SE 535 Mistral

Creating an home-made scribing template… 

Scribing the upper fuselage vents with my home made template, made with some aluminum sheet.  

First batch of vents scribed.  

All vents (22) scribed ! Need to clean up a little bit, but quite happy with the outcome.
The second template, for the rear panel, has been complicated to make and use…  

Detail of the rear fuselage and wing root. The panel lines have to be modified.  

Filling the existing panel lines with kit’s stretched sprue… 

Reducing the length of the exhaust (3,5 mm) 

Intense brainstorming: how am I going to adapt those parts… 

Ref pic 

Looking for more reference pictures of this area ! 

Ref pic #2… still looking for reference material of the area behind the seat… 

Ref pic 

Scratching some belly details  

Ref pic 

Well, the gun shells wells are obviously not deep enough…  

Eventually, found a good reference picture of the area behind the ejection seat. Probably from a prototype or early stage airframe, so I will need to extrapolate a little bit and rearrange the area…
Source : avions-de-la-guerre-..-suite-71127395.html 

Scratching the area with fine plastic card… 

Scratching the area with fine plastic card… 

Seriously, Airfux… did you really give your best to depict the guns ? 🙁 

Starting to correct the guns area: rebuild, drill, smooth… 

Cockpit’s floor is in place. Under, pieces of lead have been inserted. The upper part of the nose is glued, in order to prepare and smooth the area.  

Quite annoying and tricky job. Some plastic card has been added in order to get a proper fitting… 

Some metal tubes have been installed deep in the gun holes… barely visible, like on the real aircraft. More mastic and surfacer are needed… 

Internal parts have been installed, helping to improve a little bit the fittings. The gear bay are nicely depicted.  

Issue with this kit: the exhaust has to be installed before glueing the half fuselages (way too large at the base to be inserted afterward… so it would be hard to get rid of the awful seam near the exhaust (see pic #7 for reference) 

BTW, due to the previous shortening of the fuselage aft, the exhaust has to be shortened too. So I cut off a section of the exhaust, and applied bevel cuts… 

… so the exhaust’s aft can be inserted later ! 

Starting the modification of the air intakes, a Mistral’s very distinctive characteristic 

Dry fitting… check 

Main job on the left air intake… check !