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F14A Tomcat - PART ONE

That last sentence brings me to the real pitfall of this sanding process. If I remove too much resin, the cockpit sits too low in the fuselage and can complicate the interaction of the other pieces of the set that are counting on the cockpit sills to fall at just a certain height. If I don't remove enough resin, the cockpit will not fit into the fuselage at all. With practice, this all can be mastered, honest! It just takes time and practice, practice, practice...

With the cockpit sanding done, I needed to turn my attention to the kit fuselage. The Black Box instructions say to remove some interior portions of the fuselage side to make clearance for their cockpit pieces. See the pictures to the right. The one shows what I needed to remove and what it looked like after removal. The other picture shows the view from the outside with the Black Box cockpit fitted inside the fuselage. The side of the resin cockpit replaces the portions that were cut out of the fuselage.

An alternate approach that a friend of mine used on his Black Box set would be to machine out holes in the side of the Black Box cockpit piece. The holes fit over the things inside the Hasegawa fuselage that Black Box is saying to remove. The decision comes down to which way you are most comfortable at working and what tools you have available to do the work.

With the cockpit bottom sanded and the fuselage modified, I assembled the kit nose wheel well and tacked it onto the cockpit bottom with a small dab of super glue to test the fit inside the fuselage. When I was satisfied that the fit was correct and the wheel well placement was correct, I applied liberal amounts of super glue and accelerator to firmly attach the cockpit to the nose wheel well. Note that normal plastic cement will not work on resin. Super glue is the least messy way to deal with attaching resin parts to each other and the styrene kit parts. Two-part epoxy can also be used, but that is more mess than I ever want to get into unless I am left no choice.