Luft46's Blog

So the model desk is tidied up and everything is packed away.

The Arado 234 and the Okha floatplane have been packed away. The first one suffers from too many faults and the second needs a miracle to get the floats on. I suspect both will sit a long while before I attempt them again.

A few unfinishable kits like the Planet FW1000x3 have been binned. Short of vacforming a new canopy an over large canopy is impossible to fix. Searching online confirmed other people had the same issue.

This pretty much concludes my troll through the boxes of doom which has left me with two boxes of kits that can be primed or painted in the near future.

I am away for much of the rest of March so I do not expect much modelling to get done though I expect to visit two model shops in that time.  I will also be picking up some kits from a friend so the stash will definitely be growing.

As April is very much autumn I’m going to get stuck into serious air brushing practice and hopefully start finishing some kits off.

Recent work has mostly been on the Ar 234. I have just finished a second coat of primer after the first main PSR cycle. I’m trying to carefully balance how much work I do on this kit given it’s age and quality. A good example of this is the cockpit consists of  a crude overscale seat and a pilot figure with the front instrument panel the only other element. There is no real point in doing extra work here so I haven’t.

I will do one more PSR cycle and probably call it quits there.

The Lippisch P13 has been and gone as I have done all I can short of airbrushing on this. Having made the decision previously that I would leave the canopy open due to it’s poor fit the cockpit is now detailed to an adequate standard with the skid and U/c bay now detailed.

I also briefly had the Unicraft (Unicrap) Okha Model 53 resin missile kit out. It would have been really lovely if the four parts of the tail surfaces fitted or each pair was roughly equal in size or thickness. As it is I’ve decided that it is bound for the tip.

Someone else doing this model would be lovely.

And lastly on the kit list is the Okha on floats. This is a very conjectural plane from Justo Miranda, it is very whiffy and even less likely than some of my other L46 stuff. To do this you need a set of Jake floats and a Hase Okha along with the float struts.

The struts were initially removed and metal pins added to ensure that the fit would be solid particularly for the rear ones that will be more at a 45 degree angle than the 90 degrees of the front one. They meet the body rather than the front ones that drop down from the wings.

Plans of sorts.

The biggest issue here is to get the floats attached with the minimum of swear words possible. My next update will be  whether I have been successful.

The photo above is with the front struts resting under the wing only.