A tiny trio -- goes unfinished

[JohnRatzenberger]

Well, I needed something to fill time while working my main project so I hauled out these 3 and will work on them together off and on.



With each "big" Anigrand kit, one usually gets 3 "small" kits, and I have a small pile of these small kits sitting around. Many are of no interest to me, but I can stretch it for these 3. Sorry about the photo quality ...

Bell XFM-1 Airacuda


Grumman XP-50


Bell XP-52


Not shown are the decals (minimal) and canopies, they are put aside for safe keeping. According to Anigrand the XFM1 and XP-52 are NM, while the XP-50 is NM with yellow wings. I may decide to do something else, completely un-historical, with some or all ....

These little kits, they are all resin, are a mixed bag -- the subjects are relatively unique, there is some good detail, but also lots of air holes. If you look at the pix, you'll see many of the small parts have been cast off the main parts, making even more to clean and increasing damage opportunities.

[TimJ]

Sounds like an interesting trio. The Airacuda is the only one I've heard of so I'm looking forward to seeing how these turn out.

[MerlinJones]

Nice one, John...and thank you for sharing these.

Regards,
Bruce

[JohnRatzenberger]

Progress to date.



The fit on all is "OK" with the XP-50 being best and the XP-52 being worst. The problem with little things in little scales is the flaws are magnified. I cannot claim to be working very hard to fix said flaws. They'll all look OK from a decent distance.

XP-50: fits together well, minimal clean-up, and all assemblied align neatly without any effort. Only issue so far is the two rudders. It seems they may have cast two left rudders (shape and slot for tab) -- so when you flip it over to get the tab to match the horiz-stab, the rudder shape is upside down. I think I can sand this out a bit.

XP-52: had some major air holes that took work to fill and to reconstruct the trailing edge of one rudder. Also the holes for the wings don't match on each side. I tried to adjust to get the wings to mount even fore-aft but missed by a bit. Add to that one nacelle may not be as long as the other and the net is that the stabilizer, from above, is slanted. I don't think it's very noticeable from other perspectives.

XFM-1: Trouble getting the two wings onto the fuselage exactly square. The big problem is also the engine nacelles really sit over the wing, not under. This is very confusing and I almost glued them on upside down ....

Some or all of these may be tail sitters but there is little to no place to put weight so assume they will be glued onto something.

Next up, clean up from the assembly then on to the gear and props ....

[MerlinJones]

Thanks for the update, John.
I've had similar fit issues with my own Bonus kits and resolved these by removing at least one of the locating pins.

My favoured method for filling the odd air bubble remains a dab of superglue gel and a whiff of Zipkicker.

Regards,
Bruce

[JamesPerrin]

The way things are attached to the wing tips looks a royal pain. What's wrong with just sticking all the small bits on a long block?

[JohnRatzenberger]

I use superglue on small holes, putty followed by superglue on larger.
Over half the so-called locating pins/tabs were missing or poorly molded. In the case of the XFM1, I ended up with 2 on the one side and one on the other, I just thought I had done a better job of lining things up than that.

[JohnRatzenberger]

The landing gear is on. I have one tailsitter, the XP-50, so it'll probably get glued to a simple base.



Not shown is that I've cleaned up a bunch of prop blades and will start installing same. Most gear doors will be made from thin Evergreen strip not the provided resin. Cockpits will be painted black inside, no detail, no little figures, no nothing, just a black hole.

I should note I forgot the XP-52 wings aren't molded identically; that made the assembly problem even worse than I mentioned before. This one will probably be a paint test bed before the GB ends.

Getting about time to go figure out where I safely stored the decals and canopies.

[TimJ]

They're coming along well.

[MerlinJones]

Interesting set of planes there, John.
I'm finding that tailsitteriness is a problem with these resin models.

Regards,
Bruce

[JohnRatzenberger]

I'll take a DNF on these ....

Actually the XP-52 hit the bin several days ago when I broke something while trying to fix the misalignment(s) ...
The XP-50 and the XFM-1 hit the bin today after a coat of silver revealed too many problems that I simply don't care about ....

[MerlinJones]

Ouch!
Shame.

Regards,
Bruce