

    The kit tail-gun is just plain lame, there is no other way to describe it. Ground-crews had dressed up this gun to look as formidable as possible to scare off attacking aircraft but the kit gun would not scare of a Cessna. Fortunately Paragon as provided plenty of replacement .50 caliber barrels in the conversion kit. I needed to find some way to recreate the large flash suppressors that the real guns displayed. I used a piece of 1/16 inch (1.6mm) Evergreen rod and drilled it out with my Welders Tip Drill to make hollow tubing then sliced it off the end at an angle. Two of these were super-glued to the resin barrels then the barrels replaced the kit pieces and I now have a very formidable looking set of Brownings to place on the aft end of this bomber. The tail gun assembly will be installed after the model has been painted.

    I’ve pulled the wings back off and touched up a few more areas along the leading edge with some sandpaper and fit them to the fuselage again. The Starboard wing fits fairly well but the Port wing has a large gap at the back end and bulges out along the bottom seam. I run a few drops of Tenex 7R into the Starboard top seam and hold the wing in place while it sets up. After a few minutes the model is set down with some bottles of paint laid onto it in crucial areas to hold the wing position and given a few hours to fully cure then the lower seam is glued. The Port wing is done in the same manner until I get to the lower seam where I apply some small bar clamps to hold the wing in place and flex the plastic into the correct shape while the glue sets up completely.

    A day has passed and I am cleaning up the seams at the wing roots now. First any excess plastic that has been pressed up from the glue is trimmed with a leaf blade in a #2 Xacto handle. Next, the seam gets puttied. This process is the same as I have described in the Seam Repair instructional. I’m using the “Fencing” technique to lay a very small bead of Squadron White Putty into the seam then smoothing it out with some acetone based fingernail polish remover. I do this in a four-step process; Starboard wing top, Starboard bottom, Port top, Port bottom. After it has had a few hours to dry the seams are finished with some fine sandpaper. The picture below right is after the acetone treatment but before sanding. As you can see there is not a whole lot of sanding necessary to finish that seam.

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     The belly gun sighting blister has been installed and I cut four small rectangles of clear plastic for the offset sighting windows. These are all installed with Testors clear parts cement and held in place with strips of masking tape until the have dried. After the tape was removed the small windows were brushed with Future. The larger bubble was dipped in Future before installation.

After the Future coating had cured for 12 hours I masked off the small windows and wrapped a strip of tape around the upper edge of the blister. The rest of the blister was masked with liquid frisket material. The waist gun windows had masking tape laid overtop them and burnished into the edges with a toothpick then trimmed with a fresh razor knife. The tail wheel bay had some tissue paper stuffed into it and the only opening not masked or filled is the window in the rear crew door. The plastic piece for this the previous owner of the kit had trashed and I will replace it with some new clear plastic but because of the thin wall around this window I think it will be best to do this last.

    Things are really going to start moving now. I’ve taken a strip of masking tape and rolled it into a small tube to slide over the top turret gun barrels to protect them from the paint. First the entire model is coated with Model Master gray primer. I go over the model looking for defects and find a few around the engine nacelles, which are quickly filled and sanded. Next all the deicing boots get coated with Testors flat black. After they have dried for a few hours I mask them off with thin strips of tape and then shoot the upper surfaces with Polly Scale dark green acrylic. This gets a few hours to set up then the camouflage pattern is masked. This is done with wide masking tape that I’ve put a squiggle cut down the center. Once the masking is complete I shoot it with Polly Scale dark sea gray and remove the camo masks leaving the deicing boot masks in place and the clear parts masks in place.

Matt

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