This is Special Hobby's B-33 in 1/48 scale. It's for a commission build. The customer has asked me to build it as an Il-10. As with any Special Hobby kit, it takes some patience, work , and planning to get built.
First order was to build the cockpit. It's actually a fairly detailed cockpit, with plastic, resin and photoetch. However, the canopy is cast as a single piece, so little of it will be visible. Accordingly, I did not make maximum use of the photoetch. (I loathe photoetch with a passion.)
The instrument panel is a plastic piece, with a single photoetch piece on top, then clear film for the instrument dials, then more photoetch over that. All told, it's 8 different pieces. It's a bit crooked, but as it won't be seen to any great degree, I didn't worry about it. (Did I mention I loathe photoetch?)
The instructions call for the cockpit module to be glued into one side of the fuselage, and then the fuselage glued together. With Special Hobby kits, I've found that rarely if ever works. Also, it calls for the instrument panel to be glued into one fuselage half also. However, once it is glued in there, and the cockpit module installed, you can't get to it to glue the other side. As this kit will have to be shipped, I needed a sturdier attachment. So I opted to glue the IP directly to a box of some sort on the cockpit floor. I don't know if that was the purpose of that part, but for my purposes, it worked. A large amount of CA glue tacked it firmly in place.
In addition to the cockpit, there is a tail wheel insert to glue in to one fuselage half, as well as the tail wheel strut. The tail wheel strut was two parts.... the horseshoe shaped part that holds the wheel, and an L-shaped strut. There were no attachment pints or pins, just poorly casts areas and a vague hint in the instructions to glue it in place, and then just sort of glue it into the fuselage opening. It all looked very fragile, and would be entirely unsatisfactory for shipping or holding up the weight of the model when sitting.
So I took a piece of sprue, and drilled a small shaft through it. I then drilled a hole in the horseshoe shaped wheel strut, and joined the two together with a piece of wire. I then drilled a hole in the roof of the tailwheel housing (if you have this kit it's part #A7), and inserted the piece of wire protruding from the sprue strut part, and applied Tamiya Extra Thin cement, and after it dried, reinforced the whole structure with CA. This gave a very strong tail wheel, which is slightly out of scale. However, it will survive shipping and will last for years.
I glued this in place in one fuselage half, and then joined the fuselage halves (without the cockpit assembly),
but I only joined them at the vertical stabilizer. I left the rest unglued, so I could fit the cockpit in place.
Here you can see the fuselage, with only the vertical stabilizer glued together.
Two small locator tabs are included on either fuselage side. By allowing the fuselage to split apart, I can now insert the cockpit assembly from below. Here it is without the assembly:
And here it is with the assembly in place, but no glue applied yet:
You have to flip the fuselage over and adjust it fore and aft by eye.
Note that at this point I have still not installed the gunner's seat... it's a "strap" that stretches from either side of the fuselage. Special Hobby's instructions would have you install it on one side before the fuselages are joined, then try to join the other side. That sounded like a recipe for disaster, so I decided to install it later. I also left out a horseshoe shaped ring in the opening of the gunners area. I'll add that after the fuselage seams have been sanded. (NOTE: I also forgot to mention that I left out the spinner backplate. This will allow the exhausts to be positioned after painting.)
Once in place, I then glued and clamped the lower fuselage join, and glued the cockpit in place.
After that dried for a while, I glued the upper seams together, and clamped it with a rubber band.
One note- I don't bother too much with seam cleanup prior to joining a Special Hobby kit. You never know how it will go together, so I just sand it all smooth after joining, because it usually takes A LOT of filler to bet a smooth contour. So lots of prior cleanup hasn't helped me.
Now the fuselage is together, and the cockpit in place:
Notice how one fuselage half is shorter than the other. I will address that later, with sanding sticks and rescribing. The panel lines line up across the rest of the fuselage, except for this forward half. This is one of the things I hate about Special Hobby kits- poor quality control and engineering on essential elements. Some people cut the cowl off on one side and then add a shim. I decided it would be easier to rescribe the panel line and sand the protruding part down.
I won't join the wings to fuselage until after I have sanded all the fuselage seams smooth. However, I did want to do a test fit of the wings, just to see how it looked initially. The fit of the lower wings was not too bad:
The upper wing parts are a different story. I'd already assembled the landing gear bay parts, as well as the bomb bay parts, and obviously they interfere with the fit, so some sanding will be required. Also, I'll have to deal with those wing root gaps.
More to come!