What's on my desk? Part 112.

The red is going in an big curve from the front wheels to the rear roof, bordered by blue decals, so I hope the decals will cover the dividing line nicely...

Moving on to the aircraft.

The Dora Models Bloch is not for beginners. I wouldn't call it a bad kit, it just requires a lot of work. For instance: I had some trouble with the wings. They're top and bottom halves (pretty standard), but the wing roots and fuselage underside are separate parts. The instructions tell you to attach the wing roots to the fuselage first, then assemble the wings and underside. This is where the lack of attachment points comes in: it's next to impossible to line everything up when following the instructions.

I found an easier assembly order:

1. Assemble the wings, with the end piece of the landing gear bays inside. 

2. Construct the gear bay box in the middle. 

3. Attach the wing roots to the underside (I glued it to the right wing first, but it's easier to glue it to the underside).

4. Use the back side of the gear bay as a spar for holding the wings and glue the wings to the wing roots.

Go slow, glue back-to-front and try to align everything as you go along. I dry-fitted the whole assembly to the fuselage multiple times.

Here are the 'finished' wings:

'Finished' in brackets, because I couldn't align the right wing perfectly (that's why I recommend glueing the wing roots to the underside first).

There's a noticable step at the join line:

 

But at least now the wing roots fit nicely to the top fuselage...

Next I need to try and eliminate all steps and gaps, then fix the wings to the fuselage and repeat...

The Viggen is going a lot easier. The front fuselage is in top and bottom halves, with the intake ducts sandwiched between them.

You can see a very prominent seam line inside. I tried filling and sanding it, not easy with the curved inside, but I think it worked, at least for the first centimeter. The back half is too dark to see anyway... 

The rear fuselage is in right-and-left halves and in between them is the exhaust pipe. The Viggen used a license-built and modified copy of the American JT8D engine, used on airliners. Swedish defense doctrine in the Cold War prescribed dispersion tactics, using lenghts of highway as improvised runways. For this reason the Viggen has a trust reverser, to allow for short landings. The kit provides the reverser petals, but doesn't clearly describe how to mount them. It appears that on the ground, the bottom two would lay down on the exhaust pipe, while the top one would hang down a bit. I'll have to correct that on my model, as I fixed them all in the same(-ish) angle:

I painted the exhaust in Jet Exhaust Burned Iron, then carefully picked out some areas in Steel, just to give some visible details.

With all this done, I could mate the front and rear fuselages:

It immediatley becomes apparent that this is one BIG plane. With the wings on, it becomes massive:

The wrong tail is called out in the instructions, by the way. There were a number of Viggen variants, and the tail is one of the noticeable differences. The bottom one is for the JA (fighter) version, the top one is for the AJ (attacker) version. Top one is correct in this case.

This just goes to show: when building models, always check your references! I've visited the Swedish Air Force Museum in Linköping and I have a lot of photos of the Viggen on display there. Really cool museum, by the way. Highly recommended if you're ever travelling in southern Sweden.

Last thing to show: the landing gear struts. The Viggen has two wheels on the main bogies, and two on the nose gear. The gear is built very strong; another design choice influenced by the need to operate from improvised runways.

That's it for now.

See you next week!