The Little World

Well, that’s what it looks like – fortunately the smell is a lot sweeter.

The fuselage went together alright, and the puttying around the seams started – as this was to be a sliver-coloured aircraft a good deal of smoothing was undertaken to make the seam less visible. This might not be as good as the seams that model car builders get on their custom vehicles, but it was finished as well as ever I could do. The proportions didn’t look too strained.

In any case it was Sprue Goo all round with a night’s drying out between sanding sessions. These go down in grade from the coarsest black stick to the finest green one and then on to Ustar rubber polishers. The Sprue Goo is easy to work without tearing itself out again – one of the most rewarding tools for initial shaping being a tiny coarse file with and oval cross section. It is the one tool that seems to get wing fillets flattened without ruining the riveting of the fuselage nearby.

As with many Czech kits I find it advantageous to sand the flat faces of the fuselage and wing root to adjust the dihedral angle as much as possible before offering the parts to each other. No pinning on this one, but the cementing surfaces are quite wide. Even the tail pieces have plastic nubbins and a depressions in the fuselage to let you know where they sprout from the surface. Once you’ve gotten a day’s firm cementing you can jig the plane down and apply the rudder at exactly 90º.

The Cursèd Czech Windmills needed the old cementing jig trick – in this case a fresh one that took into account the size of the spinner cones and the spacing for the blades. Eventually I should have enough jigs to tackle any of these propellers, but I still wish they would include them whole on the main injected sprue trees like everyone else. I can really see the attraction of after-market parts for this sort of assembly. At least the landing gear was absolutely sturdy.

Oh – the side window masks were perfect and the windows actually fit pretty well