¹⁄35

Pacific Helldiver

Construction

I painted the cockpit US interior green, this may be wrong? Dark green may be the correct colour. The instructions would have you paint it "green, silky-matt". I don't know what colour that is, but if it is the colour shown on the box sides of a completed model, yuck! The only thing I added to the cockpit was a representation of the liferaft, made from tissue paper, folded, soaked in white glue and painted yellow. This resides in the rear cockpit, over the radios. The radios could be improved by adding cables, but I didn't go that far. The PE buckles were threaded with electrical tape; the adhesive was removed with Isopropyl alcohol. They were painted a very light grey. I think they look quite good.

The wings don't have a positive join so this was helped out with strips of plastic card glued to the fuselage stubs to give greater bonding area. It seems to have worked. The internal structure of the flaps and dive brakes is molded integrally with the wings. This is fine, if you have them both closed. Open or closed it is a great improvement to drill out all the lightening holes. I used my Dreml® type drill and it took about half an hour. I wanted to drop the flaps, so I removed the internal section from both lower wings and boxed in the resultant gap with plasticard. To show the correct internal structure the removed parts require swapping over (port to starboard and visa versa). The plastic and inside of the PE parts are painted red, then joined together. I used CA for this.

The bomb bay can be posed open or closed-I chose to have it open. Again there is good detail and 2 bombs are supplied but the colour information would have you paint them rust? I don't think so; mine are painted olive drab. The yellow stripes were added using decal stripes.