Big D Builds A Fighter With A Big Nose Part IV

   Previously on "Big D Builds..."

I bought a model kit from a charity shop becaue it looked like a cool design. 

Since i'm not actually that good at building model kits this led to a lot of swearing and blobs of glue  everyfrigginwhere.

Now read on.  

 

 When we left off I'd managed to get the main body of the Lavochkin put together. Next step was to jam filler into all the gaps and bits where the parts hadn't quite aligned. 

 Once that dried I sanded it all down until I got bored and painted the result.

 

 

As an aside, the Celebrations sweet tin is a perfect size for keeping spare bits and pieces.  

Plus you get to eat the chocolate first. 

  I left off the canopy until I painted the fuselage.

 

Canopy is now on and I painted that distinctive nose.

 

I am disappointed that nobody in Cold War Russia took the opportunity to paint the nose bright red and maybe add some eyes on the side.
 

Here's a better angle on the (unpainted) nose.

Between the big schnozz and those three intakes the Lavochkin looks downright goofy from the front. 

 

  Now we come to the aprt I was really not looking forward to and in fact, this is why the update was delayed for so long.  

The Undercarriage.  

" Intimidated" is really not the wrong word.  As soon as I saw those miniscule parts on the sprue I knew this stage was going to give me nightmares and at least one psychotic episode.  FFS, why are the main undergarriage legs in THREE sodding pieces?  The Nosewheel strut is in two and the only reason I can see is that tehy wanted to fil some extra slots on the sprue.   

 The nosewheel assembly. Not counting the wheel there's three pieces making up this bad boy and all of them are tiny. Not a good fit with my well-documented lack of co-ordination and chunky fingers. 

 

 The mainwheel was even worse and turned out to be a bity of a trap. 

 

Here's the relevant part of the instructions. 

 That looks an awful lot like the mainwheel assembly  is essentially one straight line.Right?

 

So that's how I put them together.

 

Then I looked at the painting guide on the back of the instructions. 

 

 Lemme just highlight the problem.

That's definite right-angle going on there. Why is this not in the fucking instructions? 

Aarrgghhh!

 

Now I have to take these bits apart and glue them back together again. 

Did the guy who wrote the isntructions and the guy who designed the kit work in different sheds  or something?

I'm going to go have a a nice cup of tea and wait for the vein in my temple to stop throbbing. 

That's All Folks.