Good morning,
Ten more days and Modelist can blow out 2 candles!
I did a bit of research into the red used on the McLaren F1 cars. Turns out they weren't painted in just any red. No, McLaren used a kind of fluorescent red, somewhere in between day-glo orange and bright red. The reason why is quite interesting. Formula 1 is a very media-oriented sport, so it was important to present an attractive picture to viewers at home. The technology of the late 80's meant that anything painted plain red, after live signal compression and diffusion, would show up as a dirty brown on a viewer's TV. To offset this, the cars were painted in this very bright, fluorescent red. The final picture on a TV would now show actual white-and-red cars. The Tamiya decals do actually have this, but I don't want to use them, because of my experience with the Williams car. Any corrections I'll make will show up very clearly. So, off I went to the internet, and I found a set of colours specifically for the 1988 McLaren MP4/4, by the same manufacturer that I bought the Williams blue from. It should arrive this week, and I'll be able to continue then... Stay tuned!
The Bergepanther, then. I'm honestly starting to lose my mojo a bit on this one. I love building full interiors, but in this case, if you put one thing half a millimetre out of alignment, it means further down the line some things don't fit very well anymore. This was the case with the top of the hull (and the rear plate, as well). I ended up with a large gap in the nose:
It's too big to fill, and would mean the big weld seams won't match up. So, I pulled the side plates loose, cut off the location lugs in the side and pried out a cover on the inside (that was never going to be visible anyway). Eventually I succeeded in closing the nose. A little putty to fill some (more acceptably-sized) gaps and I'm ready to move on:
Hmm, looking at this picture the putty will need a second application...
Finally, the T-2 Buckeye. This one is starting to fight me. I fixed the cockpit in place on one fuselage half and inserted some pieces of lead sheet as a nose weight:
See that front bulkhead, just behind the lead? It's too large, and the nose wouldn't close. Same as the Bergepanther, the gap was too large to just fill in. So I removed that bulkhead (the hole is hidden by the instrument panel), closed it all up and puttied the seam line all around the plane:
I do like it when manufacturers leave a panel open so you can position the inside stuff while (and after) closing the fuselage. In this case, there are the intake ducts and exhausts, plus the plates they're mounted on. I can leave off the exhaust pipes to better position them later, as the mounting location on the plate was not very good...
While the putty dried, I constructed the wings. These have some pretty badly positioned sprue gates and knockout marks all over the inside, so it took some work removing and cleaning up all the excess plastic. The locating plugs are also way too big and needed reshaping and sanding to fit properly. I sanded down the seam lines on the fuselage using wet 1000-grit sandpaper. Here you can see the hole in the front of the cockpit:
That's it for now. Hopefully I can give the McLaren some colour in the next couple of days and start on the spade and crane for the Bergepanther.
See you next week!
