The Little World

The call-out and the box art for this Italian/Chinese fighter show sub-assemblies bolted onto the basic structure.

The pictures provide a valuable clue that the instructions fail to show; you need to pre-paint the assemblies before you attach them – or you’ll never get clean demarcations.

So, emboldened by the Slovakian jigs, I tried a new experiment. I assembled the landing gear struts dry on the fuselage and coaxed things into position before uniting them with thin cement. The attachment point to the main structure were left dry so that the two legs could come off for painting.

Once the legs were there, the spats were easy to attach. I daresay I have trimmed some vital part of the gear off in the assembly, but the teardrop shape of the wheel housings is so striking as to hide anything else.

Wish me luck with the struts – they are all going to be painted on the sprue trees anyway, and then I am on the vaudeville stage juggling for my life.