crazypoet

So. In today’s episode of “why the hell didn’t I think of this *before* glueing something in place…” Each of the two hydraulic cylinders that raise and lower the main gear needs two fiddly little holes drilled to attach the hydraulic lines. plus, I need to drill a hole in the side of each gear well to accept one of the lines (the other tucks neatly underneath and out of sight) this would have been *so* much easier if I’d considered it either before gluing the cylinder in place or before joining the wing halves 7-P process in full display here 😂 at any rate, I’ve figured out the shapes and curves of the lines, I know where I have to drill, and just need to put a finish on the lines themselves. After much head-scratching and testing of different materials, I decided to go with some brass wire I had laying about to form the lines. with a small bending brake, I can set the correct angle for the connection to the cylinder, and the way it creates the bend gives me the look of a proper hydraulic fitting at the point of the bend. For the lines past the fitting, I’ll dip the wire in some black primer to give the proper OD for the hoses, then add a bit of texture to make them look like braided lines (yah, I have two sizes of scale braided lines, but the .5mm is too small and the .8mm ended up being a bit large after stretching over the brass wire…) wheeee!

That’s the only 1/32 Betty I’ve seen mentioned anywhere i would love to do a build of the white-painted Betty being escorted to the surrender conference by a B25 strafer i have the decals and details for the B25 in question, and the kit is waiting in my bench thing is… I want the other half! anyone? beuller? haaaalp!

They do! Add in a bit of aftermarket and it gets even better. in this case I’m building a specific aircraft, which is why I had to “back-rev” the kit to a D-5 fortunately, it’s pretty straightforward to do this

I love your approach to all of this - and I’m filing the casting mark tips away for whenever I get around to building anything with large cast pieces 😎💯🙏

I also finished up the squared-off cowl flaps for the D-5, and I like the way they’re fitting. Still need to be re-primed and may do a touch-up on the rivets, but I’m happy so far

So, I’m finally sort of caught up with where I left off with this thing 🤣 when last we met, I was starting to g to work on the hydraulic lines in the landing gear bays. I have those half-finished (one large cylinder in each bay), and I’m working on the other cylinder now. i wasn’t *entirely* happy with the look of the first lines, but they’ll do. The second set will take a slightly different approach anyway, due to the way they fit both at the cylinder and the routing out of the bay. soooo…. I’m working with a couple different materials to see which will work best (brass wire, thin telecom wire unstripped, and thin telecom wire stripped out. ill let y’all know how it works out

Ahhh…. So it does still work. I think I was trying to upload too large of a pic earlier. at any rate, this is me with the new-edition Ms Poet - we did a “coming out as a couple” traditional photoshoot last month. Traditions and customs are a bit different here - you need approval from family and friends to date publicly, and it has to be “announced” within the community her name is Thea, she’s a doctor, and thoroughly amazing

…now I just have to figure out how to upload photos over my VPN connection 🤷‍♂️🤣🤦‍♂️

Sooooo…. After a long work-related break, followed by retirement and a move out of country (I’m now living the Expat life in Phnom Penh, Cambodia - very long story 😂), and *also* finally receiving all my stuff shipped from the US (it took four months, y’all!)… I'm finally baaaack i dusted things off, washed it all with hsome dish soap, figured out where I’d left things and this is back on the worktable

Loving this! It’s a joy to see a master at work 💯

I’ve been wanting a 1:32 A-20 for *years* to go alongside the B-25 strafer I have in the queue I am looking very very much forward to this!!!

Ok, so this doesn’t *entirely* fit here, but it *is* very large scale, and some of the bits came as a kit😂 This was a project I built in a friend’s shop, paying rent by helping him finish a rifle of his own so this is a Lehman-pattern half-stock percussion rifle in .50cal it took just over a year, working Sunday afternoons in his shop It’s fully functional, rifled for modern sabot shot rather than lead balls ready for the ‘23 season 😎

So not a whole lot of progress, as I took the weekend off (utterly worth it, though - Savannah is *awesome*) bits of filing and sanding, and starting to work on landing gear hydraulics (yes, I’m putting off working on the gun bays out of sheer laziness 😂) trying an experiment with .8mm braided line, wire, and some paint I’m not thrilled with the results yet, but it’s got potential. There’s only a few of these particular flexible lines that will be at all visible, which helps. I'm going to keep fiddling about until they look right

Haven’t gotten any new pics yet, but those will be forthcoming i spent some time doing a bit of gap-filling on the seams on the leading edge of both wings. There were a couple of spots where the edges gapped by .5mm, despite everything else lining up happily. Once that’s all dried and smooth I’ll redo a couple of rivets that I managed to screw up in the process. after that, I will turn my attention to the gun bays. I have the Eduard gun bay set, and so far I’m happy with it. I’m not entirely sure about their ammo feed chutes - I’m going back and forth between those and the ones from the kit. They both have minor issues, based on photos I’ve seen, so I’ll go with whichever looks best. I’ll also have to deal with the charging rods, which promise to be a right PITA, but that’s all part of the fun. I’ll next have to decide whether to go with the PE ammo belts or the rubber ones from the kit - again, both have issues, and I’ll go with whichever looks more “right” after getting them painted up. If I had the brains god gave a turnip, I’d just close up the gun bays and not worry about it. We’ll see how badly I screw things up stuffing all the bits inside, and go from there once those are settled, there’s some hoses and such to add to the landing gear bays while they’re still easy to reach wheee! It’s good to be back

I realized that I had to do a bit of trimming on the back of the engine - that’s where the problem came from. It sits a bit too far forward out of the box with that done, the rocker arms and engine mounts fit *perfectly* I’ll get some pics of that later today

Good to *be* back! I’ve missed y’all

Sooo… Hi there! It’s been a long minute. First Covid and associated work-place hassles had me off the bench for a while, then I took a year to build a 1:1 scale fully functional muzzle-loading rifle (1850’s Lehman Half-stock, .50 percussion trade rifle) I’ve dusted everything off, gotten the bench back in order and easing my way back into this. I’m starting back in with some little bits to get my hands working again - some Eduard PE on the wings and horizontal stabilizers, and finishing the cowl flap mod needed to take is back to the correct version for this bird

Finally got the book, and yes I’ll need to do some repainting of the gun and landing gear bays. The restored versions that I’ve seen in cockpit green are not correct. Curtiss-produced versions were done in cockpit green, and some field depots also used this color. But... since my bird was Republic-built and I can’t reasonably document field mods outside of the gunsight and prop, back to the factory finish it is

You may be correct; I’d already started with interior green when I found the info on Zinc Chromate Yellow on another site. I’ve seen enough examples in Interior Green that I can at least make a case (the early photos I found were green, which is why I started in that direction). Since then, I’ve noticed that there seems to be about 50/50 mix between green and yellow, plus some gray/white examples just for fun. The challenge is that these are all restorations; while I *hope* that they’d stay with original colors, there’s no guarantee. I finally tracked down a copy of “P-47 in Detail and Scale”, which should help insofar as using the correct color for the correct factory on this bird if need-be, after the book arrives tomorrow, I’ll repaint.

This is just mind-blaring attention to detail and craftsmanship both i’ve loved this since you started...

This build is *gorgeous* particularly the cockpit - nice work!

That’s an awesome video! I’ve seen other Japanese wartime videos here and there, but this one covered aircraft types I’d not seen in other contexts. great find and thanks for sharing!

So I took the plunge and went with bare aluminum for the flap hinge internals. The surfaces that would be visible when the flaps are closed are painted to match the adjoining panels and life is good. These things are beginning to look a bit more like wings... I primed and painted the next batch of PE, and added a few necessary bits to the wheel wells, then turned my attention to the guns Note to self: next time, prime and paint the brass barrels *before* attaching... My go-to dark gray Vallejo primer just did not want to adhere to the brass at all, so I ended up stripping the barrels and re-priming with Alclad black primer instead. This would have been much simpler had I not already primed and started finishing the receivers. I had to decant the primer into a small jar and dip the bloody things... Lesson learned. I’ll use Uschi (steel) and Tamiya (Light Gun Metal) powders to do the final metal finish once the primer sets, then it’s time to finish the gun bay internals and move on.

Not much done over the weekend, but did get the seatbelts in

It’s a nice kit - got it at my LHS late last year, and it’s been a nice build so far. excepting some PE bits that are too small for even my smallest tweezers to handle effectively!