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OK - I'll quote myself here, for those of you that didn't see my post under another title.

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I've just taken delivery of the 1/48 Verlinden update set for the Monogram kit if you're in need of a review for it. Looks quite nice so far, as I haven't got it home yet. I had hoped there'd be something for the landing gear, but alas not.

The resin cockpit tub & ejector seat looks fabulously detailed, and I can't wait to get it painted & installed in my old Monogram a-10. The other resin parts make up a couple of backing pieces for equipment bays (someone help me out with their purpose here!) on the right flank of the fuse, halfway aft of the cockpit blister.

There are lots of mould plugs to sand off the back of the parts, so here's hoping a get a nice day - there's nothing worse than the smell of resin dust indoors.

The thoughtful souls at Verlinden have included a 6" strip of brass wire, which is presumably for hosing up the landing struts. This will be nice & easy thanks to JackB, who kindly sent me a load of pics of the landing struts.

The odd thing is that the cockpit tub doesn't include the main instrument panel, which would have been nice to have a similarly well moulded piece to complete the job.

My only other gripe is that the brass fret full of the etched parts wasn't backed by any sort of protective material, and as a result some of the smaller parts have little kinks in them that I'll need to iron out before I install them.
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Assembly proceeds apace, and I'm noticing a few annoyances with construction. Sanding off all the mould plugs was a piece of case, although I got a little close with the rear of the cockpit. When I joined this piece to the main tub, there's no ledge to affix it at the correct angle, and the instructions aren't clear how you mount the two pieces. I ended up tack-gluing the tub side-by-side with the original, and supporting the resin rear at the same angle while the CA cured. Once cured, I introduced a small wedge of sheet styrene to give it some resilience to handling.

Another gripe about the cockpit tub was width. I measured both original and replacement components, and found the resin item to be a full millimetre narrower than the original. This led to a pretty poor fit in the fuse, so I had to add a 0.5mm strip of styrene to each side. The riser leading to the rear of the cockpit will also need some heavy filling once it's glued in place.

I have also added a small amount of detail to the front wheel-bay, which must be installed at the same time as the cockpit, for reasons of fit. Overall, the detail wasn't bad considering the age of the model, but with the help of the ARC walk-around photos, some bulkhead stiffeners were added above the main leg, and a bit of brass wire was glued in place to represent a prominent hose.

I also noticed that the second landing light was missing from my kit, so I scratch built one from the rounded end of a piece of sprue, mounted it in a piece of styrene that I'd notched to fit, then cut and sanded it to a reasonable shape.

Part 2 follows:

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See Part 1 first!

The set contains two access panels for the bird, one for each side. The covers are represented by a rather complicated set of photo-etched brass components, which looked VERY fiddly indeed! [:S] I decided to construct these first, in case I screwed up and was left with a big hole in my A-10 with no doors! With a few minor CA related incidents, I managed to get both panels together & looking good, so the kit needed some new holes!

I used my dremel tool to remove the panels from the forward fuse, and came across the next problem when I offered up the enclosure to it's newly sanded access panel. The recess on the outside of the fuse for the ventral fin (is that what you call it?) was strengthened inside to retain thickness of skin, which baulked the bottom left corner of the panel (we're on the right side of the fuse here). A bit of careful sanding of the fuse & panel resulted in a reasonable fit, so I clamped it in place and sealed it in with some thin CA. In another ARC pic I noticed some struts showing in the top of the panel, so these were added with some box section extrusion, as I had no T-section of such a small size, unfortunately. <img src=icon_smile_sad.gif border=0 align=middle>

At this stage I'm just prepping a few more parts for an "interior grey" spraying session.</font id='Tahoma'>

Mike, it's kinda' hard to keep up with what you're saying without pictures. Do you have a digital you can snap pics with? If so I can host the pics so everyone can follow your progress.

Ugly But Well Hung

<font face='Tahoma'>Yeah, I've got a digital cam, but at the time, it was away in the South of France with my Fiancee! Now it's back I'll take a few snaps - how do I get them to you?</font id='Tahoma'>

Email them to phatom2@aol.com

Ugly But Well Hung