This was my second
time to build this kit. The only aftermarket parts were an Eduard photoetch
instrument panel and seat belts. The wing star insignia were painted on using
Tally-Ho masks. The fuselage stars were decals from CAM. The checkerboard was
made from a painted gloss white stripe covered with individual squares of
insignia blue decal film.
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I wanted this model to be more
blue in color than the Testors gloss sea blue color, which is almost black. So I
mixed gloss sea blue and blue angels blue, about 50/50.
The Tamiya gunsight part does not
include a lens, just a flat, slightly convex top. I wanted to find out if this
was normal, but I could not find any good documentation. I found one very
complete looking web-page, but all the pictures were red x's. As a
result, I added a round lens to the gunsight just because I liked the look
better that way. I also left out Tamiya's representation of the armored glass
behind the windscreen which is not shaped correctly at all.
The wings are the only difficult
part of this kit. I tried gluing the top wing halves together first this time.
Unfortunately, this did not really work any better than making the inner wing
and outer wing assemblies per the instructions, which I had tried for my
first build. I was left this time with a large gap on the bottom of the
wing and some sanding and re-scribing on top.
The pictures were taken with an
Olympus C4000 digital camera, indoors with flash and a tripod. F stop was
manually set to 11, which is the highest number on this camera. Shutter
speeds were about 1/2 second.
Chaz
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images below to see larger images
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