Big D Builds A Fighting Falcon

The latest installment in a series I like to call "Building Models When Utterly Hamfisted"

After umming and awwing for far too long I decided to make start on the hefty pile of modelkits sat on my kitchen table and selected the one which might be easiest. Plus it only cost me a quid so if I lost my temper and yeeted it across the kitchen, I wouldn't have lost much. 

  I was surprised and relieved to see that all the bits were inside although I couldn't help noticing that the instructions and the decal sheet seem to have gone astray. 

  Hmm. No instructions. Maybe this wasn't going to be quite so easy after all. 

For some reason Matchbox used to make their kits in different coloured plastics. I have no idea why anybody thought this was a good feature. 

With no instructions I set about glueing some bits that seemed to fit together

  Adding the tail

 The chin intake. 

I was pleasantly surprised by how well the parts slotted into place. 

The cockpit was basic - a seat and a floor -so that was easy-peasy. 

There was almost no filing and trimming of sprue involved 

not to mention  a refreshing lack of gaps

I still had to do a bit of puttying and as usual I made a pigs ear of it.  

 

 Not pretty, is it? 

The first major obstacles arrived when I started on the undercarriage. 

Problem one: I had no instructions on which struts went where so I had to google and guess.

Problem 2:  The nosewheel strut was supposed to fit onto the bottom of the cockpit floor and 

I must have done something wrong because there was about half a centimetre difference.

Since this would have left the nosewheel barely poking out of the bay I had to improvise.

Spare Parts Box to the rescue!

  

Yes I did just glue some leftover Spitfire wheels in there.  Sod it. Nobody is going to be looking in that bit anyway. 

It's round about this point that I realised this was a nosewheel design and I'd forgotten to put any weights in the nose.  In the end I stuffed a couple of small steel nuts down the air intake and superglued them until they stopped moving. A bit of black paint followed and now my Falcon was starting to come together. 

 Since I had neither instructions nor decals - more on that in a bit - I decided to make my Falcon part of the entirely fictional Imperial Lemurian Air Korps which meant I could just make up a colour scheme.

I am horrible at painting. You can tell, can't you? 

There was still a wee bit of assembly left to do because Matchbox had given me a 

generous selection of missiles,  bombs and drop tanks to slap under the wings of my Falcon.

Truth be told, this is the part that caused me the most stress because fitting the bombs to the underwing 

pylons turned out to be a right bastard of a job. Have I mentioned how hamfisted I am? 

The tactical I error I'd made was fitting the bomb pylons first then trying to fiddle the tiny bombs onto their tiny slots with my sausage fingers.

In the end I had to rip the pylons off - and I do mean rip - then glue the bombs on 

(which still involved a lot of swearing and a minor existential crisis) and then stick the pylons back on again..

Even by my low standards the result was a mess.  

 Behold my shame. 

The final step was to add some markings. Some leftover decals gave me the numbers for tail and nose but  

as it turns out, you can't just print some roundels, cut them out and Prittstick them onto a kit. 

And I thought I was being so clever and all.

Oh well. 

I hastily declared this particular Falcon to be part of an elite Mercenary force 

that flew for the highest bidder and didn't bother with markings. 

I think there's a life Pro Tip there. something about if you can't solve a problem just decide it's not really a problem and call it fixed. 

Anyway, here's the finished result.

It isn't pretty and I'm sure there's ten year-olds reading this and mocking me for my lack of talent. 

You'd think after all the kits I've done I'd be getting a little better....

Whatever. 

To sum up: This was a nice easy kit to make and well worth the quid I spent on it. 

It kept me out of mischief and gave me something to do that didn't involve staring at a screen or napping so I consider myself pleased.

That's all folks.