ccoyle

Try a matte clear acrylic top coat.

I've got my fingers crossed for you -- just holler if you need any advice. I also read German, so let me know if you need something translated.

Mostly it's because bedtime is approaching. Sleepy modelers tend to rush and make mistakes -- it's best to know when to quit for the day.

A little more progress -- wing tips added and one wheel well built and installed. Parts for the second well have been cut out. You can see the rather torturous shape into which the wheel well wall (say that five times fast) must gently be shaped. I only had enough evening modeling mojo to complete one well.

Very well done -- congratulations! I always appreciate seeing a model that is a little off the beaten path.

From what I've been told, the Japanese used a very poor-quality paint that chipped and flaked easily, hence the characteristic scruffy look.

Changed my mind. Just a dry fit of the wing to fuselage.

So, this trough-like structure (circled) is the best I could come up with for the aft skeletal pieces. Whether it's correct or not is debatable, but the wing skin does fit properly, and the skinned wing will fit the fuselage correctly -- as far as I can tell at this point. I won't apply the skins until after I have built and fitted the wheel wells. BTW, a strange detail of this kit's construction is that optional parts are provided to make the ailerons as separate assemblies. This wasn't an option for the rear control surfaces -- the rudder and elevators were printed as separate parts, so separate they had to be. I won't make the ailerons separately, as IMO there is little to gain visually by doing so, unless one chooses to display them in an up or down configuration, and building them separately allows more opportunities for boogering things. There are two completed examples of this kit at kartonowki.pl, and both of them have separate ailerons, but with the ailerons displayed level with the wing. You can judge for yourselves whether the reward is worth the risk.

Frankly, I'm impressed by how much progress some of you guys have made on a kit that's only recently been issued!

All the time.

Actually, the situation I've run into is similar to what happened with the Mohawk, albeit on a different structure. Part of the wing construction hassle is that the perspective shown in the single diagram of the skeleton, which looks fore-to-aft, makes some aspects of the aft construction unclear, making a certain amount of guesswork necessary. To tackle this, I'm going to have to cut out and shape the wing skins to deduce where the contact points for some of the skeletal elements should be. Of course, I'll report later on whether this all worked out or not.

Well, a card model doesn't bear the same loads and stresses as a real airplane, but its builder does have to construct it without raising his blood pressure dangerously high, like this wing might be doing. 😆

Each wing is one piece except for the wingtips. Like most low-wing monoplanes, each wing will have a long fillet along its root where it joins the fuselage.

Working on the wing skeleton. This has been a less than enjoyable part of the build. One problem has been that there are only two interlocking joints in the entire structure (circled); the rest are butt joints. Butt joints might not be all that bad except 1.) most of the joint locations are not marked, neither on the kit parts nor on their laser-cut replacements, and 2.) white glue and wood glue have both shown a remarkable inability to "grab" the laser-cut cardboard quickly, forcing me to tack the parts with CA and then reinforce with wood glue afterwards. Oh, and 3.) the two main spars are each a single, long, FLOPPY piece. So, non-grabby glue + no locator marks + floppy parts + almost no interlocking joints = 🤬. But it's done.

Welcome, Tewhano, from your neighbor to the south. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but since your last forays into model ship building some rather unsavory characters have come on the scene in the form of unscrupulous manufacturers who shamelessly copy wooden model kits and then sell them. Your Halcon is made by one of these companies, which are mainly (though not solely) located in China. Please have a read here to learn about our stance on model kit piracy. If you want to have a crack at a kit in a larger scale, not to mention a kit that is far superior quality-wise, give us a shout, and we can direct you to any number of reputable manufacturers and dealers. Cheers!

All stabilizers mounted and fillets in place. In order to counter the slight offset of the horizontal stabilizers, I had to add a tiny bit of dihedral -- normally the stabilizers lie in the same plane, but here they will tilt up just a smidge. The difference will only be noticed by the geekiest of airplane geeks. My wife just now asked about why the plane looks so scraped up. 😆

Burnin' a vacation day today and getting a little work done before settling down to watch some World Cup qualifying. I made a slight error with the vertical stabilizer which I did not catch until after it was done -- the vertical frame piece is supposed to set inside the skins about 1 mm back from the edges instead of flush. You can see the difference by looking at the aft edges of the stabilizer and fuselage. Hmm . . . oh, well. Horizontal stabilizer sub-assemblies completed and ready for final assembly.

She's a beaut!

Welcome! I love the figurines -- some very skillful painting on display there!

Fuselage complete. Had to do a little nipping & tucking to get everything together to my satisfaction, but managed in the end. There's something weird going on with the empennage section -- the little center-line tick mark on the top and the bottom seam both line up properly with the section in front, but the printed horizontal stabilizer areas are not level. The port side is about 1 mm higher than starboard. But I'll deal with that later.

I don't build them, but I bought one a couple of years ago so I could hunt an extra ten days in SC. Never once even saw a deer whenever I took my BP rifle out. 😢 Anyways, the real reason I chimed in on this thread is to say that I own a Dremel tool with a flex shaft attachment. I used it quite a bit when I was building wooden kits. I soon ditched the flex shaft -- it worked fine, but I just preferred working without it. Now that I'm working mostly in card, I rarely use my Dremel, but it does work nicely for turning aircraft wheels. As others have pointed out, you do have to pay attention to what you're doing when using a rotary tool for tasks like sanding, as it can very easily and quickly remove more material than intended.

More exciting Oscar action! Moving forward (literally) toward the engine mount. The mount consists of three concentric rings supporting a bulkhead. You can see that the fit hasn't been so good on the first two rings, and there is an ugly gap at the bottom. I think this gap will eventually be filled with wing and covered by a fillet -- hopefully. But having nothing to brace the engine bulkhead is worrisome. Any pressure applied while mounting the engine could possibly collapse the structure. So, I measured the gap between to two bulkheads and cut some scrap card stock to act as spacers. And here's the last ring + bulkhead added. Once this dries, I will fill in some of the loose seams with white glue, but this will all eventually be hidden by the cowling. A handy tool to have for card modeling is a screw punch. I got this one for Christmas a couple of years ago, along with a set of ten bits in 0.5 mm increments from 1.0 to 5.0 mm. Here I've used it to punch out the two holes where the wires for the horizontal stabilizers will be inserted. And lastly, I cut out the remaining rear fuselage pieces so I can edge color them all in one batch. Soon we'll have a fuselage! Stay tuned!

Based on my experience, whatever you do, DON'T use an open flame. Styrene's melting point is pretty low. I'd start with the hot water and try that.

I forgot to mention that an easy way to "delaminate" a card stock part, if you have a good scanning copier, is to simply scan and print the parts sheet onto 20# bond copier paper.

It might sound gross, but licking the part actually does the job nicely. 🤢 (BTW, licking might sound like a risk for damaging the paper fibers, but paper fibers consist of cellulose, for which humans lack the necessary digestive enzyme). For larger surfaces, I use a damp paint brush. I will sometimes delaminate a part if I judge the card stock part to be too thick. An example of this is the flags used in my 1/250 ship models. The flag is usually printed on card stock and designed to be folded to produce a two-sided finished flag. But such a flag is too thick to drape properly. Thus, I lightly wet the card stock, allow the water to penetrate the layers of fiber, then use a knife tip to separate the printed top layer from the remaining layers. I'll even gently scrape away any unwanted residual fibers from the back of the part. Card stock is also generally bad for forming tubes of very narrow diameters. To understand why, one must remember that a sheet of card stock is a three-dimensional product -- it's actually a very thin rectangular prism made of multiple layers. The layers of paper in the printed part want to shift as the tube is rolled, because each successive layer, going from top to bottom, must form a narrower tube than the one above it -- visualize what happens when you try to roll a magazine into a tube. The narrower the tube, the worse the problem is. One solution for this is to delaminate the printed part and then wrap it around a piece of styrene rod.