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Looking great so far!

I know you said your not gonna get bogged down on the details,but your B-17H (they didnt become SB-17's till 1947) looks great,which unit are you doing?. Somewhere i have some pics of 2nd ERS Forts including nose art.

Another thing the bulged tear drop waist windows were a purely postwar mod the WW2 ones carried standard .50's.

What markings are going one the Revell kit?. I'm very tempted to join myself with the new tool 72nd 'F' Memphis Belle kit. There acouple of Pacific based B-17E/F's i'd like to build.

ATB,

Gary

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Looking great so far!

I know you said your not gonna get bogged down on the details,but your B-17H (they didnt become SB-17's till 1947) looks great,which unit are you doing?. Somewhere i have some pics of 2nd ERS Forts including nose art.

Another thing the bulged tear drop waist windows were a purely postwar mod the WW2 ones carried standard .50's.

What markings are going one the Revell kit?. I'm very tempted to join myself with the new tool 72nd 'F' Memphis Belle kit. There acouple of Pacific based B-17E/F's i'd like to build.

ATB,

Gary

Where were you a couple weeks ago? lol too late to change the windows now since they pop in from the inside. I just figured they looked the part more for a SB-17 than anything else. I'm just going with whatever decals are in the box as I don't even think they offer aftermarket decals for SR B-17s. Like I said at the beginning I'm not sure if the actual aircraft I'm building fit the criteria as my research didn't pull up anything but they were OK with it.

As for the Revell I'm just going to do Little Miss Mischief for this one. Always liked the nose art and how it's multiple colors. Will be a test on painting and masking for sure.

Speaking of here's some of the fiddly bits of the Revell getting there.

Tailgun section which is utterly ridiculous unless you can scale yourself to 1/72 you're not seeing any of this.

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Turret pieces. The ball turret and top turret glass will get sprayed tomorrow. Well the ball will be complete the top turret will just get a cote of silver to act as the interior framing. Then it will get painted with the rest of the body in Alclad.

af221360.jpg

I meant nail polish remover but isn't that stuff isopropyl (sp?) alcohol anyway? I'll wait till my wife's home because Idk where she keeps the stuff.

Worst case I fill and sand as normal but thats a lot of work to fix all the panel lines.

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EGADS!

Top and bottom! Don't worry about how bad the bomb bay doors look because that's all getting covered by the boat so I have ignored it. I'll be giving a try to the whole filler with a q-tip alcohol rub afterwards. Hope I can pull it off. Then the blending and smoothing will begin. I thought I'd be near primer stage but the Revell kit may catch up after all.

Did you check the dihedral (sp?) of the wings? The left one seems to be fitting slightly better. I would make sure of the proper alignment of the wings before slapping filler in the roots.

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I meant nail polish remover but isn't that stuff isopropyl (sp?) alcohol anyway? I'll wait till my wife's home because Idk where she keeps the stuff.

Worst case I fill and sand as normal but thats a lot of work to fix all the panel lines.

My bottle of nail polish remover says acetone in the ingredients, I know from experience that iso alcohol does nothing to putty. You'll even smell the difference between the two right away. My wife got tired of me hijacking her bottle so she came home one day with one of my very own. Oh well, I couldn't figure out how I was going through so many q-tips so fast once, then I caught her in my model room pillaging. She owed me.

One tip, make sure you go easy with the np remover, if you have too much on the q-tip it will make some pretty realistic looking rust holes in the plastic.

Bill

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Did you check the dihedral (sp?) of the wings? The left one seems to be fitting slightly better. I would make sure of the proper alignment of the wings before slapping filler in the roots.

The dihedral is really the reason the fit is so bad. I could have left all alone and fit the bottom and then dealt with a grand canyon gap but I sanded the wing roots of the fuselages and the wings and got the dihedral right but the do is terrible now. Oh well.

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Small but substantial progress.

Completed top turret. Has had one cote of silver paint. Will receive the gloss black/Alclad treatment once installed. Sadly due to the ammo boxes you have to install this prior to closing the fuselage. I may make some modifications though so that that's not the case.

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Ball turret is complete. They're usually a different shade of aluminum/natural metal than the skin of the aircraft so I painted it silver and will dull it down a little bit and that's it.

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And finally the nail polish remover sanding technique.

Before

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After

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I still have to give it a light sanding but was letting everything dry nice and good before that. Beats the heck out of sanding all that myself.

Edited by Bigasshammm
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Final shots before the Revell gets closed up. All I need to do is attach the cheek guns. Sadly they don't have the separate barrels so Care will have to be taken from here on out.

I'm impressed with all the detail even if it is a little silly since it's impossible to see. Would make for a nice cutaway. They should make one with a clear half like they did the 1/48 kit.

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Next pics will show it closed up. I did cut a bit off the top turret ammo boxes so it can just be dropped in at a later time. Makes much more sense.

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Parenting rant.

So I sit down to glue the revell together. Finish off a bottle I tenax but that's ok because Ive had a brand new bottle sittin there for months. Open it up and immediately I know something's fishy. The top was very lose and the level is low and not a full bottle. Plus it has a sweet soapy smell. Odd. So I try it out and its not working at all. So I figured my 4 yr old princess had messed with it.

Text my wife that she's in big trouble cause they were at the store. My wife says "she told me". So I'm interested what she told her and I ask. She then says she told her she painted daddy's plane. So I go "what!?" and look and lo and behold she had used my wide flat brush I use for future and "painted" tenax glue onto the side of the revell fuselage. Which the future residue on the brush apparently reacted with the tenax and ruined the entire bottle.

Long story short everythings on hiatus till I can get more glue and I have a car in the garage in a million pieces so thats not happening anytime soon. But that's another horror story...

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Back to work. Well not really as I got the night off work work and the wife and kids even went away for a few hours. Loud music beer and modeling tools later here we are.

SB-17 got the stabs fitted. Perfect fit.Also masked and attacked the front windscreen and radio room window. Also a great fit. These Academy kits are quite good if a little simplistic.

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The Revell got closed up...

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Sanding and minor filling to follow. Not the kit's fault but an issue I had with my copy because it wasn't new.

Also been banging away at the wings. Got the wheel wells in and painted. Just finishing up some things and may get them joined tonight as well.

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Also dropped the flaps. They want you to cut them off but if you just score both sides you can bend it down easily.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Didn't forget about these just been working on the new P-51 and waiting to get these started for paint. Got the SB-17 ready for alclad. Just will need buffed out. Need more blackto finish off the revell. Plus there was something on the wing so it will need cleaned up and resprayed.

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After a few days I'll start buffing the SB-17.

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Wow! Shiny and smooth. Almost too bad you can't leave it light that.

You could if you built Tondalayo (sp?)

These Tamiya spray bombs work like magic.

Polishing this weekend. I think I'm gonna need to get more Alclad because I have too much on the plate to paint with it so these may get delayed further. But I did get more black to finish LMM though. Have to see if the portion of the wing that's screwed up will be nmf or camo before I decide to sand it down and repaint.

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Today's lesson kids. If you're going to do a 72nd 17 get the precut masks!

I bought the Academy masks for this build and I had one set of the Revell masks. I'll be getting these for every one now. The Revell fuselage and ball turret took me not even 30 minutes. Would have been days and a half case of beer if I did it myself.

Hello Bigasshammm, those masks are the greatest!! I would never have attempted my 1/72 Fort if i didn't have these masks. It's looking great.

Well played sir! Think about how much easier that makes the seams on a 1/48 Fort. The ball turret is looking good, looks a little like a Tie Fighter :) Also, I like the huge rack of Forts in the back, is that BG Hamm?

IMG_1168.jpg

Don

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Didn't forget about these just been working on the new P-51 and waiting to get these started for paint. Got the SB-17 ready for alclad. Just will need buffed out. Need more blackto finish off the revell. Plus there was something on the wing so it will need cleaned up and resprayed.

After a few days I'll start buffing the SB-17.

Your SB-17G, 44-83575, was delivered to the USAAF April 17, 1945. It flew for several years in the rescue configuration (don't know with which squadron yet) and was then used as a test subject in nuclear testing in 1952. It was then sold to various owners before being coverted into a borate bomber for about 20 years. Lately, it's now restored to standard B-17G configuraion and flies in the markings of "nine-o'-nines". You can probably find more by going to Google and just list the tail number.

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Your SB-17G, 44-83575, was delivered to the USAAF April 17, 1945. It flew for several years in the rescue configuration (don't know with which squadron yet) and was then used as a test subject in nuclear testing in 1952. It was then sold to various owners before being coverted into a borate bomber for about 20 years. Lately, it's now restored to standard B-17G configuraion and flies in the markings of "nine-o'-nines". You can probably find more by going to Google and just list the tail number.

So the decals for the academy SB-17 represent what is now the current 9 o 9? Wow had no idea.

Just to show I haven't forgotten.

F3740A1C-5364-456D-A24F-7DBB1473C107-664-0000010230C3708A.jpg

Have to paint the undersides then let her sit and maks the yellow stripes. I may try one of the kit supplied decals but I'm sure it'll be better and probably easier to paint. In fact I don't think it comes with yellow decals just the black stripes that go on the outsides.

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