Yesterday these big birds really started to round into shape. I was able to get the fuselage fully set together on the Hobby Boss, as well as start the highly detailed wheel wells for the Hobby Boss. I painted all of the engines for both Liberators and assembled the wings for the Monogram.
The Monogram has known warts involved in building the wings, specifically in the joints along the sides of all four nacelles. Even with this original molding, the joints are not great. There is a lot of sanding and filling in my immediate future.
And then I looked at the Hobby Boss fuselage, and something bad was clear as day. Apparently on Saturday, I was still ticked off at the effort from my Texas Aggies in Austin the night before, and didn’t bother to really look at the build steps. There was a significant piece missing - the wing spar. It’s a single block piece with two little ridges along each edge of what would be the center portion of the spar, intended to set it into proper position. Yep, that thing was still attached to the sprue. And no, I couldn’t just slide it into position from the outside. I sat there for a moment, incredibly frustrated, when my engineer mind started to function. Out came the Dremel, and I ground away those ridges. Problem solved.
Well, I am probably about a day out from the start of paint for these Liberators.
I’ve built both sets of wings, stabilizers, and rudders. I’ve masked off windows in both fuselages, as well as the bombardier viewport and canopy for both. Both of those latter pieces are attached, so now begins the rant. Hobby Boss’ parts fit perfectly. Monogram’s are like some drunk was in charge of designing those parts (no offense to alcoholics). One forward edge of the canopy didn’t want to adhere naturally to the curve of the fuselage, so it required a rubber band to keep it in place while the glue set. A few minutes later I noticed that the rubber band had dropped the rear mating point below the flush of the fuselage. The bombardier’s viewport is garbage. The arc of its rear connecting point is wider than the area where it mounts. This piece resisted all of my efforts to clamp it into position, so that now on each side I have a noticeable piece of clear plastic sticking away from the fuselage. Once it’s had time to sufficiently set, I’ll have to grind all of that away.
Rant over.
The Hobby Boss engines fit was weird, with slots on the rear of the engine case to slide onto ridges inside the cowling. Test fitting revealed the cowling rings would not fit properly as those ridges were molded. I ended up cutting away a bit of those ridges to get the engines to fit a little deeper into the cowlings so that rings would fit correctly. They look pretty good as they are. The kit includes a PE set with ignition wiring. I elected to not paint those, but now that everything is built, I’m not so sure that I should not have painted the PE. But the good news is that I can still get to those parts once everything else is done.
Amazing work so far Aggieman! This is an immense project both in scope of work involved and the sheer size of both kits and the space they must take up on your work bench.
A few years ago, I built a 1/32 F-86D Dog Sabre (Kitty Hawk kit) that fought me tooth-and-nail, but in the end I won the war and turned out one of the best NMF finishes I’ve done.
I’ve been seeing some of these photos show up recently on the Amazon Echo Show device that I keep on my desk lately. I really like the tired look I gave this one. So I went back to my hand-written build notes to see what I did to accomplish this look. Turns out it was simply pre-shading with black along major panel lines. This is the look I want for my Dragon and His Tail build.
I know that the Dragon and His Tail was the last Liberator destroyed after the war. The only photos I find of the actual war-time bomber seem more from its brief life after the war rather than some South Pacific island, but I’m imagining that any aircraft exposed to the harsh conditions found in the South Pacific will not look like the majority of builds I see of this Liberator. So today I sprayed the Hobby Boss’s panel lines with black.
I did similar with some of the Monogram, but just stuck to the undersides since the olive drab on upper surfaces is likely to obscure this effect. I expect that I will be doing a lot of post-shading on the Monogram kit to give it a tired look.
One of the perks of having a wife who is a tax accountant is that she starts working toward the next tax year in Decembers. Today was her first full day, which afforded me a lot of time at the bench. I was out there so long I was able to watch a slew of Christmas-oriented movies - The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, Bad Santa, Dear Santa, and Violent Night. I don’t recommend the last three for family viewing.
During this time I was able to complete about 90% of the paint work needed for these big paint hogs.
The Hobby Boss has a base coat of AK Interactive Xtreme Metal aluminum. Still to come is to pick out random panels for different shades of AK’s metallic paint (dark aluminum, white aluminum). I also need to do a deep dive into online photos to see if I can find any wartime photos of the aircraft that was originally the Dragon and His Tail to see if there were de-icer boots on that warbird; the painting guidelines for the decal set indicate no such de-icer boots, but I’m thinking that might be for the B-24J that was much more recently painted with that provacative artwork.
The Monogram first got a coat of AK Interactive Real Colors neutral gray for lower surfaces. Once that paint set, I masked with some AK Interactive elastic putty and put down a coat of AK Interactive Real Colors faded olive drab. This is not matching the painting diagram included in the Hobby Boss kit (from which the decal sheet is coming for this Monogram build). The diagram calls for olive drab but the artwork makes the green look more like medium green. I have a bottle of that paint, but elected to go with the faded olive drab because I think it will look more worn for a wartime B-24J.
I have prepped the wings/stabilizer/rudders for the black de-icer boots to come. I really don’t like overspray, so I believe I have handled that potential problem.
The Monogram rudders did not have a raised panel line, or panel line of any sort, for the curvature of the boots. But the Hobby Boss kit does. I used the HB rudders as a template to trace the outline onto wide Tamiya tape, which I then cut out and applied to the Monogram rudders. It’s probably not 100% accurate, but it’s close enough.
Today I will paint the boots, the prop blades, and the superchargers. If time permits, I’ll begin adding different metallic shades to the HB kit.
So this is to share a technique that I have been using for a while now to paint prop tips. Most kits these days have rightfully eschewed the Monogram practice of molding a raised line to denote where the tip should be painted to. I’ve found over the course of my modeling “career” that it can be difficult to get the same width of prop tip by simply applying tape.
My solution was to take this piece of sturdy cardboard and use it to mark each blade per the same geometry. In many cases, the props come molded with the shaft, so I will just put that in the pre-drilled hole. For the Liberators, neither kit has the shaft molded to the prop, so I’ve stuck a toothpick through the backside to mount the prop in the same position. This will result in the same width of prop tip markings for each prop.
