Moving on…

Sorry everyone, for the missed week.  I finished the build diary, but never got around to actually uploading it.  With that in mind, this week I’ll upload two diary entries starting with last week’s.

Last week, I moved on from where the original owner of this kit had gotten to, starting with this:

This week I’ll be setting out on my own with parts 21 to 24.

The first step is to look at the parts provided for these instructions.

Looking at the instructions I see that parts 21 and 22 both focus on adding frames to the bomb bay of the model, so I’ll do both of those parts simultaneously.

First is taking all of the parts out of the sheet that they are cut into.

Then I attached them to a couple of pieces of masking tape so that the side attached to the model faces down.  Once this was accomplished, I spray-painted them all black.

The next stage was to take the short wooden batons seen at the far left of the unpainted image, and cut them to the proper length to fit between the frames of the cockpit section of the model.

Once this was done I attached the lengthways frames to the cockpit section.

Finally, I did the same with the other two sections of the bomb bay, and painted over any visible gaps in the paint work (seen here with the fuel tanks from last week in place).

Next I moved on to issue 23 which covers the construction of the next section of the fuselage.  All of the pieces from this issue are shown here:

Building it was relatively straight forward, the frames had to be cut from the sheet and glued together in sequence before using the wooden beams at the top of the image to strengthen the entire structure.

Issue 24 was much the same, using these parts:

In a very similar manner to construct the section of the fuselage holding the door in the Lancaster’s tail.

Leading to this week’s construction coming to a conclusion rather quickly.

 

I also have to mention that the replacement parts for the flight controls arrived just in time, and I also finished them off.

This week was slightly different, involving my first use of a pinwheel to mimic rivet marks, but more on that later.

The first step, as ever was laying out this week’s components:

And then unpackaging them:

As you can see, there are plenty of frame parts, a lot of stringers, and a few metal plates, two of which will be part of the floor in the main-spar section of the fuselage.

First was building the trailing edge of the starboard wing.  These are the parts:

Which were pretty strait forwards to assemble into this:

The next step was to add stringers to both the top and underside of the section, including a set of stringer pieces which had to be attached between the ribs as shown in this picture:

Next was preparing the two floor pieces for the main-spar section, first the metal plates were roughly positioned to check for overlap:

Next, I trimmed the pieces both along their edges, and at the end nearest the camera in this picture to allow the pieces to fit properly.  Then I used a pinwheel to mark out lines of rivets (unfortunately, I forgot to take a photo at this point). Before spraying them with primer, and then (once that had dried) cockpit green.

As you can see, I misjudged the trimming, as the two parts don’t actually meet in the middle.  Also, some of the rivet lines take a slightly odd path.  But this stage has been a useful learning experience as to how to use a pinwheel.

At the same time as I painted the floor plates, I also painted the wing trailing edge built above, first with cockpit green, and then, I masked over it and painted the interior of the spoilers black:

The next part of the procedure was to extend the aft-most section of fuselage built above up to the rear turret using these parts:

Which resulted in this:

This was then further extended to add the rear turret housing:

And a similar set of pieces were used to create the attachment for the mid-upper turret:

This concludes the assembly up to issue 28.  It currently looks like this:

 

Next week we’ll be making more flooring, adding a lot of stringers, and starting on the internal details for the aft fuselage.