caudleryan

The Meng kit, while a single seater, is quite exceptional! Fit is almost perfect and good detail. My only gripe is with joining the canopy to the frame. It would have been better to have had it as one piece. I am in the process of building one right now and I'm honestly loving it!

Always a joy seeing someone build this kit! I'll be following along!

I haven't attached it yet to the fuselage. It will get permanently attached after painting is done so it doesn't get broken off.

I 100% agree with you on that. I'm going to get the workbench cleaned off today.

I should really clean off my workbench. It just looks bad at this point. Maybe I'll do that today.

And we have paint! In trying to not paint just a black paint job, I have tried marbling and shading under the top coat. It worked out pretty well and I am quite satisfied with it. It may be a little hard to see in the pics and I do apologize for that. I still have the bottom to do, but I'm going to let my hand rest a day or two. I have carpel tunnel in my right hand and I can only go so long before my whole hand is numb.

Managed to get the entire model primed. Overall, I'm very happy with how it has turned out. Just a couple of small seams to deal with. I used stynlrez primer. Not my first choice since I like to use Mr. Surfacer black 1500. But, almost everyone is out of it, so I resorted back to stynlrez. Which, in all honesty, it's not that bad. I just have to keep unclogging the nozzle every so often. And it levels out very beautifully. The mishap with the horizontal stabs has been fixed to the best of my ability and it actually looks pretty good. I'm happy with the relatively minor flaws that I couldn't sa

A few overall shots of where I'm at right now.

The rest of the fuselage is just basic stuff. If nothing else happens, I should be getting around to painting sometime next week. I am waiting on an order with a bunch of oil paints and thinners to get here. These birds got quite beat up and I would like to try oil weathering for the first time. Something like this:

Horizontal stabilizers. And this is where I made a stupid rookie mistake. The Horizontal stabilizers do not fit at all. Massive gaps both to and bottom and no positive fit at all. Even after I shimmed the crap out of them, there was still a lot of movement and no positive location. I glued them on as best I could. I used the black CA as a filler. Worked great for the top seams. Not so much for the bottom. I must have not paid attention, because the CA seeped out from underneath and ran down the fuselage. No big problem, I thought. I'll just use debonder. Yeah, I forgot that stuff a

Canopy. The canopy was a little bit better in fit, although I did have a slight step and a Gap at the rear. I filled in the gap with my favorite black CA from Starbond. I sanded down the step even with the fuselage and rescribed the canopy line. Unfortunately, this meant I lost some of the rear framing. But, I can live with it. The supplied masks are useless. They are way too small and they wrinkle easily. I used the one for the main canopy, but had to re-mask the outer edge. I just used regular Tamiya tape for whe windscreen. Be cautious, though, as the framing is a little on the

Next up, the intakes. The inner part of the intakes come in four pieces with the fan section joining in the back. Fit was lacking since the kit only has a small tab to fit the intake assembly onto. The foward part floats freely with no support. To mitigate this, I used five minute epoxy and glued the inner intakes on. Then, I taped the outer intakes to the fuselage and lined up the sections as best as I could. Fit was sloppy at best and there is a noticeable step between the inner and outer intake sections. Unfortunately, I do not have a good picture of this. I might scratch build some FOD cov

So, it has been ages since I have shared any kind of work in progress on ARC. I figured why not share this one. I started on this kit a couple of months ago. While it does go together well enough, there are some problematic fit issues that will need to be dealt with. Mainly, the wing pods and tail planes were the biggest issues I have come across. I should point out that the pics may be a bit lacking and I do apologize for that. I do not own a good camera or have a photo booth setup as my room is just too small for that. Phone pics will have to suffice. And, yes, I need to clean off my table.😊

Some pics of mine at the moment.

Meng all the way. Fit is just fantastic. I'm at the painting stage of mine right now and I have been enjoying every second of it!