A-10 Warthog

A quick view of the major components assembled, prior to attachment of pylons and some other antenna details on the underside of the fuselage. You can see some of the work I have yet to do - the edges of the panel covering the gun and front gear bay will need some filling and rescribing to get a consistent end product. You can also see some re-work that I will need to address on the underside of the flaps of the wing at the bottom of the photo - the trench of a gap that was left from joining the top and bottom halves of the wing parts will need to be re-filled and smoothed again. 

Just a quick view of some of the "less serious" gap filling that has needed to be addressed. This actually isnt bad at all - a quick pass of plastic putty and brief cleanup will be no problem at all. You can also see my attempts at "fixing" the attachment of some of the fins and antennas on the underside of the fuselage - these were all molded onto one of the fuselage halves, and the base of them was so weak that most of them had bent or broken off. I re-attached and ran tiny ropes of milliput around the base attachments to help stabilize them, but I need to do some further refinement of the final result.  

This is the "after" of one of the 2 worst areas for gap filling and cleanup that were required. You can see the remnants that still need to be cleaned up on the side of the flap, but the area where the lower half of the wing parts met the upper left about a 1.5 mm wide and 1mm deep trench to fill right in the middle of the bottom of the flap. Leaving this unaddressed would have been terrible if the model were viewed from the bottom. This gap went all the way across the bottom side of both wings. 

Heres the "after" of the engines. THIS was an incredibly time consuming exercise to get looking smooth. The front of the nacelle/cowling in front of the turbine blades had a giant step and gap that needed to be filled to look anything close to depicting what these engines actually look like. I laid down a bead of milliput all the way around to smooth the "step," which actually took 2 separate applications to properly smooth the transition, and followed this with Tamiya fine putty and Mr Surfacer 500 to get a final product that appears smooth and continuous. I'm pretty pleased with the final result, but it definitely took some work.

You can also see on the far aft section where the engine assembly attaches to the fuselage where I used some stretched sprue to fill the gap left when the engine assembly was attached. The join that is on the forward end of this part isnt as bad, although there is a slight "step" that I will have to contemplate the best method of fixing. One of the biggest hurdles in addressing these joins and seams on the fuselage and wings has been my attempt to maintain as much of the molded surface detail as possible. This has proven very difficult, as all of the panel line and rivet detail is raised instead of recessed.  

This is an example of what I wanted to do with this kit - I could have replaced this with a resin piece, but I wanted to see what I could do with the kit part. I drilled out the vent holes individually (they were molded simply as dimples), and then drilled out the front of each barrel (these were completely flat), and then corrected the seam line from the joining of the two halves and the seam line from attaching the front piece that depicts the ends of the barrels. It was a great bit of fun, and exactly what I was intending to do with this build - practice fundamentals and make the best of what I knew to be a "basic" kit. 

Heres some of the armaments painted up, and pylons waiting to be attached to wings. Again - LOTS of molding flash to be cleaned up on the pylon parts, and the seam lines on ALL of the missiles... UGH. Some of them were terrible, simply beacuse alignment of the two halves was so far off. There was warping of the plastic in some cases, but others it was just clearly not great pieces to start with. But, again, exactly the type of practice I wanted, so I'm very happy to see what I could do with them. 

quick shot of the front gear attached. I needed to get the front attached to be able to place the covering panel over the base of the gun, otherwise I would have preferred to leave this until one of the last steps. Hopefully I don't forget at some point during the build and end up needing to make a repair...  

Rear landing gear waiting for some further detail (later) before being attached toward the end of the build. 

Front landing gear bay panel alignment adjusted, step filled with sprue goo and smoothed. I will re-scribe the panel line. 

Gaps under engines filled with Vallejo Plastic Putty and smoothed. These were much easier to address than I anticipated. 

Canopy masking started. I really like the Aizu masking tapes, this is the 1mm width.  

Primed and started mottling coat as base for camo.