All the masking is finally done and the primer coat applied. I'd still be masking this time next month if it wasn't for the Eduard masks.

That's a puny little Hasegawa 1/72 B24 wing on top of the Pe-8 just to give a sense of size.



Andrew

Great work everyone who has already started (and finished). I've finally finished my 1/16 T-34 and will be working on this:


Actually I have already started to the extent of painting what I can on the trees, and putting the cockpit together. Photos in a couple of days hopefully.

Justy a couple of comments on the kit so far. A bit more flash than I expected and the "film" idea for the instrument panel seems to me to be an enormous waste. Putting the film of the instruments behind the clear panel and holding it up to the light made it look great. Once the panel was painted black (and the instrument covers cleared) the depth of the faces made it nearly impossible to see the instruments. There are also a tremendous number of sink marks on the bomb bay interior - so I am hoping if I stack it with 18 250lb bombs that they will be covered up by the bombload.

Brian

So typical of me: only after having the engine nacelle halves together and the seams taken care off do I start looking at my references more carefully. Yep, it looks like there actually should be a cowling panel seam on the underside in the H-6. D'oh!
Well, that's shouldn't be a big chore to scribe.

With the nacelle halves assembled (enough), I proceeded to glue them to the wings. Fit was otherwise good, but there was a surprisingly significant (for a Hasegawa kit) step between the wing and one side of the nacelle under the wing.

Not a big job to fix though. With the offending area marked with a felt-tip pen, it only took a couple of minutes with a coarse sanding stick for each nacelle to fix.

The nacelles glued in place, their sides were pinched in a bit, not allowing the radiators to fit. A few minutes of filing got that sorted out.

Well its to big for my photo booth so pics for the rest of the build will be from my workbench.
I will rig something up for the final pics....Finally finished all the sanding on the fusalage and took a break to start pre shading almost done have the wing bottoms to finish and started a little on the landing gear...Left a pepsi can in the pic to give you an idea of how big it is......



almost there its going to take up the top of my other display case my 1/48 Pby takes up the other one....


Build On,
Justin

Wow! Looks very impressive, Justin. "It is alive! It is a monster!" A very impressive model.

Nice choice of model, Brian. Looking forward to see it come together.

The colours are on. As the Pe-8 ws not a true mass produced aircraft (only 92 being built over a several year span) each one was actually unique in colour scheme and even armament. And few aircraft have multiple photos, so a lot of guess work is involved with most Pe-8's. The box scheme quite possibly had a 2 tone upper camo scheme, but no one can say for certain either. I like how it looks in the 3 colours anyway.



Andrew

I'm diggin' that Andrew! Very nice. "Q"

Andrew/Justin
Great builds on your B-1 and the PE-8. You have really entered subjects worthy of the title- big beautiful bombers.
tim

DITTO



Robert

Heres some more progress pic's .the top one shows the parts I had to scratch build the fins on the top I shaved into the correct shape from the kit parts as they were square.The fins on the sides arent included in the kit but promanate in all my referance pic's so I scratch built these out of plastic sheet.I then came to the nose and the kit only comes with two pitot tubes one for each side and they dont look realistic so I ditched them and built my own using sprue and wire.They are now corrected and there are the six like there should be.Started getting all my landing gear done so I can sit this big bird on its wheels and begin the large painting adventure.Hope you like the build so far.Everyone else is doing a fantastic job.


Build On,
Justin

It's done. I think it's one of the best value model kits i've come across for some time to be honest. I mean it costs about half the price of a Hasegawa 1/72 Ju-88. Fit was great for what is a relatively complicated kit, detail is good, decals worked perfect. The only thing i don't like about Zvezda's tooling is theit style of canopy frames. Whilst the clear parts are perfectly clear and fit very well, their highly raised frames makes getting clean sharp masking lines a bit more of a chore and simply look a bit out of scale as well. I'd prefer finer raised frames or even Hasegawa style engraved frame lines.
On the subject of the clear parts, something that is not immediately obvious for the type is that the cockpit canopy actually slid back in 2 sections (fighter plane style) for both the pilot and navigator. I'm not sure why that was, as i'm certain that both crew members in question did not enter the aircraft that way. Anyway that is why the canopy appears to sit slightly raised above the level of the aircrafts spine. A vacform canopy would be a nice aftermarket item for these kits so that the canopy sections could cut apart displayed open.

But anyway it's a great model kit and something to display along side your Lancasters and B-17's etc.








Great campaign idea, gave me the perfect excuse to actually get this one out of the pile and built.

Andrew

Looks great Andrew. Congrats on finishing. "Q"

Very nice job you've done with that Pe-8!

I've been making some steady progress on my Heinkel.
Taking Revell's instructions with a grain of salt, I consulted the Luftwaffe painting orders article on Swannysmodels.com and painted the cockpit RLM66 and the rest of the fuselage interior RLM02. Instructions of the original Hasegawa boxing pointed out RLM66 for the whole interior though.

I'm not an expert on the subject so I can't which is more accurate. Anyway, the fuselage interior won't be very visible on the finished kit so I'm not going to lose any sleep over that matter.

The interior components went together pretty as advertised, including the Eduard Zoom PE set. The only really tricky part was the pilots control panel with all the numerous levers.

It wasn't the miniscule size of the levers that was hard, but them being placed so close to each other made me hope I had tweezers with slimmer tips.

On initial dryfittings, all the stuff going inside the fuselage appeared to fit without a hazzle. Following the advice of a fellow modeler, I thinned the fuselage sides where the clear part for the ventral gunner's compartment fits. Pic taken after trimming.


Now the fuselage sides' gluing surface doesn't show through the small upper side windows next to the edge of the clear insert.


Next time I'll be showing you the finished cockpit parts ready for assembly, and then the assembled fuselage.

Congrats on the finish C-MOT very nice.




Build On,
Justin

Andrew - very well done Pe8.

Justin - what a monster Bone
and Eetu you have got some fiddly work there on the Heinkel.

Anyway my camera was out and working tonight so here is the progress on the Wimpy.

After painting the bombay and test fitting a couple of bombs I saw the sink marks were going to stick out like the proverbial so I have filled them with magic sculpt - and that is as far as I have gotten as I then went and tried some sculpting with the "leftover" putty.

The white spots on the photos are from the talcum powder I was using whilst sculpting so it needs a brush down before I go any further.







The interior is only sitting in the fuselage to give an idea of where it fits - there are several more bits and pieces to be installed and then I will give it a couple of washes before moving on to the turrets and then closing it all up.

Brian

Nice progress on that Wimpy! Looks good. Is that straight from the box or have you added anything?


I've been making progress as well.
The cockpit/bomb bay module fit nicely between the fuselage halves, exterior panel lines matching up well.


There was a row of thin rods in the bottom of the fuselage which reasoned where a part of the "towel rack" style radio antenna. Somehow the instructions didn't mention anything about the builder having to make the horizontal part him/herself. As the sticks would have made the fuselage seam tricky to clean up, I sliced them off and drilled holes in their place to ease later replecement with either stretched sprue or copper wire.



Here I got most of the interior components painted up and ready for assembly:

I'm pretty happy how I got most of the inaccurate prepainted interior color painted over.
In the picture below are the two parts where I deemed it better to leave them as supplied:

It's starting to look like a bomber now!

The stabilizers fit very well (those nifty interlocking locator tabs should be standardized!), with only a tiny gap on the right underside. Just PVA or Gator glue should be enough to take care of that.

The wings, even with their hefty locator spars and apparently good fit, proved somewhat problematic, probably my own fault at least to some extent. The left wing fit without problems, but there was a slight gap on the underside with the right one. As the wing halves lined up nicely on the leading and trailing edges and matched the fuselage as well, there had to be something wrong either on the fuselage's gluing surface or the wing's, but I couldn't confirm that either...

Anyway, with surface detail right next to the seam, I naturaylly didn't like the idea of having to dabble with putty and sandpaper. After a quick pondering, I cut up a piece of thick styrene sheet and inserted it to the bomb bay to spread out the fuselage to get a better fit.

That worked, no filling required next to the surface detail, but even though only by moving the gap from between the fuselage and wing to between the fuselage and the external bomb rack, the gap looks should be easier to fix there.

With the wings in glued in, I noticed that I should have kept a closer eye on the fit...
The left side is okay:

...But the right side is not quite so:

That left me quite puzzled, as the thickness of both should be the same at the wing root (I glued sort-of bulkheads found inside to each other on both), and the upper side lined up nicely all the way. I'm pretty certain I didn't contribute to that myself while holding the parts when gluing either, as the wing spars fit snuggly and shouldn't have allowed hardly any movement. Though it's surely nothing some sanding and a bit of putty can't fix, it's something I would rather have avoided by doing some more dryfitting prior to bringing out the glue...

And another thing, be careful with the part attaching to the front of the engine nacelle face, trapping in the prop-retaining grommet. I of course happened to glue mine the wrong way around.


While nothing serious on it's own and something that won't be seen with the props in place, it of course, as mistakes tend to do, lead to more:
Dryfitting the part J5 incorreclty with the small nub facing inwards, the grommets wouldn't fit in. I then cut the grommets a little shorter to get them in, but doing that sliced off a bit too much, resulting in them fitting less than snuggly. The grommets now having just a bit of space to move back and forth, the props won't stay in place without drooping.
Fortunately that's easily fixed with either small blobs of blu-tac or PVA to hold the propellers properly.

Alright folks I've landed with my 1/48 B-1B LANCER "DEAD RECKONING"from the 37th BS TIGERS hope you like glad this big beast is over thanks for the great campaign.2nd time building this one think I learned my lesson .....








Build On,
Justin

Well done Justin, that thing is a BEAST !!! Man' I don't think there's that much plastic in my entire stash !!

Looks great, very nice job.

Cheers, D

It's high time to come up with at least very little progress.

This is my beast:


And here are pictures of what I did up till now.








For the first time in my modeling career I decided to glue the wings to the fuselage halves before having the fuselage done. There will be some fitting problems with the upper wing halve so I tought it will be easier to correct already having lower half set in place.

Looking great. What did you use to cut the slats in the wing?

Justin and Andrew, that are fantastic entries. Big and beautiful in more sense than one Funny to see how technology has developed so much over 70 years.

Michal, nice details on the B-17. It looks very nice. I am now building the old B-17 from Matchbox with almost no interior detail. Not that it can be seen anyway with 3mm think plastic glazing. Yours is much better, but without the nostalgia.

Thanks for sharing

You guys are "killing it" with some fine builds (I esp. like the PE-8)

I'm jumping into this build a little later this Spring but I can't decide which plane to build: the AMT A-20G or the Promodeller A-26B...

What to do, what to do...

Cheers,
Fred

Nice builds everybody! I am up to my eyeballs in other comittments at the moment so my bomber is in a holding pattern. Hopefully I will get started with it soon....keeping my fingers crossed. Keep posting your amazing builds all. You are providing me the motivation to get these other things done so I can begin my bombing run!! Thanks, "Q"

Im still slowly working on my Mossie nearly ready to get the cockpit sub assembly done then I can start serious construction work Its taking a while as hard to get in the mood (and leg under the table) at the moment