The Little World

Deciding to make a sacrifice is a daunting thing – whether it is the business of culling your shirt collection and binning some or leading a chain of captives to the top of the ziggurat, you are faced with a decision; something’s going to be traded for something and you need to make sure that the second something is better.

Ivan is a perfectly good kit, and would make a fine addition to my air museum – I’ve already researched the subject and there are examples there in real life that have been surrendered by defectors. The temptation to make him as a regular kit was strong. Yet every time I put off making a test bed I lose out on new knowledge.

So I bit the bullet, assembled the front of the fuselage without cockpit, and will close the wheel wells, The canopy will be firmly cemented in place and any stray gaps and seams re-enforced with cyanoacrylate glue. Ivan will be as strong and sealed as I can make him.

I will then seal him further with a heavy-duty undercoat like Mr. Hobby Surfacer 1000 and let it cure fr several days. After this I will seal this undercoat with a couple of coats of clear lacquer. Ivan will look like a big grey recognition model. I want him to be able to take coat of colour paint and then be able to remove that coat later in the piece.

This will let me have a big enough test bed to be able to conduct several experiments at one time to compare products.