What's on my desk? Part 67.
Hi!
Very short blog post this week. I'm (still) working on the Fram ratlines and, although relatively easy, they take a long time.
All ratlines on the starboard side of the ship have been added. I've learned to make the rightmost knot going up and under itself. That way it's more straight and the line can be made a little more taut. Here's the overview shot:
I should be able to finish the ratlines this week, then next week: sails!
On the Bf108 the oils are almost dry, so I started attaching the seatbelts. These are multi-part pre-coloured PE, which have pros and cons. The fact that they're precoloured is nice, because you don't need to paint and worry about about correct colours. On the other hand, they're springy PE and need to be bent around the corners of the seats. PE also doesn't lay down very naturally.
These days there are very thin actual cloth seatbelts (HGW e.g. makes them) that are very fiddly to construct, but look absolutely fantastic. Something to consider for superdetailers.
Anyway: here are the seatbelts installed so far. I already glued the back and right walls and the rear seat rest. There's also a small instrument panel in between the front seats.
I showed the filled-in seam line on the fuselage in the previous blog. The way to deal with this is sanding it with progressively finer wet-use sandpaper. First 320 grit to grind away the putty and level everything, then 400, 600, 1000, 2000, 4000, 6000 and finally 12000 to restore the plastic to a nice smooth shiny surface. The bulkhead panel lines were rescribed with the Tamiya scriber tool and some Dymo label tape to keep the line straight. In the end you should have eliminated all traces of the seam line. Some putty will be left where there was a recess, but this will be invisible after priming and painting.
Okay, that's it already.
See you next week!