Ailerons, flaps and landing gear

Good evening to all of you visiting my blog. In the first part of this post I will give you some hints how I corrected another big fault made by HK. The second part will deal with the flaps and the last part with the landing gear and the wheels.

When you take a look at the ailerons of the kit you will quickly notice that they are well detailed on the upper side but have no detailing at all on their under sides. Since this is quite visible this fault has to be corrected.

What you see in the picture is the detailed upper side with the trim-flap marked with the red circle.

This pattern has to be transformed to the under side. I did this by drawing all the lines with a pencil and a ruler:

Then I cut lengths of small 1mm stripes from Evergreen-Sheets. They were cut to needed length and then glued with superglue to the corresponding

pencil-line on the under-side.

Finally I had to scribe the panel-lines for the trim-flap and then I sanded the complete part carefully with 1000 grid sandpaper.

This procedure was very time-consuming but regarding the result is worth the effort:

Here the trim-flaps are still missing.

And this is how they look like installed in the wings (with trim-flaps 😉):

Right wing

and left wing.

Just beneath the ailerons located are the inner and outer landing-flaps. Again a lot of rework necessary due to countless ejector pin-marks on the visible sides.

Otherwise the fit is good as far as their fixing in the wing is concerned:

Right wing

Left wing

And finally painted and weathered:

weathering was done with thinned oil-colors on a coat of Future Floor Polish.

Now I finally come to the last part of today’s post: The landing gear.

Again a lot of rework needed because of

moulding-seams on really every part. After a lot of sanding I glued the parts together. Then they received a basic coat of an Alclad selfmade mixture of polished aluminum and steel which I prepared after studying a lot of reference pictures:

When painting the parts you have to decide if you want the safety-struts - which assure that the landing gear cannot be accidentally retracted on the ground - to be fitted or not:

Since there is a lot of weight on the struts when the model is finished I decided to keep them because they strengthen the construction. Keep in mind to paint them in red.

This is how all components look like when painted and assembled. The hydraulic cylinders were made with strips of bare metal foil:

Backplate from each engine compartment,

weathering was again done with oil-colors.

Since the kit wheels are a bit basic I invested in resin parts from Eduard. They come with masks and have crisp details and are weighted very nice.

Their fit to the landing gear is perfect and they really look very good after basic painting:

The weathering still has to be done.

The rubber color is Tamiya rubber. Very

realistic in my eyes:

I drilled a 3 mm hole through the tailwheel used for guiding the currency cables coming from the aft fuselage to the base-plate:

The second hole already filled was not necessary. Nobody is perfect 😉.

Last pictures of today’s post belong to the tailwheel-fork. The hydraulic cylinder for

suspension was painted with a 1 mm Molotow-Chrome-Pencil which I can highly recommend:

And this is how the fork looks like:

This was all for today.

The next post will deal with the scratchbuild items I added to the fuselage based on the fantastic Dambuster-Book from Mark Postlethwaite and Piotr Forkasiewicz.

Have a good night and a good start into

the new week. See you soon...