ALF18

Putty time! I like to use nail polish remover and a Q-Tip to shape it before it dries. This works for most applications. Will need a second coat, but better already. Remember how horrible the bottom was? Lots of putty required here. Coming along. I will be using Leading Edge decals for this one. I had a look at the colour scheme to see what needed to be red or black. Since I'm using a brush, I wanted to do the first trials on the underside, and make sure that the red paint w

Nice souvenir! I gave my father's logbooks away to a museum, so can't check - but there's a good chance one or both of them flew that tail number. I love hearing about well-preserved aviation relics. ALF

Thanks Geoff. I wish I shared your confidence... 🙂 Somehow, I will force it to work.

As part of the intake dry-fitting, I saw that the lower wing didn't fit at all because of those huge intake trunks. That's why I chopped the things. I think part of the problem is that the cockpit is sitting a bit too low, pushing everything down. I finally got things to fit a little better, but there are still some big problems. The aft fuselage to wing join is odd. The arc is different on each, leaving a huge step. I got it all together after lots of chopping and dry-fitting. Putty will be required!!! Tops of the wings glued in plac

Some of the gaps are incredible on this beast. I will try to clamp, etc, to minimize this one. In the meantime, I am working on those intakes. Looks to me like the trunking causes the outer covers to fail to seat properly. I am not a trunking fan, given that these intakes on the real thing just kind of terminate in a large screen that keeps the rocks out of the huge vacuum-cleaner style impeller (for the centrifugal-flow engine, not axial-flow like modern jets). Notice that I don't care about the mould leftovers much either. Here, I've chopped up that large assembly that was

Wow, major gaps to fill! You're on the right track, buddy. ALF

Thanks Elmo! 🙂

Thanks Shawn for the confirmation. I've been struggling with the fuselage joins now. Got out my CA glue, and glued the front/top of the nose section. Underneath, this is what happens. After the front set, I attacked the portion just aft of the cockpit. Hopefully that will set nicely, and I can continue later. Now, to head to the apartment complex's pool! It's 31C, feels like 37. Perfect pool weather. ALF

Before I glued the fuselage halves together, I had an overnight flash. Some people obssess about their lives and relationships at 3 am... I think about my latest model. Here is what I thought about. This is the nose gear bay, assembled according to the kit instructions. Have a good look at the little sockets at bottom left. I had a dim memory of something being not quite right when I built this kit the first time, several years ago, but at 3 am it kept evading me, until I remembered. The little sockets were intended to receive the side tabs on the nose gear strut! Here i

Now that the cockpit is in place, I decided to work a bit on the intakes before gluing the fuselage together. Remember I mentioned that the kit parts are not numbered? Well, I noticed that there were two very similar parts. The upper one, dry-fit on the fuselage, is the one for the T-33. The lower one is for the F-80. You can see that the T-33's is longer, the extra length for the rear seat. I tossed the two short parts into the bin. BTW, both the T-33 and F-80 parts fit very poorly into the fuselage side. Taking Mike Millette's advice from his Hobby Scale b

Good job! Love that Lethbridge demo pose... 🙂 ALF

Nice job, Shawn. I'm happy it fit reasonably well. Of course, with your skills, you're always able to make it work. ALF

Small hijack of my own thread. I did some searching for other in-progress threads, to see how other people addressed some of the problems with this kit's assembly. I stumbled on this one, which I will read more carefully. https://www.hyperscale.com/2010/features/t3332mm_1.htm#:~:text=The T-33 was built,schemes were just about endless. Of particular interest to me is the part about the intake assembly, since I know this is a problem in this kit. ALF

Next troublesome fit - the nose wheel well. The kit's plastic is somewhat recessed, giving a possible clue as to where exactly the wheel bay should go. The problem is that it doesn't fit snugly into these recesses, and could be glued in at multiple angles and in many little variations of positioning. Dry fitting to see... I finally applied some glue, and will try this. Next step, after it solidifies, is to see if the two fuselage halves fit nicely with this part in this position. If not, I'll use more Tamiya Extra-Thin glue to unseat it and corr

Just got my little envelope from the Plastic Models Store in Kyiv. Three Quinta Studios cockpit decals. They arrived in great shape, well packed, with a nice little business card inside. Nice to see they are still in business. I will definitely order from them again soon. ALF

I brush Future on both before and after decal application, over top of kitchen foil AND Alclad finishes. It does a good job, and doesn't change the sheen. Here is kitchen foil: And Alclad: ALF

The tail pipe. Ugh. I mentioned earlier that this kit has no locating pins, and that fit is not ideal in some areas (as you've heard from at least one follower of this thread as well, so it's not just me). I did some dry-fitting with the tailpipe assembly, and found that it caused the rear fuselage to have a gap at the bottom. I chopped off some of the thick ridge around the front-most portion of the tailpipe, and here's what it looked like. Careful scrutiny will show that there is still a too-tight fit at the rear end, due to the thickness of that ring at the back part. I di

I experienced the same thing updating my in-progress thread for the big T-33. Multiple failures with text and imgur embedded links. After a few tries, it wouldn't even load the ARC forum pages at all. I tried using Chrome and Edge, same result. After 2 hours of doing something else, I tried just a one-liner of text and it worked. I could then add images and text by copying them from the Word doc where I had pasted my long original post that kept failing. No, I didn't start with Word. I typed text into the field, added imgur links, more text, another link, etc. Only after it failed and Chr

Here's the small ridge that the cockpit sidewall sits on. Putting together this whole tub was a bit of guess-work, because there was no definitive angle to set the rear wall (no locating pins or grooves). Looks like I got lucky with the angle I chose. Rear view. Front portion. Now to paint the black on the back of the instrument panels, and assemble the tail pipe and paint the nose gear bay. ALF

Okay, so one image and text at a time is working... if this keeps up, it will become annoying to post anything here. Here I've added the instrument panels. I still have to paint the tops and backs of those panels black. Control sticks are installed. The hand grips look a bit odd, but they're close enough. Not the same as the Canadian ones. Sorry for the fuzzy pictures. It's a very grey day here, and natural light is very muted. Dry-fitting of the cockpit into the right-hand fuselage half. Yes, the seats are buried rather deep into the fuselage. In reality, they can be ra

Monday morning update with cockpit progress. Seats are installed, along with the right-hand side wall.

Monday morning update. Running into server errors, so here's a test post with no images. ALF

Thanks! Now I'M happy... 🙂 ALF

Here the left-hand cockpit wall is installed. You can see that the front silver thingie (technical term) on the lower wall has its rear half broken off. Brittle resin, of course. It's also clear how the rear seat rails have come loose. When dry-fitting the front seat, I noted that the gear handle assembly interferes with the seat. It's actually a good thing that the rear portion of it has snapped off. Now to add the resin footrests to the fronts of the seats. More waiting for things to dry and solidify. More soon. ALF

This is one part where I have to be patient. I did some dry-fitting of the seats into the rail assemblies. Those assemblies (you can see them on the cockpit floor, with the solid backs) are tricky because there is no clear guide for where to glue them. That is true for much of this kit. No such thing as locating pins, and sometimes not even a ridge to give a clue. The instructions are not super clear either. I've assembled the nose gear well (top left), painted the wheels (background), and finished the pre-assembly of the side panels (left and top right). Why the patience? Because I