As I had mentioned in the previous post that I was working on the fixed turret version on my P-61. Here is the first go round on the basic construction. Oddly enough the Testors Model Masters paint jar is the same diameter as the turret. I wrapped a piece of strip styrene .010 and CA’d it together and then added some strip to the joint before sanding to the aprox shape of the outside ring. I added the smaller strip .010, .020 to the inside as a spacer then added the second piece slightly lower to achieve the look int he picture below. The cross bars are from a paperclip (larger one).
The size of the paperclip is a touch to large for the scale bracing pieces so i need to get some smaller rod. Right at 1mm is really close.
In the shot above you can see the spacer a bit better. One thing that is stumping me is how to get the correct vertical off set for the .50 Bownings. I made a mold out of Playdough, but I forgot that it shrinks when dry.
Need to figure something out as the new barrels and gun bodies need to be correct and not canted one way or the other.
The detail on the turned brass is crazy good. Highly recommend these if the budget allows.
Back to working in the gear bay. PE support bracing on the first boom I did was a learning time and thus made a jig to keep the two parallel and allow me to glue the cross braces on with little effort.
I just had the required grooves hang off the block of wood and CA’d the cross piece in one at a time. Much easier than trying to fiddle with it as you build. Not fun.
Said pieces of the PE attached with a touch of CA. I will need to adjust the fit slightly but overall much easier the second time and a little cleaner as compared to the first.
Last for the day is the sanded and primed and sanded rear bulkhead in the gear bay. Next to the bulkhead is the first boom tail section with movable rudder.
One piece at a time to add the inner structure to the boom sides.
Since this PE is designed for the GW P-61 I needed to add the ribs to the side walls. This is really easy once you determine the start point. For instance there has to be a structural piece at the tail side of the boom. So that is where I started. One thing I noticed on the first boom is that the inside is far from round as the real aircraft is. This could be rectified but that would require more thought and planning than I want to give to this aircraft. The only time this is noticed is when the person looks into the back of the boom through the wheel well. Sorry to digress there. I am working on building a PE frame for the rear tail and horizontal stabilizer. This will provide two things when I get to that point. But in preperation for that I purchased the Micro-Mark hole punch.
This will enable me to build something like this…
This is a picture from the plane out at the MAAM location. (MAAM.com) and look at the restoration. So until the weekend.
Thanks for looking,
Back to the bench. Slow going on the install of the PE for the inner main gear well.
The extra strips styrene will be trimmed off and the PE fiddled with until the fit into the wing works out. One error in the PE directions is the placement of the oxygen tanks. The instructions have the bracket placed on only once side of the boom. In the actual aircraft it is situated up further and crosses the upper joint on the model.
My tanks are made from rod tube and just sanded roundish on the one side as they get buried pretty deep into the back of the boom and cannot be seen. Here is a second view of the same area.
Now a test fit of the boom halves. I had to create a way to allow the PE tank holder to take the inner curve. Something it really wasn’t happy doing. I cut through one of the brackets at the top and thus allowed the bracket to take the curve over the top.
One gap issue can be seen at the bottom of the picture. This will just be cut out and a new piece of styrene cut and CA’ed into place. I wanted to prime the area on both sides of the boom to see were the main problems would be.
Here the boom halves are taped together and primed. Yea there is going to be some clean up on both halves.
In the above picture you can see where the issue of fit comes into play. I’ll file this area and sand flush. then once that task is done there is a PE part that covers the face of the rear well that fits over the joint. On the first boom this worked out really well as the PE piece was just proud of the plastic and thus a bit of filler could be sanded and flared in. See picture below which shows the PE piece in place.
then here is the filled and flared in as in profile.
So for the next day I’ll be sanding fixing the small errors and then off to the garage to spray the zinc chromate yellow. More to come shortly and thanks for looking.
Here I begin to build the detail on the bulkhead in the main gear bay. This one I am correcting my hodge podge work on the first boom. A bit of advise I am taking from the latest FSM “Detail is cumulative.” So thus I endeavor to go slower. Below is the result of adding some of the PE details.
Next up was folding the cross braces that support the gear actuator and the reservoir to raise and lower the gear doors. Actual picture from the MAAM site.
If you look at the horizontal braces the solid face is out. In the PE kit you fold it the other way. Not sure why the oops. So I folded the PE and then drilled out the holes with a .08 drill bit.
Then attach to the bulkhead with CA and a needle to place a small drop on the ends.
Also, if you go back to the actual aircraft picture the tie arms that link the gear doors and the rams are shown. I built them out of .09 & .05 brass wire.
Second object to build is the tank. First go round was a piece of round styrene. What I had on had resulted in a bit large to scale. Out in the garage I found a small screw-eye for picture hanging and ground off the threads then clipped the eye off and rounded that cut end over. 
I cut, well trimmed severely, a piece of PE sprue and wrapped around and folded the ends back over as part of the hold-down bracket.
That’s all for now. Next up will be attaching all the goodies. More later.
Well there have been some set backs. The gear door retract connections decided to come apart when I was filing to fit. Not a big deal more of a heartbreak. So I changed directions and reproduced the connections with Abion Alloys slide fit tubing. I used the round nose pliers and bent up the heim joint and used two PE pieces from a model car engine wire loom set I had.
The red marks are where the additional gear door retract linkage goes. The furthest on the right is the opposing door and the mid mark is for the link that rotates it all into the raised or lowered positions.
Here the linkage is set in place for a dry fit.
One thing to note is that while the wire loom PE is mostly the right size for the brass it did need to be opened up slightly. Just a quick waller out with a pin vise and ready to slide to the correct location. Ont he far side I drilled a piece of flat styrene and then used my new cool Micro Punch set. This created a washer that I CA’ed to the end for a better cap.
In the below I have the other loom PE reamed out and ready to slide on.
Moving back to the bulkhead I removed it from the boom for ease of construction and have added the hydraulic fluid canister and the line that feeds through the bulkhead to connection fitting.
And again the real aircraft gear linkage.
Found some time to work on the linkage last night. Added a styrene disk as a washer and slid on the wire loom PE. Used round nose pliers and fine tip tweezers to get the loop and inserted a brass wire through the PE and with a pin added the CA to hold in place.
After some thought on the real aircraft and the model I have decided to forgo the second, well third, linkage bar. Mainly as I do not know where it should be attached. The MAAM aircraft is a later version and has the split gear doors so that could be why there are three in the photo vs Monogram having the two doors.
Began work on the interior of the wing at the boom. On the first go around I used the PE framing but for some reason this time I thought i would give it a whirl out of styrene.
The styrene was formed by using the PE as a template. Punched and or drilled out the holes.
Wanted to add a bit of detail and it’s not correct but just to show it busier.
Finally a decent day to paint. Added the chromate yellow to the interior.
Next is the fitting of the boom to the wing. As been said many times before the fit is a bit off to say the least. I’ll be building this up with strip styrene.
Been able work on the boom to wing joint some.
Above is the first go round with the filler. Once this dried i sanded and added more to finish off the fillet.
Bit smoother and flared in. Below is the other side and been primed to allow better view of flaws to be fixed.
Bottom of the boom right behind the gear well. If you recall the PE that covers the rear portion of the bulkhead and this sat a bit proud of the boom skin. Here you can see that I have filled in up to the PE and then let dry overnight.
Now as the sanding is mostly ready to go I moved to the top of the wing and tried something I had read about on a forum sometime ago. This is with the recessed full filler caps. If you look close on the P-61 from Monogram the raised lines show where the caps go and have some detail. This detail that I read on uses punched out disks and strip styrene. The first go I did was a smidge to large and so went one step down on the punch die. I CA’d the strip to the top and filed down to reduce the height of the hand grip.
The above are the first go round below is the revised.
Tomorrow I hope to prime and pre-shade the second boom and begin to work on the rudder frame.
Weather is not my friend. Too cold to paint so i began to work on the horizontal elevator framing. I had already cut the elevator from the kit piece and was originally just going to drop it some in the diorama. But as many things do I changed direction and now I am framing it out and will add some type of fabric to it once I get that far.
In the below picture I have already cut off the elevator and have filled in the resulting seam with a quarter round piece of sprue. This I filed to form a concave finish and have begun to add the hinges.
Below i create the leading edge of the elevator. This would be wrapped in a metal skin. I used a round styrene rod and two flat strips CA’ed to the tangent of the round. I then carefully sanded the “legs” even and to the correct length.
Here we have fit the elevator leading edge to the horizontal stabilizer and get the rest of the hinges set and the length of the scratch piece set.
Now the next thing to create is the framing. I purchased some .001, .005 & .010 brass sheet. Cutting a strip of the .010 to a close width I used the profile of my pointed tweezers as a template. Strange but they are the perfect profile. I used the back of a #11 blade and scribed the outline and added material for the fold. As a result after the two lighting holes were punched out and folded.