ccoyle

Here's the patched-up seam. I first filled it without about three passes of canopy glue, then applied a thin wash of appropriate edge color, followed by a shot of matte clear spray to take the shine off the filler. It doesn't look too bad -- certainly not the Polish Touch, but better than the untreated gap looked. Naturally, bright lighting and closeup photography makes it look worse than it does at normal viewing distances and lighting. And here's the rest of the spine.

Me, too!

Yep, they are all card. They are part of the laser-cut frames set, cut from what the Poles call "beer mat" stock -- it is the same stuff used commercially to make disposable coasters. On to skinning the spine. The kit includes joiner strips, which is nice -- I would have made them myself but the kit spared me the effort. I glued the first four pieces together using their joiner strips, then glued the entire piece first along one side . . . . . . and then along the other. The color registration is good. I got a bit of a seam gap on the other side, which I'm going to try to remediate. We'll see how that goes.

No finished ones here, but there are plenty of finished gun brigs from that time period for more general reference.

Thin CA is pretty darn thin and will make a horrible mess in a hurry if you're not careful with it -- I shudder to think about what "ultra-thin" must be like. 😳

A fantastic result! Congratulations!

I wonder if the rust in those photos increases her radar cross-section? 🤔

I was going to mention the 1:250 card model published by Paper Shipwright and still available from them as either a printed kit or free download.

Framing for dorsal hump and vertical stabilizer has been added -- calling it a night. Not all of the transverse bulkheads come up to the height of the dorsal profile piece; I'm not sure what the deal is there, but I'll find out once I start adding the skins.

Not uncommon for card planes, the fuselage consists of a number of conic sections.

Welcome aboard!

I have resurrected this pathetic, long-dead topic only to share with you what can be done with this very kit by those card modeling wizards over in Poland. Oh, that I should ever possess such skills! Curtiss H-75 P.S. Stumbled across that thread quite by accident while searching for info on an unrelated kit.

You may be able to loosen the bond with water if you used wood glue.

Very nice! Much sleeker-looking than a typical cutter.

Interesting. I always have enormous amounts of difficulty trying to stick EZ-Line with CA.

With the cockpit closed up, it's time to start skinning the forward fuselage, beginning with the wheel wells. I'm now committed to eventually building the Wildcat's nightmarish landing gear. 😬 To this point, I've been following the sequence of diagrams pretty closely, but for anyone who decides to build this kit later, it's a good idea to add the flat skins of the wheel wells before gluing the frames together. You can still do it afterwards, but it's a little trickier, because that central girder is part of one of the frames, and it clearly gets in the way. Then we have the first two fuselage skins added. Fit and registration has been good, although there seems to have been a deliberate omission of certain joiner strips. I added homemade ones -- no biggie. There's a very slight color mismatch between the second and third skins, but strangely enough it's only on one side. The parts came from the same sheet, too, so it's kind of weird. But the difference is not as noticeable as it was for the GPM Hellcat kit, so I won't complain. Once again, the fit for this part was very good. I then decided to skip ahead a bit and add some of the wing skeleton parts, just to stiffen up the spindly spars a bit. They were beginning to get uncomfortably wobbly from being jostled around. Interestingly, there are multiple errors in the numbering of these parts between the diagrams and the laser-cut frets. This hasn't been an issue so far because it's pretty obvious which parts are which and where they're supposed to go. That's all for now!

Greg, did you use EZ-Line for the rigging? If so, I'd be interested in hearing how you go about securing the ends to their attachment points.

He's recommending your build log as a resource for a rookie builder working on a different kit. It's actually a bit of a compliment.

All the cockpit components ready to add to frame. All closed up now.

Moin moin, Marius! Cala Esmeralda is a beautiful ship -- I'm very fond of topsail schooners. Good luck on your project!

Welcome to MSW, Sam!

As Allan said, you can certainly spruce up your model however you like. That being said, I would probably shy away from adding ratlines. All of the sails on a small schooner could be raised and lowered from the deck -- there was simply no need for sailors to go aloft, so ratlines would look a bit out of place.

Hoping for a speedy recovery, Glenn. Backs are weird -- they can go out for the most seemingly innocuous of reasons.

Looks great! What's the new project?

Starboard side instruments completed.