The Little World

Fitting an eastern European model together is like opening Forrest Gump – you can never tell whether you have a soft centre or not.

In the best kits the parts fit, and in the rest they nearly fit. You are fortunate if the gaps are symmetrical and the surfaces parallel. Plastic strip and sheet can be fused into even the worst wing – under a coat of paint it is invisible. Some gaps have styrene cement, cyanoacrylate cement, and acrylic filler – all at once.

The other challenge is the fit of interior components. The cockpit tubs are the worst problem, with no ledges or locating surfaces in some. This Vanguard has a full resin tub that slides in neatly after the fuselage is complete and interferes with nothing. The engine is another thing. It does fit, but you have to balance it in place and hope that the CA and later PVA glues will let it dry square. The final answer was to upend the fuselage in a glue bottle and let it set undisturbed.

The nose and wing machine gun housings looked frightening on the instruction sheet but have gone down perfectly. Those nose guns are not that long – that’s just the end of the resin feeder.

As an encouragement, here’s what it looked like in primer.