I’m going to use nails and a staple to fix how the engine pylons are attached to the wings.
Regarding the inner engines, I drilled holes in the wings and in the engine pylons. I then super glued a short section of a nail into the holes in the pylons. The nails will be super glued into the holes in the wings and provide a strong attachment.
This is a dry fit (no glue) of the engine to the wing. The fit between the nail and the hole in the wing is tight enough to hold the engine in place.
I used the same technique for the engine on the opposite wing.
The outside engines needed a different solution. The wing is very thin at the location of the outer engine, just two sheets of plastic in thickness, so I could not drill a hole. Instead, I made a slot in the plastic and glued a piece of the metal staple into the slot. A hole was drilled into the engine pylon which fits over the staple to provide a strong attachment.
The tail has been glued onto the fuselage. Now it’s starting to look like an airplane.
After the glue cures for a couple of days, I’ll attack the joint between the tail and the fuselage. In the meantime I’ll do some work on the rack mounted nukes.
The original B-58 had a huge combo fuel drop tank/nuke bomb hung under the fuselage. Later versions had four additioinal B-43, 1 megaton, nukes hung under the wing adjacent to the fuselage. Usually the engine pods blocked the view of the four nukes. This photo shows the additional four nukes painted in white.
The cross section of the main wing was so shallow that a traditional landing gear system would not fit. So the solution was eight, 22 inch diameter tires inflated to 240 psi. The wheels that held the tires were designed to remain intact in case all of the tires exploded upon landing.
Excluding the front landing gear tires, there are 18 main landing gear tires and wheels that need to be painted. Major pain in the butt.
Eight of the wheels/tires are attached to a subframe which in turn connects to the main landing gear struts.
This photo compares a set of B-58 tires/wheels to the main landing gear of a B-24.
I used Perfect Plastic Putty to fill the seam between the tail and the fuselage. It worked really well.
I’ll be using Caracal decals that I purchased when I bought the B-58 model from e-bay last year.
The decals are really nice quality decals. The carrier film is very clear. I’ll apply the tail decals after the kit is finished so I don’t accidently scratch them while I’m installing the engines and bomb racks. By the way, The mounting lugs on the bomb racke are way smaller that the slots in the wings. Plus, the curve of the bomb racks do not match the curve of the wings. That means more wasted time dealing with Monogram’s poor engineering.
After a lot of sanding, the bomb racks (green arrows) were finally attached to the fuselage.The brass pins (red arrows) will be used to attach the bombs to the bomb racks.
This is what the bombs look like when dry fitted to the racks.
This is the BIG BOMB after it is dry fitted to the fuselage.
I used Bare Metal Foil to finish the canopy frames. There are no pre-cut masks available and I was concerned that I would screw up the canopy if I hand-painted the frames.
Well, smack me with a loaf of French bread. IIRC, the instructions for that beast say you can do one or the other, not both; the bombs and the big tank. Guess I know which way I’ll go now!
This is a usefull tool when working on an upside-down aircraft. It is a foam block that is used by model shipbuilders. It securly holds an upside-down aircraft in a flat position.
I glued the outside engines to the wings and used a clamp to hold them in place.
The outside seam between the engine and the wing is pretty good.
However, the inside seams are really bad, bad, bad. I’ll have to use some PPP to fill the seam.
